Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

From Convergence to Webvergence: Tracking the Evolution of Broadcast-Print Partnerships Through the Lens of Change Theory

This study, based on a 2008 survey of news directors in the top 100 U.S. markets and editors at U.S. newspapers with circulations greater than 25,000, found evidence of a decline in the print-broadcast convergence model. Only about half the responding newsrooms had convergence partners, and notable percentages had ended collaborations. Among the remaining partners, convergence was often practiced at a low level of integration that did not include online collaboration. Instead, most TV station...

Changes in Professionalism of U.S. Journalists in the Turbulent Twenty-First Century

A panel study of 400 U.S. journalists assessed changes in indicators of professionalism between 2002 and 2007, a period of significant economic and technological turmoil for news organizations. Findings show that professional organization membership declined among journalists, and staff cutbacks and higher workloads posed threats to the autonomy of some news workers. Beliefs about professional roles shifted slightly, with more emphasis on analyzing problems and being adversaries of public off...

Socialization or Rewards? Predicting U.S. Scientist-Media Interactions

This study investigates scientists as public communicators, with a particular focus on factors that influence scientists' interactions with the mass media. Based on a U.S. survey of scientists, the results show that some of the patterns characterizing these interactions have remained remarkably stable over the course of at least three decades. Scientists continue to interact with journalists more frequently than commonly assumed, and status, socialization, and positive intrinsic rewards are a...

Health News Agenda Building: Journalists' Perceptions of the Role of Public Relations

This study uses a nationwide survey of health journalists (N = 774) to explore the agenda-building process in health news, examining how journalists develop story ideas, value expert source characteristics, and perceive the acceptability of using public relations materials. Results indicate that intermedia agenda setting may be a stronger influence on agenda building than are information subsidies, and that journalists rate characteristics associated with public relations training as importan...

Enhancing Perceived Credibility of Citizen Journalism Web Sites

This study examined whether information about a writer and hyperlinks on a citizen journalism Web site affected the perceived credibility of stories. Participants read stories from a popular citizen journalism Web site and rated the stories in terms of perceived credibility. Results show that hyperlinks and information about the writer do enhance perceived story credibility. Credibility is enhanced most greatly when both hyperlink and writer information are included and, to a lesser extent, w...

What's in a Frame? A Content Analysis of Media Framing Studies in the World's Leading Communication Journals, 1990-2005

This paper provides a systematic analysis of media framing studies in the world's leading communication journals. A quantitative content analysis of 131 studies published in fifteen international journals demonstrates how frames are conceptualized and measured. Current problems in framing research include lack of operational precision, the descriptive focus of many analyses, neglect of visuals, and insufficient reporting of reliability.

Expanding and Validating Applications of the Willingness to Self-Censor Scale: Self-Censorship and Media Advisers' Comfort Level with Controversial Topics

Research on the Willingness to Self-Censor (WTSC) scale posits that the desire to withhold one's opinion is an intrinsic, as opposed to situational, trait. This study of high school media advisers (N=563) revealed that advisers who rated high on WTSC were more likely to state lower levels of comfort with the coverage of five controversial topic areas in their student media. These findings held even when accounting for key demographics, fear of reprisal for running the stories, job enjoyment, ...

Disentangling Media Effects From Debate Effects: The Presentation Mode of Televised Debates and Viewer Decision Making

This experiment examines whether the presentation mode of televised debates impacts how viewers assess the issues debated. Participants were exposed to a segment of televised debate on either a single- or split-screen. Candidate character and party attachment were more important in how viewers formed opinions of the debated issue with the split-screen than with the single-screen. On the other hand, in the split-screen condition, viewers relied less on pre-existing notions when forming opinion...

The Effects of Persuasion Knowledge On Click-Through of Keyword Search Ads: Moderating Role of Search Task and Perceived Fairness

This study examines the effects of persuasion knowledge and conditions that influence its impact in the context of keyword search ads. Students participated in an experiment featuring a 2 (persuasion knowledge: primed vs. not primed) x 2 (search tasks: complex vs. less complex) between-subjects design with a covariate (perceived fairness). Results reveal online users are less likely to click through keyword search ads when they are aware that advertisers' persuasion attempts are at work. Howe...

