Quick post here about the Oslo explosion news. Since the news broke I’ve been scanning different news outlets to see how quickly and in what ways news organizations jumped on the story. The news broke first on Twitter, but then again that’s not anything particularly interesting anymore. That happens all the time in moments like these. What followed next was fascinating – more on that in a second, but first I want to get into why this matters.

I’m convinced by the work of folks such as  that we’re undergoing a fundamental change in news delivery, and one that journalists don’t always understand well enough. Audiences are being segmented by more choice, sure, but lifestyle patterns also play a part. Most don’t have cable TV in their workplace, so when they want breaking news they are more apt to tune in via online or mobile formats such as iPad or their phone. Thorson & Duffy, in their groundbreaking 2007 research that presented the Media Choice Model, combined the traditional psychological and social needs people have from media with something called “aperture,” the notion that media use is dictated by time-of-day factors. We can better predict what platform (newspaper, online, tv, radio, etc.) a person will choose based on the time of day and their place.

All of this matters because these are important tools journalists can use to allocate scarce resources in breaking news environments.

The cable networks’ slow reaction was interesting. It took them anywhere from 10 minutes to 25 minutes to break into coverage, all while was being throttled with chatter. Slowly they got on board. Meanwhile, what happened on the Web was fascinating. Al Jazeera English, which streams their broadcast online, cut in and so what they had on TV was what you could view on the Web. The BBC soon followed and those were the two major news outlets with a significant Web streaming presence mirroring what they had on TV.

The U.S. cable news outlets, meanwhile, were lagging when it came to Web presence while AJ and BBC were already streaming. An hour after the news broke on Twitter, only MSNBC had Oslo as its top story. CNN and Fox News had it buried as a lower-level link on their front page with no photo. Amazingly, at one point CNN used the “Breaking News” bar atop their page to note that the Senate had voted to table the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” bill while giving short shrift to what some were calling Norway’s 9/11.

Meanwhile newspapers were doing more with their online effort. The New York Times and Washington Post did get stories and initial photos up quickly and have been slowly expanding coverage as they got more information.

About an hour in, CNN (which by this point was covering it on their cable counterpart) finally moved the link to a more prominent position:

Upper left. See it? That photo to accompany the breaking news was a picture from the scene …. which was on a Norway online news site Web page. It was a screenshot of a Web page.

By a couple hours in, the online news portions of the cable news sites were catching up. But it was a slow crawl to get there.

While the CNN and Fox News sites lagging was bizarre, I’m more jotting this down to make a bigger point about aperture. The news broke a bit after 10 a.m. here on the East Coast in the U.S. By then, most Americans were at work and so online and mobile was the best way to reach them. The New York Times and Washington Post strategy (which really was their only possible strategy because they don’t have TV outlets) was best suited for this. They went straight to the Web and social media with their stories. The cable networks prioritized TV at a time of day when online and mobile would have brought more audience.

And this says nothing of text alerts. I still haven’t received a text alert about this news 2 hours after it broke.

The point is that newsrooms are facing scarcity. We have research that helps us decide which platform to emphasize first when news like this breaks. A text alert that takes me to your website is going to draw me in when I’m trying to work. Instead, I found myself going to Al Jazeera and even to Norweigan news sources online thanks to excellent translate feature. I also found curated Twitter feeds at places like Blogs Of War. I was making my own news, as Dan Gillmor likes to say. I had to – the news outlets here in the U.S. were forcing me to.

Lost eyeballs. CNN was made irrelevant in the early going and there’s no reason for me to go there now. They’re behind. Newsroom workflow can be improved if we are using time of day to help make judgements about what platforms to emphasize first when there’s big news. If this had happened on a weeknight then the TV strategy would have made the most sense, but it’s frustrating to see bizarre emphasis on platforms that get less traction at certain times of day.

In moments like this I see the opening for newspapers making a push in digital spaces. They aren’t burdened by the need to do TV and online and can be nimble, go Web-first, and get the news out there without having to worry about splitting its resources. And they’re what we want when we want a more refined version of the story.

