Dead Newspapers, Live Scholarship, and Slow Posts
Another academic year is in the books, and I certainly didn’t find much time to blog. You could argue that I was working on more important things — teaching, publishing, etc. Or, you could argue that I was only responding to immediate incentives and failing to heed the long-term benefits of blogging. Maybe both?
At any rate, a fair number of people have come to this site in the past few months (according to Google Analytics) looking for Dead Newspapers and the Damage Done — my article on measuring the empirical effects of the closure of a pair of American newspapers in 2009. It only took about 5 years for the postmortem to reach print — but when it did, a few people actually noticed. Crazy! For those of you who are interested, the link above takes you to the official Political Communication PDF. As far as I know, the journal is providing free access to the publication indefinitely. If you poke around on this site, you might find an earlier draft as well…
Notably, my article received coverage from a number of outlets, including The Boston Globe, Poynter, the Nieman Journalism Lab @ Harvard, and the Yomiuri Shimbun in Japan. Writing about newspapers, it turns out, is a good way to get covered by newspapers. For now. Levity aside, having people read my scholarship is very gratifying. I’ll be hard at work this summer, working on my next act. In the meantime, I’m still trying to find my way through the Japanese translation of my own work. So far, I can recognize my name — and that’s about it.