The War Against the Moon: Andre Maurois' 1927 'Fantasy On the Coming Power of the Press'

In 1927, French author André Maurois published The Next Chapter: The War against the Moon, a "fantasy on the coming power of the press." Unlike seminal dystopian works such as We, Brave New World, and 1984 in which governments control the news media, War against the Moon presents a future in which news media control the world's governments. Unevaluated heretofore by journalism historians, War against the Moon reflects post-World War I concerns regarding propaganda, the malleability of public ...

Booknotes

How will we do our jobs as journalists and as teachers and scholars? [...] most important, how informed will be the citizens who are required for participatory democracy? JMCQ sponsored a panel at the annual AEJMC convention in Boston this summer that asked, "Does J/MC Research Matter?" The question is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. [...] what of books, the "media's" ancient forebears, whose authors have the outdated luxury of taking the time and space to report and reflect thoughtfully on o...

Comparative Essay: George Gallup in Soviet Russia: Reflections On Boris Doktorov's Histories of Public Opinion Studies in the United States

[...] I found only one work that dealt with a less important episode of Gallup's life-his study of Hollywood. [...] we, the romantics of "socialism with a human face," were under the spell of public opinion studies, which would change the style of leadership and push people at all levels of the Soviet hierarchy to better understand the real views and feelings of the masses. [...] Doktorov wrote nothing about the relationship between Gallup and the U.S. government, because the American autho...

The Age of American Unreason

Writing before Twitter emerged on the cultural scene with its explicit mandate for brevity even in self-expression, Jacoby decried the fact that a preference for snippets over substance had spread through virtually all of the print media, not merely in those competing for the attention of the mass authence (to say nothing of soundbites). [...] if the sad fact is that college faculty and teachers more generally are in search of respectable numbers of warm bodies and favorable ratings in order...

Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned From the People Vs. O.J. Simpson

Simpson murder trial remains the exemplar of everything that can go wrong in a high-profile case: rapacious journalists swarming the courthouse, posturing lawyers run amok, and a star-struck judge who couldn't or wouldn't control his courtroom. [...] although Ito routinely declined to be interviewed during the trial, he agreed to talk with KCBS reporter Tritia Toyota about his parents' incarceration in internment camps during World War II on the condition that the station wouldn't promote th...

The Bigger Picture: Elements of Feature Writing

A ride around town, a two-mile walk, and a moment of quiet thus created focus, and demonstrated for me that this book is more than worth the money and time to read it. The Bigger Picture is a sharp and clean book that beautifully describes the process of how to write features, with each chapter coming from a working writer, journalist or scholar with an extensive background in this area. While individual authors vary in their approaches to feature writing, the book speaks in a single voice,...

Cbs's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of Mccarthyism

Ghiglione's meticulously researched (76 pages of footnotes) work follows Hollenbeck from newspaper reporter in Nebraska, to regional Associated Press photo editor, to reporter on New York's futuristic daily newspaper PM, to WW II correspondent in North Africa and Europe, to stints at all three networks, including his revolutionary and shortlived CBS press-criticism radio show. First hitting the street in 1940, PM cared little for newspaper norms of the day, and, as it turned out, for turning...

The Coming of the Frontier Press: How the West Was Really Won

Especially strong are her analyses of the California press; journalistic icons like Otis Chandler, William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, and Mark Twain; legislation such as the Homestead Act of 1862; and references to Spanish-language, Chinese, African American, religious, medical and scientific, and women's suffrage publications.

Communication for Development and Social Change

[...] at the theoretical level, although the selected articles review a range of theories associated with communication and development, discussion on some important perspectives is far from enough. [...] although the book explores the role of various mass media in communication for development, discussion of new media is thin, touching only in passing on the Internet in general.

The Content Analysis Reader

The items are organized into seven sections - history and conception of content analysis, utilizing and sampling, inferences and analytical constructs, codes and coding, categories and data languages, reliability and validity, and computer-aided content analysis. Because of these studies, such criticism is widely recognized for the political ploy that it is. [...] this is a book that could be useful for the casual observer of content analysis as a research methodology, but not as useful as ...

Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press

Covering for the Bosses is, in the author's words, a story of the pivotal moments in that long, tortured history [of the labor movement] that show just how determined the region's leadership and this includes the press - has been in fighting organized labor, and how determined workers have been to keep pushing for their rights despite defeat after defeat. Atkins decries continued opposition to organized labor and the potential revenues lost due to tax exemptions granted industries.

Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and On the Wild Web

The book begins with where we are now - declining newspapers, the rise of the blogger, falling public trust in journalism, and the noisily competing worldviews that are now part of our political and social landscape. There is no doubt that Americans need news literacy (the ability to evaluate the quality and veracity of contemporary journalism) because readers and viewers face new challenges in the wide array of choices available as both consumers and producers of news and information.

The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture

Understanding and explaining how children around the world use media and how the media influence them is a complex task, considering the lack of adequate research on this topic in most countries outside of the Western world. [...] cultural context and the level of diffusion of new media vary widely. According to the author of the chapter on Greenland, Jette Rygaard, Greenlanders are only too eager to embrace the world, but maintain a firm hold on their cultural identity; they want to "let G...

Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture

Whether the female consumer's favorite narcotic is magazines, films, cable television shows, or the products featured in them, the book reveals ways that popular media formulas sustain a work-tospend cycle that condemns women to eternal girlishness and a bland, exclusivist racism that masquerades as an acceptance of diversity via ubiquitous media images of blond, "light-skinned" AfricanAmerican top models and singing divas.

Journalism 1908: Birth of a Profession

[...] Williams' pronouncements and arguments about the role of journalism in the early twentieth century were fairly representative of much of the discourse of that era about journalism, whose roots could also be found in the progressive movement and in advocates of the Social Gospel who had come to recognize that religion had ceded its power over public opinion to the newspaper press but with the caveat that the press act as a socially responsible advocate for societal uplift. [...] less pa...

Journalism of the Highest Realm: The Memoir of Edward Price Bell, Pioneering Foreign Correspondent for the Chicago Daily News

[...] evidence of his formality and seeming lack of emotion appears in the chapter, "I Learn I'm a White Nigger," which describes Bell's dispatch to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 to cover race riots. Yet Bell's path to his "celebrity" journalist title is evident here, based on his growing body of work that included the first news interview with a British secretary of state for foreign affairs and interviews with several British cabinet members on features of the German War (WWI).

Literary Journalism On Trial: Masson V. New Yorker and the First Amendment

The techniques of storytelling - character, dialogue, and point of view, for example - are as truthful as techniques of the traditional news story - the inverted pyramid, detached recitation of facts, and objectivity. By integrating a history of the Supreme Court's libel jurisprudence - particularly as it relates to the actual malice test - and a history of legal problems that literary journalism has caused The New Yorker, she puts the debate into clearer perspective.

Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio

Lum and Abner began in 1931 and lasted for nearly a generation (the most popular network series often did) until 1954, by which time network radio was fast fading in the face of television competition.

Medium Cool: Music Videos From Soundies to Cellphones

According to Maureen Turim, Web sites provide an alternative for non-mainstream artists to serve niche markets, and suggest that intriguing music videos can be attributed to the historical avante-garde and progressive art movements. While it does offer historical perspectives back to cinematic jukeboxes and Elvis Presley on television, with extensive use of textual analysis, it falls short on the future of music videos, especially in portable media like iPods or cell phones.

Packaging Terrorism: Co-Opting the News for Politics and Profit

In chapter 3 Moeller writes that the 9/11 images of the World Trade Towers collapsing and the spontaneous posting of personal photographs of missing loved ones burned into the national consciousness. [...] the picture of Bush at Ground Zero with the American flag was a top-selling image prior to the downward spiral of the war in Iraq.

Print Matters: How to Write Great Advertising

[...] it might be better if the concept was introduced in the section on writing body copy, and then reintroduced in the direct mailing section. [...] the book would be stronger with a concluding wrap-up chapter to bring all the authors' ideas back into focus.