The early days of a new tech launch are always a test. Should we adopt it or not? Will it be around for enough time to justify the time spent learning and using it? If it dies, will we lose all of our data?

Many are having this same discussion about Google Plus right now. As the new-kid-on-the-block challenger to Facebook, there are many questions out there about whether it’s worth it to learn it. I’m already on record about the fact that I think this thing is a game-changer, and I think it’s time for our Lehigh journalism, marketing, and PR students to get on the train now so they can be ahead of the curve. We don’t want to wait until someone tells us at a leadership or strategic communication seminar 2 years from now.

I’m also making this argument for the university as a whole, and you can read it here. I do think GPlus is going to change the way we do education, but this post is devoted to journalism.

Before I start, I do want to say that Silagh White and I are going to work to have a meeting on campus that goes over the basics and will have some networking for folks interested in using Plus here. More on that to come, but if you want to take part then please email me or leave something in the comments. And make sure to circle me on my profile.

I’ve been an evangelist for as a journalistic tool since 2007 and first used it in my classes at Missouri in 2008. Back then it had a funny name and wasn’t instantly seen as useful. People thought it was silly or a waste of time. I had (and have) a great role model in Jen Reeves to keep pushing, and over time the journalism crowd came around.

I hear similar things about Gplus. “It’s a waste of time” or “Not ANOTHER social network!” or “Why do I need another Facebook?” or “I don’t understand it.”

The reason, young journalists, is because if the past five years have taught us anything it’s that you have to be your own experimenter. When I started out in the business, if I didn’t understand something there was an editor to walk me through it and teach me. Now that teaching editor has been laid off, furloughed or – gulp – YOU are that editor. You have to learn to play with new tools on your own and figure out how to adapt them to your job. Some of them – many of them – will die and be a waste of time. But the more tools you use, the more practice you get and the more versed you are in the concepts of social media. GPlus has a low learning curve for me because I’m immersed in social media tools. If you’re having trouble, it’s because you’re not playing enough.

The other thing is that the new journalist makes the future. You don’t sit around and wait for an editor to tell you that you need to be on Plus. You need to be the one changing the newsroom.

Already I see huge potential in journalism, such as:

• Plus will have a page feature for news organizations, similar to Facebook. This is a space you need to be in. By next year, newsrooms might want a journalist who can manage these pages on occasion. Will you be ready for this new job market reality? For my marketing/PR students, this is the most essential part of Plus that you need to be learning. Now.
• Hangouts - This multi-way web conferencing tool is going to change how we do news. Imagine if newsrooms could make reporters or editors available for a few minutes a day to take questions from random readers. Or what if reporters in the field could chat with editors and other staff? KOMU did what we think was the first-of-its-kind web cast on the air using GPlus. Huge kudos to KOMU, which is a leader in experimenting with new tech and journalism. We need more newsrooms to be imagining ways to use things like Hangout to interact with readers. The ability to share videos with those on the Hangoutcast is already huge. Lots of potential here.
• Circles - As I explained yesterday, to see what your readers are posting you have to mutually opt in. That means you have to figure out the language of Plus, to be engaging enough that people circle you, so that you benefit from the community “police scanner effect” similar to Twitter. Plus is an evolution – it’s not enough to be a brand anymore. You have to add value. This is a completely new social media paradigm, and the time to start learning what works is now. Don’t wait. And by the way, if you’re in marketing think about the implications of having to add value in order to get circled. Being a brand in a space isn’t enough anymore.
• Source building - Circling people in your community, much like finding them on Twitter, will be important. But the granular privacy options that allow for public/private conversations will be another way for reporters to cultivate sources.
• Link traffic - A couple of my blogs are already showing signs that GPlus is a great driver of traffic. If you can connect with people in the ways I talked about above, this will be a big opportunity. As with many social media products, building influence early matters.

