Grady at Wall Street

Hijacking my blog for a Grady PSA:

Four journalism students are participating in a fellowship of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers organized and sponsored by our Cox Institute.  Nicholas Fouriezos, Kathleen LaPorte, Cailin O'Brien and Maria Torres will spend their Spring Break on Wall Street visiting and training at The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Yahoo Finance, the New York Stock Exchange and Oppenheimer.  They were selected based on their performance in our advanced reporting course, which focused on business journalism in Fall and Spring 2013.  Keith Herndon, who taught the courses following his Reynolds Fellowship in Business Journalism, will accompany them on the trip.

Teaching Hospital vs. Theme Park Journalism

A popular approach to teaching journalism, one promoted by the Knight Foundation's Eric Newton, among others, is the teaching hospital method. Like medical school students, so goes the idea, students learn by doing. Not just doing it in a classroom, mind you, but doing it in real life. It's hard to argue with that.

Of course lots of j-schools do just this, through their student news operations or, like at UGA, through those independent of the university, in our case The Red & Black. I bring this up because here at Grady we're in the midst of an accelerated curriculum discussion prompted in part by a TV station downstairs that's running deep in the red. OnlineAthens has a good story today on the station (you can read the actual report here), which is likely to be sold and somehow we're going to create a new curriculum that will make use of that suddenly available space. As part of this, journalism will likely combine with broadcast news as a department, and curriculum.

Okay, fine. I have you up to speed as best I can on what's happening at Grady. Lemme push it a bit more.

I'm on two committees looking at this and someone came up with an interesting alternative to a teaching hospital approach, one I think deserves discussion. A teaching hospital can drive the curriculum, the tail wagging the dog, plus it's hard to staff 24/7, especially between semesters. Instead of a regional newsroom covering the basics, and training kids to work in a declining industry, we're looking at more entrepreneurial and innovative uses. The one I'm discussing here is the idea of a theme-based newsroom. A journalism theme park, if you will. So this year, we're going to focus on a single theme, say obesity or hunger or whatever. That becomes the "theme" of journalism students, of broadcast/TV students, of online stuff, of advertising students, of PR kids. It would reach across the curriculum, across the college, and reach across the University and involve students from, say, social work. Plus it would not require 24/7 staffing, not require students cover sewer board meetings (they'll do that in basic reporting classes). We'd use this as a capstone experience, or an upper-level set of courses. I dunno.

So, your thoughts?

Where UGA freshmen come from

I was messing with some data today. The map below shows you which high schools sent kids to UGA in the 2013 freshman class. You can click on the various schools to get the names, how many kids sent, and the school's rank.



Oh, a raw Excel file is here that lists the schools by rank. Data from UGA's factbook. I'm trying to do the same for 2003 and make a comparison, but the 2003 data is being difficult for some reason.

Titular Colonicity -- JMCQ Style

I've written before about titular colonicity -- in part because the name tickles me, in part because it says something about academic research. Quite simply, the hypothesis argues that as an academic field matures, more research article titles include colons. Well, the latest issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the main journal in my field, came out this week and in it you'll find a good example of colonicity being very titular. Of the eight studies published, six include a colon. Of the two that foolishly forgot to use a colon, one has a question mark in the middle of the title, so we'll give it a pass.

In JMCQ's spring issue 10 years earlier, only six of 11 published studies included a colon. Ten years before that, six of 13 studies included the magic colon.

So is mass comm maturing as a field, as measured by colons in titles? I actually did a quick-and-fast-and-dirty and non-systematic study of colons and found that indeed their use has increased in our field. What that means I can't say, but one of these days I'm going to do a real analysis of colons in the major mass comm journals and submit the results to AEJMC, just for the hell of it and just to give some reviewer a reason to not accept a paper.

And just in case you think I'm making this crap up, here's an analysis of the so-called Dillion Hypothesis about colons in titles from studies published in the ecological sciences. As the abstract states:

In general, the results of this study support the Dillon Hypothesis of Titular Colonicity.

So there.

Inching ever closer ...

I'm on two different Grady College (at UGA) committees examining how (not if, really, but how) to restructure the college both administratively and in terms of curriculum. As I've mentioned here before, the provost has accelerated the process some -- not necessarily a bad thing given how slow academe can creak and grind its way to a decision.

So both committees met this week. We mostly talked at the conceptual level, not at the nitty-gritty course level. That said, here's how I sense things are going (keeping in mind I could be completely wrong):

• Journalism and Digital and Broadcast Journalism (the old Broadcast News but now with fancy modifiers) will merge.

