A new post that I wrote just went up over at Next American City. The post – which is about a pair of different attempts at building the news organization for the 21st century – grew out of reading a couple pieces in the Atlantic that came at the topic from very different starting points. One is a top-down approach to save big news, the other a grassroots effort to build new feisty news-of-the-people online start-ups. Yet, at their core, they both have a single central problem: in a world of unlimited media choice, you have to prove your worth to win an audience. (Big news has a second problem too: billions upon billions of dollars in debt & dead weight.) At any rate, the full piece is available here. Watch out for hamfisted literary devices…
PS. I should point out that my friend Cate originally sent me the link to the Atlantic blog post detailed my little article. Thanks!
In my post-Memorial Day malaise, I just got around to reading the current Atlantic cover story on Google & the future of journalism. Having seen dozens of similar articles over the past few years, I’m a little jaded about this sort of Eeyore news navel-gazing. That said, I found this particular article to be pretty well done. James Fallows gives an unusually clear and concise explanation of the news industry’s woes and it is clear that the folks at Google are actually thinking hard & bringing a new perspective to helping news organizations migrate to the digital future. Of course, I’ve got some opinions of my own – though maybe they should be taken with a grain of salt since I read the online version of the article for free instead of buying the magazine when I saw it at Suburban Station? The article itself is quite long (who has time to read the news?), so click through for some highlights…. Read more ›
I haven’t had too much time to blog lately. Instead, I’ve been trying to complete a draft of a new paper that examines citizen competence. Citizen competence – which scholars study as a way of understanding whether (or perhaps to what extent) citizens are capable of contributing meaningfully to their democratic governance – is normally ascertained within the context of national politics. My paper tries to gain some leverage on how the scholarly understanding of citizen competence might look if citizens’ interactions with local as well as national politics are factored into the equation.
Without bogging down in details, past citizen competence research has two overarching conclusions:
1. Most citizens aren’t very competent – at least in any way political scientists have managed to measure competence.
2. The citizens that seem most competent are usually white, wealthy, educated, older men.
My findings from local-level data suggest that, if we take a holistic view of citizen competence and include both local and national activity, the population as a whole may not be as adroit as we’d like, but the picture of the competent citizen shifts. (My approach is to study the level and distribution of political knowledge, as determined from a randomized survey of 1000 Philadelphians.)
First, women and minorities close the knowledge gap with whites and men such that the groups are nearly equally matched. This shift is driven by movement at both ends of the spectrum: whites/men know less about local politics than national politics while minorities/women know more about local politics than national politics.
Second, socioeconomic indicators – wealth and education levels – that are relentlessly & positively correlated with national knowledge aren’t so clearly matched with local political knowledge. A pair of figures illustrate this very well:
Read more ›
Just a couple quick thoughts on a spring afternoon…
Last week, I was watching the Phillies wallop the Nationals & I had a brief moment of clarity regarding media effects. For decades, communication researchers have worked to clearly and definitively capture and depict the effects of media exposure. It turns out this can be very hard, especially when scholars try to prove real-world effects that go beyond controlled, laboratory environments. Do kids really benefit from watching Sesame Street, or are the kids that watch Sesame Street just being raised in homes that would otherwise cultivate language skills, sharing, and so on? Do people buy Budweiser because of the funny commercials, or do they like cheap, well-made beer? Etc…
Trying to answer questions like these is hard enough, but when the topic of concern is controversial it becomes even more challenging to show media effects. Take, for example, the case study of mediated violence: Does consumption of media that depicts violent acts contribute to violent behavior? For decades, scholars have studied this question as it relates to TV, film, and more recently video games. Generally speaking, the academic consensus is: yes. (There are occasional voices of dissent.) Meanwhile, media producers stridently deny any responsibility for the content of their programs. Media, they say, reflects and does not effect society. This, to me, has always seemed like a flimsy & convenient response. The public isn’t comprised of lemmings, but…watching thousands and thousands of acts of dramatized violence doesn’t seem to have any possible positive outcome to me.
