New.Journalism.Review

Students looking to secure work experience in journalism should read Freelance Unbound – How to avoid paying for internships. Referencing Emily Fraser Voigt, it makes some great observations about how young graduates must ‘leverage their position’ to succeed in journalism:

‘Young people trying to get their first job don’t have much leverage when they aren’t that valuable – ie valuable to the people who will be paying the salary. And they aren’t valuable [a] in a recession, like now, and [b] when they pursue a career path that is oversubscribed.’

It’s true that students will  struggle to get work in the ‘sexy end’ of journalism, which has been hit hard by the downturn. As Freelance Unbound observes, students need to build up an audience for their work (see: Blogging as a way to build a personal brand online), build a great contacts book (so students must engage with the community), and do student journalism. I also believe we must revisit that debate over whether journalism should be taught on its own. At undergraduate level, it seems far better to teach journalism as part of a joint honours programs (i.e. it must be combined with another subject – how about computing? Or business? etc).

I too would also urge students to have a back-up plan when they don’t get that dream job working for that celebrity / football mag. Perhaps take a serious look at the land of B2B, where many publishers are riding out the downturn (just take a look at the Informa share price) or consider positions in corporate communications and PR. Students leave with a wide range of transferable  skills which are appropriate to a large number of editorial career paths, although perhaps not always in journalism.

Work Experience at Zoo magazine

One of my students has just got work experience  at Zoo magazine (Baur). I was pleased to see that Baur will be paying his expenses. They don’t have to do this, but it’s great that they are doing this because it means that more students from a wider range of backgrounds can participate.

Zoo emailed over a reassuringly comprehensive ‘Guide For Workies’, which outlined the role of the work experience student.  He would be asked to do the mundane jobs of opening the post and making the tea, alongside the more important work e.g.  searching the tabloids for potential Zoo-like NIBS and gossip. But a guide like this means that both publisher and student knows what they will get out of the placement.

I urged the student  to be prepared to make the tea (a crucial role on deadline day, although a job that some students see as being beneath them) i.e. aim to do the crap jobs quite well (just not brilliantly!). But also go in armed with potential news/feature ideas that they could run past the features editor during a quiet moment. Getting even five minutes with a features editor of a national consumer magazine is very valuable and one not to be wasted.

I saw many workies come through the door when I worked at Emap, most of them were students from nearby City University. I always asked about what they thought of the magazine and how it could be improved. We certainly kept an eye on the ones with good ideas and a keen interest in our mag. Emap employed many former workies.

But when it comes to careers in journalism, it’s tough at the start and even tougher at the end. Felix Dennis, founder Dennis Publishing, bluntly explains the economics of magazine publishing in his book How to Get Rich:

“Youth is a further factor. By the time talent is in its mid-to-late forties or early fiffies, it will have become very, very expensive. Young talent can be found and underpaid for a short while, providing the work is challenging enough. Then it will be paid at the market rate. Finally, it will reach a stage where it is being paid based on past reputation alone. That is when you must part company with it.”

He adds: “Just remember the simple rules concerning talent: identify it, hire it, nurture it, reward it, protect it. And, when the time comes, fire it.”  This is the rule at Dennis Publishing and at Emap.

The analysis of websites from a cultural and media studies perspective raises numerous methodological hurdles. When conducting audience research using a particular genre of newspaper or magazine there is a centrality to the text(s) being considered. In contrast, researchers of the Internet can often feel overwhelmed by the vastness and global nature of web communication, which is in constant state of flux and development.

The following observations on methodology are based on research conducted on the levels of user-interaction offered by British local newspaper websites.

1. Knowing where to start…

To conduct an analysis, one must first determine a sample of websites.

‘Given the large volume of WWW [World Wide Web] texts and that these texts are intertextually connected to each other, a critical question concerning textual analysis is deciding on what could be considered a starting point.’ (Jones,1999).

The Internet is defined as being a ‘network of networks’ and it is its inter-connected nature which has proved so troublesome for researchers.

2.It can be helpful to view websites as academic journal articles.

We can view websites as being a bit like academic journals. Whilst websites are not ‘peer-reviewed’ as such, they do share a key quality of a journal in so far as status and prominence is achieved through the number of times a website is ‘cited’ online.

The number of links in to a website reflects its trust, prestige, authority and credibility within the Internet community (Park, 2003). Similarly, a key way that exposure on search engines, such as Google, is gained is through the number of times a site is linked to by other popular sites.

