The Next R&B Publisher?

Soon after The Red & Black publisher Harry Montevideo resigned, people began to wonder who might take his seat high on Baxter Hill.

I have no candidates in mind and I'm unlikely to play a role in the search, which means from the safety of my "academic perch" (as one critic described it) I can offer all kinds of suggestions without any of those pesky responsibilities.

I expect the search will be inundated with the names of impressive pros looking to leave the industry. Searchers, fight the temptation of a splashy name or a splashy newspaper. One of those folks may very well turn out to be your best choice, but I'd prefer to see a young and hungry entrepreneur, someone not necessarily from the newsroom but someone who gets journalism.

Someone with ideas. Not someone with war stories.

In other words, someone who approaches the R&B like a startup, someone willing to reboot The Lady on the Hill. But -- and I can't emphasize this enough -- mindful of the R&B's storied past, its role in the University community, and of course the role journalism plays in society. Someone who can talk to townies and business leaders and university administrators and please talk to the students who spend countless hours at the newspaper because, dammit, they've gone and caught the journalism bug even though their momma warned them to practice safe studentdom and daddy insisted they get a degree in something that pays more.

Is there such a person out there?  If so, please apply.  If so, search committee, please hire.

R&B Resignation

Harry Montevideo, the longtime publisher of The Red & Black, has apparently resigned (Flagpole story).

[update, also on Poynter now]
[update, board statement]

Allow me to hijack my media blog to offer a few words.

I won't write a lot about Montevideo because, frankly, I've been a UGA journalism prof for 21 years and I don't think he's ever asked my advice about R&B plans and strategies.  That either makes him incredibly dumb or canny beyond belief.  After all, my expertise is in reporting, not managing a news operation, so other than to tell him the move from 5-days print to 1-day digital all at once is really truly marvelously stupid, I couldn't add much other than to tell him "I told you so" after the plan sent the paper stumbling into near irrelevancy.

There's no reason for me to recount Montevideo's history.  It'll be written elsewhere.  His leaving is an end of an era for the paper -- a creature he nurtured and nourished and helped grow into an award-winning operation with a really big building on Baxter Hill.  He deserves loads of credit for making the paper what it was, just as he deserves credit (along with a few of its kookier board members) for making the paper the lesser creature it is today.  His recent foolishness (wrestling a student to the ground, the walkout, the obscene salary, the mangled move from print to digital, trying to pick a fight with my department) all conspired to lead a fresher and more clearheaded board to a simple conclusion, that it was time for Montevideo to step down.

So give Montevideo credit for a job well done.  Yes, he was successful when it was easier to be successful, and yes he fumbled the job when times became tough, but the R&B is a nationally recognized student news organization and he deserves much of the credit.  Not all.  The students did the reporting, the editing, the shooting.  But give him credit nonetheless, and let's move on.

May we live in interesting times?  Grady College has a new incoming dean.  The Department of Journalism has an new incoming chair.  And now the student paper will have, after a search, a new incoming publisher.  It's a time for fresh starts all around.

It's an opportunity I hope that won't be wasted.

Opinion vs Fact-Based Reporting

Here's a brief but fascinating piece from Pew that analyzes the three major cable networks in terms of how much of their time is devoted to fact-based reporting versus opinion.  The graph I put below, but check out the site as well.

The Slow Death of Mass Communication?

I work in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.  There are a lot of programs out there that include some form of mass communication in their title, either as singular or, oddly, plural.  But how popular is the phrase?  And is it changing over time?  Glad you asked.  Here I present a graph via the magic of Google of how often mass communication was mentioned in books.

As you can see, the phrase peaked in the 1950s, dipped but clawed its way back in the 1970s, then started a slow and seemingly inevitable decline.

As some of you know, I wrote a testy post some weeks back about the possibility of changing the name of our college.  That was mostly about losing journalism (bad idea) or adding a long list of stuff after journalism (worse, given how badly written it would be, such as Journalism and Media, etc.).  Here I present an argument for losing mass communication, undercutting my own position because I'm a data guy and the graphic above suggests our name is, well, kinda stuck in the 1950s.  The mass communication part, mind you.  Journalism stays until you pry the name out of my cold dead fingers.

Okay Hollander, but how about journalism?  Isn't it dying?  Below, the graphic is squeezed to fit given how long ago the word appears.

What does this really mean?  Hard to say.  This is, after all, merely mentions in books scanned by Google, but the data suggest quite strongly that mass communication as a phrase may have less meaning today and tomorrow.  Journalism means something specific and, after all, Henry W. Grady was a journalism guy, but mass communication may be overdue for a change.  The problem is, we end up with all these awful combinations of words to try and capture what it is we do in our college (essentially we teach students to inform, persuade, and entertain -- but that makes for a lousy college title).

Political Knowledge -- Over Time

In playing with Google, we can see how the phrase "political knowledge" has been used in books over time.  See below.

So the phrase "political knowledge" really took off in the 1950s, hitting its high point in the early 1960s, and then dropped.  There were burps up in the 1970s (Watergate?) and the 1980s (Reagan?).  It's odd the term never really appeared until the 1940s.

Interesting, while not being terribly informative.

Polls of Journalists

There's a story about an Australian poll of journalists that deserves a brief mention.  A lot of it is caught up in that country's politics, which won't mean a hell of a lot to U.S. readers, but there is one small methodological point I want to explore. See below:

On the topic of voting intentions, only 61 per cent of the 605 respondents were willing to reveal their voting intention, but of those who did, 43 per cent said they would vote Labor, 30 per cent Coalition and 19 per cent Green.

For a lot of us those party affiliations mean little.  The real point here is only 61 percent gave their voting intentions and from that small subsample, we have a list of partisan preferences.  So basically we're operating with a non-random sample of 369 journalists, because there's no reason to suspect people randomly choose to give their political preference.  A number that small, the margin of error balloons.  Plus it's become so non-random as to be questionable whether margin of error (about 5 percent here) even matters.

In other words, beware.

Now you could do a quick-and-dirty analysis to see if those who agreed to reveal their party preferences differed from those who did not on such factors as age, education, etc.  If you did not see significant differences there, you have more confidence in the meaningfulness of your results.  The story here doesn't go that deep, so it's hard to say.  The real point is, beware subsamples when people assign themselves through a willingness to reveal something about themselves.  My hunch is the journalists who didn't reveal their partisan leanings differ wildly from those who did -- and that throws the whole analysis out the window.

Brilliant Scholar Update

I like to sometimes see who is citing my research -- thus making this another Brilliant Scholar Update.

• If I spoke German, or maybe Dutch, I'd have more to say about this study, which cites me (shouldn't everyone?).  Ah well, on to the next in our brilliant scholar update ...

• This study looks at political satire, a favorite topic of mine.  Basically it's a summary of the available literature.  In the same journal issue there's another that cites me.

• Keeping with our The Daily Show and satire theme, this article in MC&S notes my early work (two cites, from 1995 and 2005).

That's it for now.  Just a quick update to feed my self-esteem.  Actually it's interesting to look up my talk radio research.  That's largely a dead area now and no one is doing stuff, or citing work, in the last few years.