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

My family likes to joke about my father’s garage. It is a foreboding place, packed to the hilt with boxes and boxes of stuff that predates Richard Nixon, and he declares he “needs” all of it. The garage is a source of constant humor in my family. I’ve long thought I didn’t inherit my dad’s packrat ways, and in terms of material things I think I do OK in that regard, but I’m learning I am a packrat when it comes to online stuff.

With a cross-country move coming up, it is time for me to start consolidating and packing. Not the house – it’s a little early for that. But because I am at some point going to lose my MU e-mail account, and because I’ve been annoyed with the spamage on Yahoo! Mail, I decided to declare endless war on spam and make the switch to Gmail this weekend.

This means migrating a lot of saved emails to Gmail, so I started with my Yahoo! account. And it’s amazing the stuff I have sitting around. Read more

Well, we aren’t into full interactivity mode with the White House web site, but America at least got out of the early 1990s with a new feature the Obama adminstration added to WhiteHouse.gov.

Obama promised in the 2008 campaign to allow for public comment on legislation sent to his desk. This weekend we got a look at how it’ll happen, as the White House provided a link for citizens to share public comment on the economic recovery bill.

Granted, it’s one way communication. People can type in their thoughts and send it on to whoever’s reading everything (assuming they are; I harbor no illusions that it might not be going into a server landfill somewhere), but there is no talk of getting a reply back or even the ability to see what others are saying. Read more