In the past news sites were quite ‘insular’ in nature – obtaining status within the web community played second fiddle to the old-fashioned logic that the way to generate revenue was to keep users on a website. So you would find some news sites where the only links out were to the websites of advertisers and commercial sponsors.

Web producers have learned to be more generous with the number of hyperlinks they make. They hope that by doing so this will encourage respected sites to create links back. It should be noted that some large publishers STILL do not understand this (note the recent statements by Rupert Murdoch regarding Google News).

It is legitimate for academics to use hyperlink analysis to determine a sample of sites to study and to assess potential influence in the online community.

The benefits of hyperlink analysis are highlighted by Park (2003): ‘Patterns of hyperlinks designed or modified by individuals or organizations who own websites reflect the communicative choices, agendas, or ends of the owners. Thus, the structural pattern of hyperlinks in their websites serves a particular social or communicative function.’

It’s possible to use commercial software, such as LinkChecker Pro, to conduct analysis of website structures.

3. The accuracy of user data is forever in doubt.

Those seeking accurate newspaper and magazine readership figures may naturally drift towards the website of ABC for accurate data.

Unfortunately, no such universally agreed measurement is in place for web audience figures. To give a crude example, Google Analytics is used to monitor the traffic to this blog. But the data it produces differs to that which rival traffic monitoring systems such as SiteMeter records.

Large news sites tend to use traffic monitoring services from companies such as ABCe, ComScore or Hitwise. Peter Kirwin (Forget about ABCe; let’s have an old-fashioned fight about traffic numbers) highlights the discrepancies between figures from these rival website data monitors and asks for more transparency in their methodologies.

To put an additional spanner in the works, it’s an interesting exercise to compare ‘official’ user figures with those generated by external sites such a Compete.com. It’s almost innevitable that there will be discrepancies in traffic data based on companies various methodologies.

4. The problems of using Google.

Unless a researcher likes the idea of writing their own software, they may be reliant on Google (or other commercial providers) to seek out websites to study or to search within sampled websites.

Using a search engines in academic research presents many challenges. Witten (2007): ‘Their architecture is shrouded in mystery. The algorithms they follow are secret. They are accountable no one.’ No single search engine crawls the entire web and we have no idea what sites / pages are missing.

Synder (1999) suggests that the problems with using search engines in link analysis are market-driven, rather than anything particularly wrong with the technology itself. He urged search engine companies to become as transparent as possible in the way they operate, so that academic researchers can use them fully.

5. A website is never complete.

With most media the creative process has already taken place before an artifact is published. On a news website content changes day-by-day or perhaps hour-by-hour. Postings disappear, the headlines on news stories rewritten and features that once appeared on homepages are moved to other places on a site.

Imfeld (Salwen, 2005) highlights the issue of conducting research ‘in this period of almost constant renovation of websites’. Unlike any other type of media output, a website is forever changing and is never fully complete.

This blog post has outlined some of the the problems of conducting serious web analysis. It’s not the aim to locate or suggest solutions. From personal experience, attempts to examine techniques used to study magazines and newspapers and them simply transplant them into a web context have been far from successful and could be considered naive at best.

Jones, S. (1999). Doing internet research: Critical issues and methods for examining the net. Thousand Oaks, Calif. ; London: Sage Publications.

Salwen, M. B.(2005). Online news and the public. Mahwah, N.J. ; London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Witten, I. H. (2007). In Gori M., Numerico T. (Eds.), Web dragons: Inside the myths of search engine technology. Oxford: Morgan Kaufmann.

Time to wave goodbye to old-fashioned lecture notes (Independent – 19th Nov 2009) reports on how Russell Stannard, principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster, uses technology to mark student essays.

This got me thinking. I’ve been dabbling with Camtasia 3 for a few months. The software came free with an issue of .Net magazine. I was attempting, with not a lot of success, to create tutorials on how to upload content to Joomla! (a CMS) for my students. Camtasia is a screencast tool i.e. it records everything that you do on your PC screen in video format and you can also record an audio commentary. This is useful for a number of purposes, such as those listed on the official Camtasia site.

But after reading the article in The Indie, I’ve found it’s also very useful for providing feedback on journalism assignments. Students submit assignments electronically using our Moodle-based VLE. I then get a student’s Word file on screen and edit it, whilst simultaneously giving a live commentary on the changes that I’m making. This is like giving a student their own personal tutorial. The file produced by Camtasia is then saved, compressed in size and can be emailed to the student for viewing.