• That merger will likely include a mix of 1-hour skills-based classes at first so students are more multimedia savvy before walking into journalism-oriented classes.

• Something will replace WUGA-TV. What? Still so far up in the air you can't even see it. The odds? I'd put it at 30 percent some kind of big teaching hospital newsroom thingie, 70 percent a more innovation lab thingie.

• We'll have three departments but with the potential for faculty to be associated with more than one department. Call 'em, for now, Ad/PR, Journalism, and Media Studies.

• While we'll remain administratively vertical, we're inching toward a more horizontal approach when it comes to areas of interest. What's this mean in English? I'll write more on this later.

• "Yes," you ask, "but what's media studies?" All the stuff that doesn't fit in the other two, largely entertainment or documentary oriented but also critical studies. The name will probably reflect this "critical" aspect as well, so it might be Media and Critical Studies. I dunno.

Again let me stress the information above is merely my sense of where things seem to be headed after only two meetings (one for each committee). The faculty will of course have to approve any changes, and we haven't even begun to address the zillion little issues that will crop up in merging faculty and coming up with a more (ugh, c-word warning) converged curriculum.

Also it's unclear now the New Media Institute fits in whatever happens downstairs in that TV space. Hell, a lot is unclear. There's a college-wide meeting next week to discuss the results of focus groups all the faculty participated in, or were invited to participate in. They make for a fun read. While there are no names attached, I can easily spot some people who have been singing the same song for years and years. That meeting next Friday (3/7) will hopefully bring into focus some of the expectations and plans.

Writing with Numbers: This Week's R&B

I don't normally publicly critique the local papers unless they do stories that involve public opinion polls or, in this case, write with numbers. Lemme take a couple of minutes to look hard at two stories.

• UGA students don't finish in four years. This is a longish story and my main concern is that the main reason, by far the main reason, that UGA lags here is the Hope Scholarship. The Hope makes it possible to linger in college compared to other universities. The numbers here are right, only 62.4 percent of freshman in the latest cohort graduated in four years. In fairness to UGA, 10 years ago that number was 44.2 percent. So when making comparisons, also look at how improvement rates compare.

• College of Engineering grows into competition for Ga. Tech. This reads like a PR piece for the Engineering school. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited as hell at the success this program is having. It can only mean good things for the university. But the third graf of this story is too long, out of place, and that 70 percent job number is so out of context as to need a critical eye. Yes, maybe 70 percent of UGA engineering grads get jobs, like Tech, but I can promise you they're very different jobs. Tech is world class in engineering and computer science. We're not there yet. Be critical of every number, and especially don't let the flack write your story for you -- as this one seems.

I don't want to sound overly harsh. I'm glad to see numbers in stories, but you've got to be careful to make sure they are apples to apples, oranges to oranges.

Curricular Excitement, Grady-style

We're involved in a long -- as in really long -- set of discussions on how to restructure Grady College at UGA. A careful, deliberate process.

The new provost just slammed down the accelerator.
(important -- see added comments below)

All along we kinda sorta expected the Department of Journalism would combine with the Digital and Broadcast Journalism sequence of the Department of Telecommunications. We both do journalism, after all, even if there are huge differences in how we approach it.

Long and short of it, broadcast and journalism will combine, and instead of having a couple of years to work out exactly how this will work, the provost wants it done by the end of Spring semester. That does not mean in Fall we're combined. That only means we have until the end of Spring to work out the curriculum and then the administrators will spend their summer ironing out more mundane but important details like faculty loads, etc. And it's not done then. It has to go "up the hill" through the bureaucratic maze that is UGA and the Board of Regents. It'd go into effect Fall 2015.

So the lede is this: the provost doesn't want us to talk about whether it's a good idea, she wants us to do it, and now, not later.

I agree it's time. But here in a plantation model university about the only thing faculty control is curriculum, so the provost and Grady administrators have to ease this along, finesse it, because all it takes is a handful of pissed-off faculty to gum up the works. I don't see that happening, but ham-handedness is a keenly developed UGA skillset.

That overall discussion of restructuring Grady? That will continue, but we're apparently carving out the journalism curriculum thing to speed it along.

CORRECTION (or amplification): We're not told to merge, just told to complete our curriculum review by the end of the semester.  To me this is more or less the same thing, as most of us knew where this was going and support a merger. I don't see any likely scenario in which our curriculum review leads to anywhere but combining journalism with broadcast news, but I could be wrong. It's possible, I suppose, we could all sit down to meet and end up in a melee. If that happens, I'm going for Hazinski first, just for the hell of it (muahahahah). Also, the speedy discussion is tied, in some small part, to a decision needing to be made about the TV station.