Those are just a few ideas. We need journalists exploring this space now. We need young journalists doing this too so they can refresh our newsrooms (and some really original examples of what you’re doing just might land you that dream job). We’re past the point where just being on social media is enough for newsrooms. Can you talk intelligently about it conceptually and use it wisely? Does your use reflect that?

But that is my bottom line. This is gut check time for young journalists. If you aren’t relishing the opportunity to play with new tech now, you might not be cut out for this business because curiosity about tech tools, both current and future ones, is part of the job. Because of the nature of the classroom experience I can only pack in a fraction of the tools I know about, but I try to give them the essentials. What I can’t teach is curiosity. My students can’t afford to wait for me to show them the next big thing and explain it to them. I try to teach students to understand the concepts so that they can figure these things out themselves long after they’ve left Lehigh. When it works well, my upper-level classes become a conversation about new tools I’m seeing and new tools my students are using; we learn from each other.

But the time to start is now. Be curious or think hard about whether you really want to work in media. I’m not sure I can afford to be less blunt about this.

As I’ve played with Google+ more the past few days, I’ve gotten to know the interface a bit more and am seeing some possibilities. To recap, here’s the review I wrote and here’s a helpful post by Jen Reeves about getting started on G+.

As I said in my previous post, one of the more intriguing features is Circles, which gives you granular control of sharing. You can share with the public, with anyone in any of your circles, or with individual circles. At the same time, the only things you see are from people who have circled you.

So I find myself wondering whether G+ could solve the social media spam problem. You know the drill, those unwanted replies you get on Twitter or random friend or direct message requests on Facebook. On Twitter, for example, I can block someone and keep messages from getting through but I can’t do it until after the fact, and it doesn’t stop spammers from creating new accounts to send me replies.

The G+ interface solves this because it requires both people to circle one another for a message to get through. A user can send me a message either privately or to me in a circle on G+, but I don’t see it if I haven’t circled them back. The only reason I see spammers at all is I get followed by random people I don’t know and have never heard of. A quick profile scan tells me whether they’re worth following, but even if I just ignored new circles I’ve learned with social media that discovery through other peoples’ conversations is better than random follows.

Google gets the benefits of granular privacy controls. By making it opt-in on both ends, it helps you block out things and people you don’t want to see.

This has enormous implications for my journalism students. The ones who have been focused solely on branding themselves well and selling their links will have a lot harder time getting traction in an environment where it’s easier to ignore you. That means you need to make sure that you are building influence by adding real value to the conversation communities of which you want to be a part. That means being knowledgeable, interactive, and producing something original. Branding still matters, but it’s not everything in this kind of environment.

It also makes me think that marketing and PR folks may have to think about their G+ strategy differently. The usual way it works on Facebook or Twitter isn’t going to work on G+, not when blocking makes discovery harder.

It gets more intriguing when you consider that the ability to share with limited circles or even with individuals means that Google+ looms as a personal email killer down the line. The principle is the same: I don’t see messages unless the users have approved of one another. Obviously the fact that G+ will never be universally adopted means this won’t happen anytime soon, but there are possibilities of linking it to Gmail, perhaps, that allow you to approve messages from some email addresses and have them delivered to your Plus interface. It would take some thinking on Google’s end, but I see it as possible without killing the freedom of passing out an email address.

The email spam possibility is probably a pipe dream for now, but that’s one of the things I really like about G+. There is so much that can be connected to this skeleton.

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’ve watched more Al Jazeera today than I have in the past 10 years. The protests in Egypt have turned this into the news network’s coming-out moment, much in the way news events in the 1980s put CNN on the map. The reasons for this should be fairly clear for the professional journalist. We’ve been cutting foreign news bureaus over the years to squeeze out a few more bucks for shareholders, and so when crisis happens overseas we are not well positioned to cover it in any kind of detail. It’s why the Chilean miners coverage so much last fall; because of coverage like that, we cannot be ready for this.