The system has worked so well that I have invested in a newer version of Camtasia – 6 is the latest edition. I also bought a decent quality Logitech USB desktop microphone

Pros of using Camtasia:

1. An interesting way to deliver feedback: Getting students to read any feedback delivered in the traditional way (i.e. hand written corrections to their scripts) can be a problem – they normally just want to see the grade! This is a particular issue for weaker students who can sometimes feel intimidated when they see pages and pages of corrections. Of course, it’s the weaker students who really need to see (and understand) their feedback.
2. It’s quicker than correcting scripts the old-fashioned way: It takes ages to mark 60 or 80 scripts, so I always have one eye on the clock. I’m sure that I’m not the only tutor who times how long it takes them to mark each paper. If a bit of software doesn’t improve my productivity – it’s gone!
3. You can go into a lot more detail: It’s like a face-to-face tutorial. You can provide a lot more explanation verbally than you can using written comments. This is really handy for the weaker students. You can also ‘zoom’ in and ‘highlight’ individual paragraphs to provide detailed comments.
4. Good feedback from students: I have done a really small test sample, but I’ve had some very positive feedback from students.

Cons: The files must be compressed quite heavily if you are going to send them via email and this can take up to a minute or so to complete. I move on to reading the next assignment, whilst Camtasia is busily compressing away.

Camtasia 3 is widely available for free, but it doesn’t provide brilliant compression. It’s worth getting hold of a new-ish version. Feedback has to be logged and verified by external examiners, so sometimes it’s best to have it in hard copy format.

Cost: Camtasia 6 costs $299 or around £180. But there is a free web-based screencast technology called ScreenToaster that seems to do a similar job, although I’ve not tried this.

I am keen to find out who else is using Camptasia or similar screencast software.

Times Higher reports on the introduction of bar code readers to take registers at Derby University.
http://ping.fm/LowmR

Despite its problems, anything that can automate basic administration must be welcomed. Filling in registers of 100 students manually each week is the equivalent of doing the dishes by hand, when you could use a lovely Bosch dishwasher instead.   

Lecturers already undertake crippling amounts of non-academic / 'house-keeping' work. Each year more hurdles are put in the way which prevents them from doing what they are paid to do – i.e researching, writing and teaching. From a human resources perspective (or, indeed, any perspective) filling in registers manually is a total waste of time and money. 

The government now requires that academics have to take registers to keep tabs on those pesky overseas students (the assumption is that overseas students are all secretly plotting ways to stay in the country, rather than writing assignments).

I don't agree that lecturers should be asked to carry out what amounts to UK border control checks. If I have to do this, at least allow me to wear a nice blue uniform, with a hat and have some shiny metal handcuffs. But as it's now the law, let's at least do it vaguely efficiently.

In an analysis of how UK websites are embedding participation and collaboration, I found the following academic texts useful.

If you are one of my students, you may well have the pleasure of reading some of these articles. 

Most of the journal articles can be found on Google Scholar or the usual databases. The ones highlighted focus on UK developments……..

22 Journal Articles:

Bardoel, J. (1996). Beyond journalism: A
profession between information society and civil society. European Journal
of Communication, 11(3), 283.

Bennett, W. (2003). Communicating global
activism. Information, Communication & Society, 6(2), 143-168.

Deuze, M. (2003). The web and its
journalisms: Considering the consequences of different types of newsmedia
online. New Media & Society, 5(2), 203.

Deuze, M. (2005). What is journalism?:
Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism,
6(4), 442.

Dutton, W. and Helpser, E. (2007). Oxford
internet survey: The internet in Britain. Oxford: OxIS.

Helsper, E.
(2008). Digital inclusion: An analysis of social disadvantage and the
information society. London: Department for Communities and Local
Government,

Hermida, A., & Thurman, N. (2007).
Comments please: How the british news media are struggling with user-generated
content. 8th International Symposium on Online Journalism. Austin:
University of Texas.

Hermida, A., & Thurman, N. (2008). A
Clash of Cultures. Journalism Practice, 2(3), 343-356.

Marchi, R. M. (2005). Reframing the runway: A
case study of the impact of community organizing on news and politics.
Journalism, 6(4), 465.

Lasica, J. D. (2003). Blogs and journalism
need each other. Nieman Reports, 57(3), 70-74.

