The most interesting turn my classes have taken this semester has been the step up in collaboration. Both my J198 Multimedia Reporting and my J325 New Media & Social Change courses have been made more use of collaboration in projects outside the bounds of the class itself. This has been my “classroom without walls” vision on steroids.

In J325, my students are collaborating on a social change project with students in Kjerstin Thorson’s class at the University of Southern California. This has been interesting to watch mostly because my main rule for myself has been to stay out of things. It’s in my nature to plan and micromonitor the learning process, but Kjerstin and I both have made the committment to let these projects develop organically. In plainspeak, it means I’m staying the hell out of it and being more of a guide and sounding board. Their pitches are due this week, with only one guideline: we want you to wow us.

In J198 we’ve always used community folks to help us build stories. The new wrinkle this semester has been the expansion of the classroom in a cross-university partnership with classes doing something similar to what we’re doing with multimedia. It began with a Twitter scavenger hunt, set up by at the University of Memphis, which had students at Lehigh, Memphis, West Virginia, Drury, and Oregon all doing the same assignment and following one another’s class hashtags. Read more

I love Denver. What a great city, and particularly what a great city for a convention such as AEJMC 2010.

This wasn’t my first AEJ rodeo (it was #6, actually), but all in all it was my favorite one so far. I’m not sure what it is about going as a professor instead of a graduate student, but I had the best networking time meeting new and interesting people. It didn’t hurt that people actually knew who the hell I was this time thanks to the fact I was honored with the Nafziger-White-Salwen Award (my remarks), but even that aside it seemed like AEJ was teeming with interesting people this year.

The best part was the good vibes. To be honest, the past couple conferences were a bit of a downer, what with the cratering of the print news industry and a solid dose of misdirected anger that sometimes pointed at new media folks. I’ve gotten the sense that a lot of academics were working these past few conferences to save the industry and restore what was. Not this year.

Thankfully, we’ve moved on. It’s not entirely about some of the new junior scholars, because a lot of long-timers are doing some innovating things both with news and in the classroom, but I think this year offered a sign that a lot of the younger guns like myself are making a mark. Maybe our research agendas are helping shift the research and teaching conversation ever so slightly toward newer forms of journalism.

Like I said, we aren’t the reason, but I felt like I was making an impact this year for once. I am not sure I ever felt that way before at an AEJ convention. My work is in areas that have had to work hard to gain even grudging acceptance at times (i.e. citizen media), but this year I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore. The conversation has shifted. Read more

I wanted to share the brief remarks I had with me at the AEJMC business meeting after receiving the Nafziger-White-Salwen Award for top dissertation. This isn’t word-for-word because I got a little stage fright as usual and panicked up there (those of you who know me know that I am terrified of public speaking), but it’s the gist of what I said.

Thank you for that kind introduction and I apologize for the length of that dissertation title. This is such an amazing honor and I would like to thank the committee for their work on this award. It is so humbling to join the incredible list of past winners, many of whom I consider to be intellectual heroes and whose work I not only admire but also cite with great frequency as part of my own work.

So, I got through May thinking about how wonderful my first year was at Lehigh thanks to great students and wonderful colleagues in my department and at the University. And then when I didn’t know how much better it could get, I found out about this award and it was like the cherry on top of the sundae.

I have some people I want to thank for making this entire journey possible. First, my wife Amy. I wish she could be here to hear this, but she is an incredible support and I don’t think I could have gone through this process without her partnership. Second, I want to thank the Missouri School of Journalism. They gave me a top-notch education and introduced me to world-class people – wonderful faculty and students that give you such fertile soil for your intellectual development.

My committee deserves so much thanks. David O’Brien from the Department of Rural Sociology. From the School of Journalism, Shelly Rodgers and Clyde Bentley. Margaret Duffy, who is here – wave your hand so everyone can see you!

Finally, I am so gratified to recognize my dissertation adviser Esther Thorson. I realize I am one in a chorus of people singing Esther’s praises in this organization. We all know what an amazing scholar and leader she is in our field, but I had the special privilege of knowing her as a mentor as well. And I want to take this opportunity to make sure she is recognized for her work and passion in helping develop graduate students into thinkers and change-agents in our field. I appreciate you so much, Esther, and share this award with you.

Thank you!

I just finished my fifth AEJMC convention, but this was a new experience. It was my first as a non-student and it was weird to walk around and network as a professor and not a student scholar. Two things I can say about that. First, what they say about the PhD being a union card is sort of true; it seemed like people were deferring to my alleged expertise more this year (as if somehow I’m infinitely smarter now than I was three weeks ago before my dissertation defense).

Not always, though. I like the spirited discussion and pushback I get when I discuss things in the Civic/Citizen Journalism group. Perhaps that’s a good sign it’s a good intellectual home for me and my work. I consider myself a lifelong learner and loathe the term “expert” because I don’t ever want something to serve as a turnoff to pushing back on things I say. Discussion is good.

The second thought is this new phase is going to take some getting used to. I’m used to mingling with that awesome yellow “Graduate Student” tag on my badge. It was a license to talk to all the senior folks and go total fanboy on them. I feel more restrained now without it, and I probably should be. The ideal path is to merge my work with theirs rather than simply stare and marvel at their work like a painting. At least that’s the way I visualize it.

But I sat in on a number of interesting sessions and really enjoyed the poster sessions even more than usual. Those scholar-to-scholar sessions, a veritable street market for presenting research, are always some of the best stuff at AEJ and this year was no exception.

One of the standout sessions was the J-Lab luncheon on Friday. Doug Fisher’s blog has a good recap of the presentation, which had three newspaper exects talk about content sharing among competing papers to allow for a reallocation of resources to other areas such as investigative reporting. This would allow for one reporter to do the nuts-and-bolts daily coverage and let newspapers focus dwindling resources on what they do best. Read more

Note: This is written for AEJMC’s call for responses to the question of what the future holds for journalism and mass communication. Submit your own entry by following this link, and win free registration to the convention in Boston.

The future of news is just fine. It’s the future of journalism that is so unsettled.

Since Walter Williams founded the first school of journalism at the University of Missouri in 1908, we’ve seen a lot of technological advancements that have thrown journalism, the system by which we produce news, into states of change and upheaval.

Journalism itself is undergoing change, but the basic unit of that product – news – is at its core unchanged in terms of the value it brings society. The modes of production have changed in the past 100 years, but our basic charge to teach storytelling is still central to what we do. This part of human communication is as old as time and probably won’t go away any time soon, but the ways in which people are willing to pay for it is undergoing what some call change, others call assault. Read more