Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Newspaper research panels cover online topics What are academic "newspaper journalism" researchers researching? As has been true for several years, a lot of the accepted papers for the annual August gathering of Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication have "online" in their titles, including a bunch in the organization's Newspaper Division. Only abstracts of the papers are available now; for the full documents, you'll either have to go to San Francisco Aug. 2-5 or wait for the eventual posting of the full texts online. For now, I think the abstracts and titles alone are intriguing... and I've posted them all online here: Newspaper Division 2006 Convention Papers A study of online news site readers' geography has already won an International Newspaper Marketing Association award.  A whole panel of papers is dedicated to the theme of "Journalists and Readers Online." One report promises to be the first  in an ongoing study of whether "an online news platform can be both commercially viable and socially responsible." Meanwhile, with all the interactive citizen journalism going on online, I'm intrigued by a project that surveyed newspaper editors on their attitudes toward letters to the editor. (Personally, I can recall newsroom colleagues who considered most letter-writers to be cranks. But that was a long time ago.) From here in Knoxville, my University of Tennessee colleague Mark Harmon will present results of his study of newspapers' candidate endorsements before the 2002 and 2004 elections. (The research is not directly related to his current run for Knox County Commissioner.) Also of possible regional interest, Marshall University faculty member Marc Seamon will present a paper related to his doctoral dissertation on newspaper "framing" of the mountaintop removal mining issue. If you'd like to scan the newspaper division's accepted-paper list for other school names, or for your own name, here's my authors and institutions summary. The Newspaper Division is only one of more than two dozen AEJMC divisions and interest groups with events at the Aug. 2-5 convention. The convention keynote address will be by Lawrence Lessig, founder of Stanford University[base ']s Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of Free Culture, The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. More about him at www.lessig.org. 5:21:03 PM

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