Anyways, after watching that Phillies game, I have one question for these media producers: If the public isn’t affected by media content, why are streakers so carefully excised from sports broadcasts?
On another, perhaps slightly more sober note, I had the somewhat bizarre pleasure of writing direct quotes from myself in a press release out today from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The folks at AEJMC selected the article, Citizens’ Local Political Knowledge and the Role of Media Access, that I contributed to the current issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly for a project that publicizes academic research to the media (and, hopefully, general public). As a bonus, the whole article is made available online for free. Check it out…
A couple weeks ago, I was reveling in free over-the-air Olympic coverage. Crystal clear picture & sound for the low, low price of $0 a month. Fantastic. The weird thing is, after decades of watching crappy broadcast TV, Americans suddenly have great, free HD – and nobody uses it. And now that the Olympics are over, neither do I.
Whether you realize it or not, this is incredibly wasteful. Air, or radio wave spectrum, is quite valuable. So, I wrote a little article for Next American City about how I think our air should be reclaimed. Check it out and, you know, write a letter to your congressman or the FCC. Or leave me a comment. Whatever is easiest…
As yet another snowstorm buffets the east coast, I thought I’d squeeze in a little post to freshen up things around here…I should get a little slack for all the snow, right? Are there blogging snow days?
First, and speaking of snow, this image (and the post it leads to) was forwarded to me last week since I’m a media geek. Turns out nobody cares enough about the Washington Post to bother digging it out from a snowdrift. The free rag? Totally different story. I feel like I’ve made this point before, less succintly, about the Metro and other similar publications. This image sure drives it home…
Second, this seems like a good opportunity to toot my own horn a little. Any day now, an article that I wrote about the effects of increasing media choice upon local & national political knowledge will be released in the new issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. It’s a great journal – despite its frustratingly limited presence on the web – and I’m excited to have the article printed. I’ve never been so happy to give away the product of (literally) hundreds of hours of my work… A sneak preview of the piece can be found here. If you’re interested, the main finding is that simply having more media access – to things like cable TV or satellite radio – correlates with having less local political knowledge, even after controlling for various other factors. Kinda scary given the modern media world we live in…
Happy shoveling – or, if you’re somewhere sans snow – happy gloating.
Next American City just posted a quick review I wrote about a recent Project for the Excellence in Journalism report on the local news media in Baltimore. You can check out my post here. (Thanks to NAC for the nifty picture to the left, btw…)
The PEJ report is an interesting piece of work. Basically, it is a very ambitious attempt at taking a week-long holistic cross-section of all the local news media in Baltimore. It has limitations, outlined in a couple detailed blog posts a commenter referenced on NAC, but it’s still a useful piece of work. Put simply, for all the opinionating done by old- and new-media folks about the fate of local news, nobody ever takes the time to do real, empirical research. At least, that’s what I’ve been saying for years now…and now PEJ has at least tried to do so.
I have to admit, I’m a little peeved – the PEJ report sort of steals some of my dissertation (and very, very slowly impending publication) thunder. This article – drawn from my dissertation and now in press with Information, Communication & Society - is sort of my take on the same ground that PEJ is covering, but in Philadelphia. My assessment of new media is a little more sanguine…
Yesterday, as I rode the shuttle from Princeton’s campus to the main train station, I noticed the gentleman next to me start a crossword puzzle. I ignored him & continued reading…but after about 5 minutes of the ride, I glanced over.
Reaction #1: Hey, wow, that guy’s making good progress.
Reaction #2: Hmm – it’s a New York times puzzle – those are hard.
Reaction #3: People around here are so smart! Shucks!
Reaction #4: Oh, wait, it’s Tuesday – NYT puzzles on Tuesday aren’t that hard. I’m not impressed anymore. Any dolt knows that ‘mint’ is a 4-letter answer for ‘breath freshener.’
Reaction #5: I can’t believe I just downgraded a stranger’s intelligence based upon the presumed difficulty of a crossword puzzle – and that I had a logical rationale for doing so. I need to make better use of my time.
(You know, by blogging. Duh.)