Lasica, J. D. (2003). What is participatory
journalism. Online Journalism Review, 7, 2003.

Nguyen, A. (2006). Journalism in the wake of
participatory publishing. Australian Journalism Review, 28(1), 143–155.

NUJ Commission on Multi-Media Working.
(2007). Shaping the future. London: NUJ. 

Park, H. W. (2003). Hyperlink network
analysis: A new method for the study of social structure on the web.
Connections, 25(1), 49-61. Petersen, S. M. (2008). Loser generated
content: From participation to exploitation. First Monday, 13(3)

Pavlik, J., Morgan, G., & Henderson, B.
(2000). Information technology: Implications for the future of journalism and
mass communication education. Report of the Subcommittee on Educational
Technology Prepared for AEJMC Taskforce on Journalism and Mass Communication
Educator at the Millennium,

Quiggin, J. (2006). Blogs, wikis and creative
innovation. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(4), 481.

Schultz, T. (2000). Mass media and the
concept of interactivity: An exploratory study of online forums and reader
email. Media, Culture & Society, 22(2), 205.

Singer, J. B. (1997). Still guarding the
gate?: The newspaper journalist's role in an on-line world. Convergence, 3(1),
72.

Singer, J. B. (2003). Who are these guys?:
The online challenge to the notion of journalistic professionalism.
Journalism, 4(2), 139.

Snyder, H., & Rosenbaum, H. (1999). Can
search engines be used as tools for web-link analysis? A critical view.
Journal of Documentation, 55, 375-384.

Thurman, N. (2008). Forums for citizen
journalists? adoption of user generated content initiatives by online news
media. New Media and Society, 10(1), 139.

Wallsten, K. (2005). Political blogs and the
bloggers who blog them: Is the political blogosphere and echo chamber. American
Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting. Washington, DC September, 1-4.

20 Books:

Allan, S.
(2006). Online news: Journalism and the internet. Maidenhead: Open
University Press.

Axford, B.,(2001), New media and politics.
London: SAGE.

Bauer, M. W., & Gaskell, G. (2000), Qualitative
researching with text, image and sound : A practical handbook. London:
SAGE. 

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks
: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, Conn. ;
London: Yale University Press.

Burnett, R. (2003) Web theory : An
introduction. London: Routledge.

Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the
network society Blackwell Pub.

Castells, M. (2001). The internet galaxy :
Reflections on internet, business, and society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Curran J., Morley D. (2006.), Media &
cultural theory. London: Routledge.

Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the
oppressed (New rev. 20th-Anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum.

Friend, C. (2007), Online journalism
ethics : Traditions and transitions. Armonk, N.Y. ; London: M.E. Sharpe.

Gillmor, D. (2004). We the media :
Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people. Beijing ; Farnham:
O'Reilly

Jones, S. (1999). Doing internet research:
Critical issues and methods for examining the net. Thousand Oaks, Calif. ;
London: Sage Publications.

Keeble, R. (2005). Print journalism : A
critical introduction. London: Routledge.

Kline, D. (2005), Blog! : How the newest
media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture. New York: CDS
Books.

Kovach, B. (2003), The elements of
journalism : Bill kovach & tom rosenstiel. London: Atlantic Books.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media :
The extensions of man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rheingold, H,
(1994)
The virtual community: finding connection in a computerized world, Secker &
Warburg, London

Salwen, M. B.(2005). Online news and the
public. Mahwah, N.J. ; London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody :
The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

Tapscott, D. (2007). In W (Ed.), Wikinomics
: How mass collaboration changes everything. London: Atlantic Books.

Six LINKS
 

Anon. (2005). Bill gates: Free culture
advocates = commies. Retrieved 18 Aug, 2009, from http://boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill_gates_free_cult.html

Bowman, S., & Willis, C. (2004). We
media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information. At Http://www.Hypergene.net/wemedia/, Accessed, 1

Bruns, A. (2007). Habermas and/against the
internet. Retrieved Aug, 2009, from http://snurb.info/node/621

Economist,The (2006), Among The Audience, Retrieved 1 Sept 2009, from
http://www.economist.com/surveys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=6794156

. Johnson, S. (2009). Are we on track for a
golden age of serious journalism? Retrieved 15 Aug, 2009, from http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/05/areweontrackforagoldenageofseriousjournalism/

Kelly, K. (2009). The new socialism:
Global collectivist society is coming online. Retrieved 15 August, 2009,
from http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism