Searching for "J-school"

Search for "j-school" via Google (while not logged into Google, GMail, etc., and the first entry, of course, is the wikipedia article on "journalism school." After that, you get a list of schools and other stuff, all 588,000 hits. Where the school is listed below, it's the main site.

1. UC Berkeley
2. UNC
3. Missouri
4. CUNY
5. Columbia
6. Kansas
7. CUNY's Twitter account
8. Florida's Twitter account
9. Wisconsin
10. A MOOC I've never heard of

I gave up looking for my own j-school (Grady, at UGA). I'm sure we're there somewhere. Eventually. And it's kinda funny that UF's Twitter account appears via Google before the college site.

By the third page you start to get articles that use the term "j-school" in them, often in a disparaging manner, but not always so. Me, I'm a fan of the word.

Slouching Toward a Curriculum

The UGA journalism department, now made up of the old j-dept. and broadcast news, voted earlier today on its new curriculum. I wrote about it some time ago and the latest version looks close enough to it to let earlier version be your guide. Basically it's heavy on skills classes, heavy on newsroom work, heavy on students getting exposure to lots of different skills, such as work in video. The old 3410 lecture-lab class, for example, will go away. Students will do capstone classes tied either to the broadcast of NewsSource or work to put stuff on its web site (plus, of course, still doing stuff for R&B, etc.). Specialties include investigative reporting and there are classes in data and coding.

There were two votes against it, perhaps due to the overly undergrad aspect to the curriculum and its lack of flexibility, both reasonable arguments. One of the negative voters asked three or four questions, but never offered explicit criticisms. The other "no" vote didn't say a thing. In full disclosure, I'm not as happy about the new curriculum as others are, but I think it's an interesting approach and worth a try. I worry we may be creating generalists, not specialists. But I may be wrong (words, by the way, you'd never hear uttered by our two "no" vote faculty who, best I can tell after all these years, are never wrong about anything. Nor do they ever laugh at funny stuff in meetings. Sheesh.).

Okay, so what's next? The package of classes is sent later today to the Grady College curriculum committee. Assuming no problems there, it'll go to the Dec. 10 meeting of the entire Grady faculty. Assuming no problems there (yeah, yeah, lots of assuming), it'll head "up the hill" to the university curriculum process.

We hope to have a new and improved curriculum in place by Spring 2015 2016. Nothing happens fast at a big university, unless of course the president or provost or athletic department really want it, then stuff happens really really fast. Funny how that works.

A Grad Class -- Maybe

I have a slot for Summer 2014 to teach a special topics graduate-level class at UGA. It can be about anything. In the past I've done summer seminars on the effects of social media, the intersection of humor and politics, and religion and media. This time I'm mulling over something less fun,  a course in secondary analysis. As Wikipedia notes, secondary analysis is "data collected by someone other than the user." The entry continues:

Common sources of secondary data for social science include censuses, organisational records and data collected through qualitative methodologies or Qualitative research. Primary data, by contrast, are collected by the investigator conducting the research.

There are a lot of reasons to like secondary analysis. Someone else has done most of the work, there are no pesky IRBs to deal with, and you get these great national or international samples and therefore terrific generalizability. So what's not to like? You don't always have access to concepts you'd like, measured in ways you'd prefer them measured, and there can be a learning curve when it comes to identifying, downloading, cleaning, and analyzing the data. A steep curve.

Hence ... my possible class, if it can attract students.

There is so much data available. Interested in health? Kids and health? Try getting IRB approval for that. But there's lots of data out there, some collected by the feds, some by others, that even dips into such sensitive topics as drug use. Interested in lifestyle stuff? Internet use? And politics, interested in politics? Oh man, we got your data right here. Well, not here, but at places like GSS, ANES, Pew, Census, and a bunch of federal data best found via ICPSR.

I'm still plotting this class, but basically it'd look something like this:

•  What is secondary analysis? How it differs from other methods.
• Read studies that use secondary analysis. Break 'em down.
• Limitations and strengths of the method.
• All the different places data exist.
• Identify concepts students are interested in.
• How to find your data. 
• Downloading and cleaning.
• Your friend, SPSS, for analysis.
• Recoding variables, getting it right.
• Running analyses.
• Writing up your results as a publishable paper.

Okay, that's what I have so far. Most of my scholarly work uses existing data. I'm particularly fond of Pew and ANES, but I've used others.  In fact, I have one dataset right now that must have 10 studies I'll never get around to.

Oh, and the dirty little secret we don't teach students in research methods -- sometimes you skim an interesting dataset and the study will jump out at you. This has happened to me a number of times, including a study that will soon be published in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, or the one I'm messing with now where I found a bunch of questions asking what language Latinos prefer to get their news. Having fun with that one and even found a good theoretical base having to do with ties to the ancestral country and political participation. Shhhh, don't mention this to our research methods instructors.

Will the class make? For the academically uninitiated, that means enough students sign up to justify holding the class. All you usually need is five butts in seats, and it's possible it might attract folks from other colleges (political science, maybe, or sociology, or public health).

And of course it all depends on my own single vocal cord getting repaired next month so I can croak out a lecture. Hell, everything rides on that. Luckily, I don't have to make a decision on the class until early Spring.

Lack of Transparency

Not only is UGA searching for a new president, but the Grady College where I work is also seeking a new dean.

Interesting stuff.  I'm gonna talk about the latter.

Grady is a college of journalism and mass communication, a place where transparency -- at least theoretically -- should be the standard, the default, the go-to position.  The reality has always been, at best, disappointing.  But in the search for our new dean, thanks to the fuzziness of Georgia's okay-but-not-great sunshine law, the present search manages to be as non-transparent as possible.  They're following the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.

Let me explain.  Georgia law allows searches for the "executive head of an agency" in Georgia, including "units" of the University of Georgia, to operate pretty much in the black.  In other words, the public's business is not exactly conducted in the public eye (the spirit of the law).  As O.C.G.A. 50-18-72(a)(7) outlines, a search can choose to keep secret who applies for a wide assortment of jobs in local and state government, including UGA, until such time the search chooses to name the finalists.

The theory is that by having a search open to the public, good people won't apply.  Never mind how bullshit that argument really is.  Show me the evidence this is true, not just that you think it is.  If you're applying to a journalism and mass comm school and you're afraid of transparency, don't apply to a journalism and mass comm program.  Try the business school.

The news hook?  Last Thursday and Friday a group of candidates for the Grady deanship, somewhere between seven and 10 folks, went through "Skype interviews."  From that pool the search committee will probably recommend three or four to publicly visit and pitch their wares to Grady and the UGA administration.  We may know the "finalists" in the next few days. Stay tuned.

A word about "finalists" and Georgia law.  Often, searches for a school superintendent will name only one "finalist" for consideration, keeping all the other names secret.  In other words, violating not just the spirit of the law but taking behind the schoolhouse and beating the ever-living crap out of it.   

They'd never get away with this kind of bullshit in a UGA dean or president search, or at least you'd like to think so.  And there's no reason why a dean search cannot be transparent.  The law allows you to be completely open if you choose to be.  The recent search for the dean of the University of Florida's journalism school was completely open, as required by state law, including details on every person who applied and complete transparency along the way.  Whether or not you're happy with the outcome (full disclosure: Diane McFarlin, a former boss of mine a million years ago, got the job), is another matter.  Let's give her the benefit of the doubt.  She needs it.  The point is just down south at a similar program they conducted a completely open search and, best I can tell, it suffered not at all in its pool of applicants.

It's a friggin journalism and mass comm program.  We can do better, especially when our motto has to do with something about training democracy's next generation.

Or perhaps democracy should be in quotation marks.

Shocker -- Survey Finds Journalism Jobs Hard to Come By

The famous annual survey of the journalism job market -- conducted by colleagues in my college -- finds that it's been a tough year for journalism jobs.  Press release here. 

The lede:  

Graduates of the nation's journalism and mass communication programs in the spring of 2009 confronted a job market unlike any that graduates have encountered in the nearly 25 years for which comparable data are available.

And yet, there are jobs out there for young journalists, especially in smaller markets but even in some big markets where newspapers especially have shed more expensive and more experienced reporters and editors.  But it is tough.

Owning a TV Station

It's kinda cool, and a bit retro, that my college bought a TV station.  Given our Internet age, it's as if we're living That 70's Show. 

But there are some interesting research possibilities in having your own station, concepts you can study by having control over content and programming.  A lot of these possibilities are beyond the scope of what people know and get into other research areas, such as management and audience studies, but I think if the folks who work with the station and video can figure out ways to manipulate programming we can better understand how people learn about certain issues -- our main topics usually being poverty and health.

How do you do that?

Not the old fashioned way, like in print, where you might randomly assign readers to different versions of stories or even editions of the newspaper.  That's hard to do with a television signal.  But the folks who do this stuff can devise a series of programs on an issue and explore how much this raises audience awareness or likelihood to seek out some health care.  Even better, from a research standpoint, they could craft webcasts where you do get real manipulation of content to explore what works and what doesn't work, hopefully something beyond the tired old studies of college sophomores sitting in a laboratory, watching TV and filling out a questionnaire.

Political learning is a bit more difficult, but I think it might be interesting to do one week of newscasts in one style, measure responses, and then do the next week in a somewhat different style, and measure responses (learning, interest, etc.).  Maybe one week could focus more on straight news, the next week on more narrative styles of storytelling, and see then which seems to work.  The stories themselves would not be equivalent -- so it's hardly a perfect experiment -- but you gain a lot in generalizability.

But the area most ripe for this kind of research is priming.  TV news, in particular, has a powerful priming effect, as was detailed at length in the excellent book, News That Matters.  I'd love to see a research program using WNEG that attacks some area -- health or public affairs or whatever -- along these conceptual lines, given the access and control one can have over content in a station owned by a mass comm program like Grady.

A Major Called "Newspapers"

I'm gonna stray a bit off the what people know track.

I teach in the Department of Journalism, yet we don't have a major called journalism. Instead we have three majors: newspapers, magazines, and publication management. Anyone with a clue about the changing dynamics of the news business realizes having a major called newspapers makes about as much sense a business school having a major called convenience store management. We teach journalism, not newspapers, not magazines. We teach it for dead trees and online and all the rest. Journalism is a verb, something you do.

And yes, turf protection rears its ugly little head. No place is so petty as academe. We don't want to upset anyone by having a major called journalism in what coincidentally is a Department of Journalism. Extend this brilliant line of thought to its logical and deeply disturbed conclusion and you can complain about Department of English having a major called English -- because, after all, many of us use English. Dammit, how dare they claim it!

Let the brainiacs run free and you arrive at only one possible answer -- we change our name to the Department of Newspapers and Magazines.

So can I drag this vent, kicking and screaming, back to a what people know discussion? Probably not well, though of course our curriculum influences what skills students have when they enter the market, which influences how news is produced, which influences what people learn about their social and political world. So yeah, all of this petty crap does make an indirect difference.

Except not, because we still have a major called newspapers. We're roaring fearlessly into the 1950s.