In moments like this, there is a vacuum. So while U.S. journalists are still packing their bags to parachute in and cover Egypt, we turn to what we have. Al Jazeera is streaming coverage online. Citizens armed with mobile tools are , giving us video, pictures and Twitter messages. This is the building blocks of news now when the journalist-observer is not there to see it for themselves.

Given all of that, it’s hard to argue against social media as a tool for citizen journalism, but what about as a tool for activism? Read more

By now we’re familiar with The Error. I’m talking about how NPR (then Reuters, then MSNBC) declared Rep. Gabrielle Giffords dead within hours of the Tucson shootings, then had to retract the report after it turns out they had bad information. Then, of course, had to do the public mea culpa.

Errors happen in journalism. They aren’t our finest hour and certainly aren’t the thing that we aspire to, but we see this stuff happen every so often. Especially in breaking news situations where things are developing and people are emotional, that pull to confirm things quickly and get information out there is strong, and it’s almost an automated process. I remember on 9/11, for instance, how crazy the newsroom was. There is a lot of pressure and people don’t always think straight.

But, I’m not here to beat that dead horse. There’s plenty of coverage if you are interested, and journalism students in particular would do well to absorb this. No, I would rather talk about social media’s role in the way information spread. Read more

This past weekend I got to take in my first Online News Association 2010 conference. I debated going at all for a long time because, as someone who has never attended, I didn’t know whether it could live up to its high cost. I’m glad I went though because it was productive and engaging in a way I don’t usually find at my academic conferences.

I should have known, but any doubt was wiped away Jane McDonnel’s opening remarks: “Welcome to the conference where journalism doesn’t know it’s supposed to be dead.”

This introduction summed up my experience, for the most part. There was a hopeful vibe to this place from people of all walks. Educators who are enthusiastic about training the next evolution of students, practitioners who are putting their interactive skills to good use, and the dreamers who are constantly working on giving us something better. The message, it seems, was this: We’re remaking the industry with new media, but if the industry wants to stay married to intransigence then forget them because we got this.

That innovative spirit, heavy on the kind of boldness that appears to be hubris to outsiders, is a refreshing thing to see. There are days where I want to see the legacy folks evolve and incorporate the radically awesome new ventures in digimedia, and there are days I want to blow it all up and let the brilliant new media folks remake it all. I came away from ONA10 focused on the happy medium, but it’s good to know that the innovators got this if it’s needed. Read more

South By Southwest’s panel picker opened today, so I officially have SXSW on the brain until next March. I wanted to talk a little about a panel I proposed and also plug a few others that I have voted for.

A shameless plug for our panel: If you like what you hear, please vote for us using the link a couple grafs below this one. It requires a short registration but you aren’t obligated to attend the event in Austin. Ours is the only panel tagged “journalism education” and so I think we bring a lot to the table here. 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

This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling. Read more

I don’t care much about the Winter Olympics, but as a scholar I am interested in the media aspect of the Games. Lately, NBC has me beating my head against a wall. Judging by the tag that has gained popularity of late on Twitter, I’m not the only one.

These Olympics are made for an American TV audience. Vancouver is in the Pacific time zone, meaning that audiences all over the U.S. should be able to watch the drama unfold in real-time. NBC, with its ability to carry coverage live on three channels (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC), seems uniquely aligned to make that coverage all the more compelling in a real-time world.

The problem is that NBC seems to have not gotten the memo that we live in a world of media immediacy. Read more

So do you have the Buzz yet? Not a buzz; it’s far too early in the morning to be asking that question.

I’m talking about , a newly unveiled service that has been rolling out since Tuesday to people who use products such as . You should know if you have it the minute you log in, as it will ask you if you want to try it. And if you try it and hate it, don’t worry; buried at the bottom of your Gmail page is a link to turn Buzz off.

How to explain Buzz? Imagine if you’re a media company that, oh, begins with a “G” and really doesn’t have a product ready-made for social sharing of news and information. You’d probably take a hard look at and , see what ideas work best, build your engine around those things and sprinkle in a few innovations of your own to encourage folks to make the switch.

