Monday, May 8, 2006

Tennessee journalism research conspiracy? The home page of Newspaper Research Journal, a "refereed" academic quarterly, is now linked to our home page for the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. The journal is co-published by the University of Memphis journalism department and that very AEJMC newspaper division... whose website editor is here at a UT Knoxville keyboard. Sure, Tennessee is a wide state, and we're at opposite ends, but I don't know why we didn't get around to linking the two sites together... Now we have, thanks to a note from Elinor Kelley Grusin, NRJ co-editor. The NRJ site includes everything a journalism researcher ("chi square" or "green eyeshade" variety) needs to know about manuscript preparation, submission and review. Among other things, NRJ is one of few academic publications that refer authors to the AP Stylebook, rather than the APA Style book favored by many social science journals and dissertation writers. "Because the purpose of NRJ is to provide a bridge between educators and professionals," the site says, "the writing style should be clear, lucid and direct. Short sentences and paragraphs enhance the quality of NRJ. Traditional Associated Press style is used for text." (The Chicago Manual of Style is the journal's recommendation for academic details like endnotes.) Along with the link to the NRJ page, I've added one to FindArticles.com, a site that makes it possible to search past issues. University researchers can get at the electronic editions of journals through their libraries, but the general public -- from "big media" companies to bloggers planning a media revolution -- may prefer to check out the FindArticles search. (The free site does have some advertising, unlike most library search systems.) For example, a quick search for "Smart Mobs" retrieves my review of Howard Rheingold's book by that name from a couple of years ago. (Coincidentally, so does searching for "Smart Bob," but that also produces a mostly illegible, cartoon of a flasher... no connection or relation.) 7:58:04 PM

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