What you get is Google Buzz, a service that is part innovation and part technological Frankenstein. It functions on the basic unit of sharing that drives both Facebook and Twitter: the status update. You can update people on what you’re doing, thinking, reading, etc. You can reply to others. And you can socially share things you are producing, such as blog posts, videos, photos, and so forth.

Google has a built-in engine for this last one, because it has over the years either bought out or created an array of choices from (photos) to (RSS reader) to Blogger. It has a lot of features that über services such as Facebook have, but it’s never had a way to link them all together using social networks. Read more

Forgot to post this last week when I tripped across it, but I was tooling around the NBC site for the winter Olympics and noticed a cool section called Olympic Pulse.

The page, linked off the main home page, is essentially an aggregation for feeds featuring athletes and NBC broadcast personalities. You can sort between these groups or have a combined feed. Off to the right are links to other social media outlets where folks can find Games content, such as via Facebook.

Blogging was the big new media thing at the Beijing Games in 2008. Missouri sent several students to China to work one media coverage as part of an internship-type thing, and in fact one of my students was blogging daily from the Games. And boy did blogging take off across all types of media, which is interesting because really it’d been a growing phenomenon for about four years before that point. Read more

Location-based wikis? There totally is an app for that.

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

Read more

The situation in Haiti has my mind churning this week. The images and stories coming out of this tragedy after the earthquake have been heartbreaking, but I have been mindful of how mediated the whole thing is for me even as I blog about it. I’ve never been to Haiti, unlike a few friends of mine. My whole conception of what Haiti is and what its struggles are (and were, long before this quake) are coming to me via media. As I get ready for another semester of Media & Society, that perspective is still as fresh to me as ever.

There’s another aspect of this though that has me intrigued, and that is the use of social networks to raise donations for the victims in Haiti. I touched on it a bit the other day when I wrote about the SMS campaign being used to raise aid dollars, but it’s much wider than that. As I’ve been sitting here this week editing down my 200-page to a 2500-word abstract for a professional organization competition, I realize that much of what I’m seeing as it relates to Haiti and social media reflect what I found in that research.

First, a story, then some theory, then some explanation. Read more

It doesn’t shock me at all that the early stages of the Haiti coverage were built on social media rather than professional media. We’ve seen this before when big news events happen and traditional lines of transmission inhibit the ability of news organizations to get the message out.

In the case of Haiti, the 7.0 earthquake damaged so much communication infrastructure that communicating the stories and images out of Port Au Prince was thrust upon the locals still shellshocked from the devastation. That my first thought after the disaster was to wonder how the citizen journalists on the ground would tell this story shows how far we’ve come. As a scholar I’m no longer fascinated and in awe of the notion of the citizen reporter. In my case, I found myself wondering last night what they’d do with it this time, how it would be different and more meaningful than past events.

Within hours, the New York Times was curating a social media roundup on its blog, soliciting voices from the region. The Los Angeles Times was aggregating tweets and attempting to verify whether the voices were hoaxes or actually coming out of Haiti, just one interesting professional media use of social media that looked like a next step highlighted today by the Sydney Morning Herald.

But that’s all stuff we’ve seen before, and as Mark McGwire would say, I’m not here to talk about the past. Read more

The Brown & White student newspaper did an article today about a project I’ve been working on a little bit during my first semester here at Lehigh. For about a month now a group of students have been using to raise awareness both about the conflict in Darfur and the United Nations’ role in helping us find a way through it.

The article’s great and really shows the thought and preparation (not to mention the current hard work) put into this project. It’s off to a nice start, with students tweeting a few times a day, building an audience, and also following others for the purpose of retweeting (follow them at @).

I won’t overstate my role in this, as really I’ve just been the Twitter adviser here to help shape students’ understanding of what this thing is and offer advice on how to make it work. They’ve done a great job both creating content and listening to their audiences. Twitter is one of those forms of media you have to use a little before you really have a handle on what it is. I’ve noticed a marked growth in the quality in the short time the students have had to get more comfortable.

This project is what I loved about Lehigh as I was getting to know the place while on the job market. Opportunity abounds here. The project started because someone at the U.N. contacted Bill Hunter here at Lehigh (we are a U.N. partner campus). Something that simple is the catalyst for something interesting.

Of course we are having to look hard at how to define success. Followers were scant early on, but they’ve picked up steam as we’ve gotten more of an audience. This is in part due to retweeting, I’d bet, but also because the students have shown interest in others by following like-minded folks on Twitter simply by searching the live feed for “Darfur” posts. I’ve been tracking followers by the day and it has been an interesting case study in building a social media brand from the ground up.

What’s most interesting to me is that these aren’t trained journalists. Most of them aren’t even studying journalism or communication here. It is a powerful reminder to me of what I already know, that the heart of what we do in media is still about telling stories and that is something people can identify with both as consumers and producers on the Web. Most of us are storytellers at heart in our own little way, and different media platforms are merely channels for our stories be it a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. Stories are the building blocks of social change and action, though, and so this is a field experiment at work.

I gave them a little bit of guidance by telling them to “find your voice” on Twitter, be it straight reporting, opinion, analysis, or a mixture. We aren’t editing or approving anything they write, and so I’ve really been testing out this notion of a light hand of direction that we learned with MyMissourian. We aren’t editing for style or grammar. It runs back to the basic questions: Is it true? Is it fair?

In 48 hours, my dissertation final draft will be done and I’ll ship this thing out to my committee before my July 16 defense date. I’m exhausted from too many 15-hour days, but I sometimes marvel at the stamina I’ve acquired for research in graduate school.

I’ll wait to post a full abstract until this thing is fully defended, because I’m always a little nervous about putting the cart before the horse. But real briefly, I’ll say what it’s about. I surveyed a bunch of online community users of various types and over various sites to get a sense of their social ties. I tapped into ideas of social capital first theorized by Pierre Bourdieu and made famous by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.

The basic idea is that the thickness and the extension of peoples’ social networks is a powerful predictor of how we help one another and get involved in everyday civic life, types of engagment that span from voting to the reciprocity that comes with giving money to a friend in need.

Typically researchers measure offline social capital (offline ties for real-world local benefit) and online social capital (ties formed online for real-world local benefit). I measured those two as well as a third new variable I’ve created called virtual social capital, which measures online ties created for non-local beneft (I’m calling it Distance Engagement).

The one thing I can say so far is my created variable works big time as a distinct way of measuring online ties. So I’m thrilled about that.

But I’ve found some other stuff related to motivations for using online communities, social bonds, and the forms of engagement. I’ll save those results for later, save this teaser: social media doesn’t do squat for local engagement as a general predictor across all different types of sites, but it does surprising things for online forms of activism and helping. And the motivations/needs people bring to their media use is very important in determining how this all works. Viva la Media Choice Model!

Anyhow, 48 hours and I’ll send this thing out. Defense in 11 days, yikes!

AP has put out a FAQ about its new initiative to capture revenue from search engines and aggregators. Hopefully my linking to them doesn’t constitute stealing.

Just for fun, I created a tag cloud using their text using Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/):

The one word that jumps out to me is “authoritative” and in context it’s referring to the content that is produced and the fact it should be most visible to people looking for it. They’re trying to protect the value of what they do, obviously, but I can’t help but think this won’t go over well with people who understand that the Internet has leveled that playing field somewhat. Read more

There’s been some excellent traffic and discussion on my last post regarding Singleton/AP and Google News. Much of that has been generated through social media (Twitter and links on other blogs), reinforcing a lesson I try to emphasize with my students: Think of social networks, not web sites, as your platform.

Anyhow, read the post and add to the discussion if you like.

I want to pull out one response I have to the comments though because it is pretty salient to the discussion. What happens if all these newspapers go away or put up walls around their content? Will people pay for it? Will the newspapers collapse and take democracy with it? Read more