Posts Tagged ‘ numeracy ’

Journalism 24/7: What we studied, Fall 2011

At the end of each semester, I like to reflect on what I learned from teaching Journalism 24/7, my course on the changing news industry. The material changes so fast that the world looks different every time I teach the class. This time – my 10th – at the request of journalism major Evan Livingston, I’m compiling an annotated list of the websites we examined. For any journalism program contemplating such a course – and all programs should be preparing their students to understand the business side of journalism along with its history, ethics and skills – this list offers a framework on which to build.

Given the wildly overpriced textbook market, it’s gratifying that this is such a low-cost course. I require only one book, “The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril,” by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, a widely available trade paperback that costs less than $15. Though published in 2003, much of it is essential background reading. The only truly outdated chapter is the one on network television news, so we skip that. Everything else we read is available for free online – appropriately, for a class in which a major theme is the loss of revenue in the movement of news to the web.

The annual State of the News Media report published by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is essential reading for instructors. This exhaustive compilation covers newspapers; magazines; online; local, national and cable television; audio journalism; and ethnic and alternative news media. For each sector, the authors analyze audience, economics, newsroom investment, ownership and digital trends. The 2011 report includes special sections on mobile platforms and community news. A report on the previous year is issued each spring. Sections of the report could be assigned in small doses, or for graduate students, but the whole is overwhelming. I assign the section on local television, which is where many of our students hope to find jobs. The material has proved invaluable in class discussions.

Another core text is the 2011 report by Bill Grueskin, Ana Seave and Lucas Graves of the Columbia University School of Journalism, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism.” Each of the 10 chapters – on journalism economics, audience, Continue reading →

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2011
12/21
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Changing News Industry
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Teaching
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A teachable moment in numeracy

A recent Business Day front page in The New York Times featured an enjoyable story headlined “Rabbit Ears Perk Up for Free HDTV,” by Matt Richtel and Jenna Wortham. It reported on young people who have dropped their cable-television susbcriptions and replaced them with “the modern equivalent of the classic rabbit-ear antenna.

“Some viewers,” the story continued, “have decided that they are no longer willing or able to pay for cable or satellite service.” These viewers, “including younger ones, are buying antennas and tuning in to a surprising number of free broadcast channels. These often become part of a video diet that includes the fast-growing menu of options available online.”

“Cord-cutting,” as this phenomenon is known in media circles, has been much discussed in my Journalism 24/7 class, which examines the changing news industry. Good, I thought, here’s a story I can use in class. I turned to read the continuation on page B6, where I learned that from April to September, “cable and satellite companies had a net loss of about 330,000 customers.” Antennas Direct, a St. Louis manufacturer, “expects to  sell 500,000 this year, up from 385,000 in 2009, according to its president.” A young couple in Minnesota and another in Virginia were quoted on their decisions to cut the cord and whether they miss the cable offerings.

So this cord-cutting thing is really happening, I thought as I finished my breakfast and glanced at page B7.

“ESPN Says Study Shows Little Effort To Cut Cable,” said the headline at the top of that page.

Hunh?

My first thoughts were snarky, I’ll confess: Is this evidence of some kind of internecine warfare on the biz desk? Don’t the Times business editors talk to one another? Ah, schadenfreude.

The ESPN story, by Brian Stelter, reported that Continue reading →

2010
12/12
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Changing News Industry
Journalism Fundamentals
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Slipping numeracy into reporting class

I’ve started putting into action one of the most important things I learned at the AEJMC meetings in Denver last month. I’m not waiting for that special day, that somewhere-over-the-rainbow day, when every student in our program takes a class devoted to quantitative literacy. I’m focusing now on ways to incorporate quantitative thinking into lessons and discussions that ostensibly have little to do with numbers.

On Tuesday, for example, I gave my introductory reporting class its first weekly current-events quiz and included a couple of questions about President Obama’s speech on Iraq. I asked:

In his Oval Office address last week, President Obama said the U.S. has spent more than _________________ on war in the past decade.
a. $10 billion
b. $75 billion
c. $1 trillion
d. $10 trillion

The answer is C, $1 trillion. But more important, this was an opportunity to discuss estimation and to talk about which numbers pass the sniff test.  What is a billion? A trillion? How can we make sense of these numbers not only to readers but also to ourselves?
The key, I told my students, is to keep some number comparisons in your mental back pocket so you can pull them out easily. For billions and trillions, I said, I’d use our university’s annual budget of nearly $2 billion. Is it likely  that seven years of fighting two wars cost the United States $10 billion, or only five times as much as it costs to run the campus for a year? Continue reading →
2010
09/12
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Journalism Fundamentals
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Summer travels 2: AEJMC in Denver

The AEJMC, or the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, is a 98-year-old organization that holds annual meetings for faculty members who teach journalism, advertising and public relations. It meets every year during the first week of August in some large U.S. city. Roughly half its 4,000 members show up to attend sessions in the sunless, underground meeting rooms of an anonymous convention hotel and to schmooze with friends they haven’t seen since grad school.

That’s grad school as in doctoral studies, for the most part. AEJMC seems to be dominated by people with PhD’s who conduct studies with names like “The Media and Identity Scale: Some Evidence of Construct Validity” and “The Influence of Interdependent Self-Construal on Consumers’ eWOM Behaviors in Social Networking Web Sites.” (I’m sure these are both very fine studies.)

The daily sessions begin at 7 a.m. and run until nearly midnight. There may be a dozen or more sessions during any given 90-minute time slot. The sessions are labeled in degrees of opacity: research panel session, refereed paper research session, high-density research paper session, scholar-to-scholar refereed paper research session, panel session, teaching panel session, mini-plenary teaching session. None of the four AEJMC staffers I consulted could define these terms. This schedule goes on for four days, plus a “pre-conference” day of workshops.

With so many choices, finding intriguing sessions at this year’s meeting in Denver was easy. I attended “Journalists and Numbers: They Can Mix,” “Planning, Launching and Running a Convergent Student News Website,” “11 Years of Terrific Teaching Tips” and “The New Convergence: Innovations in Industry and Academic Collaborations.” I went into one session by mistake but stayed for a fascinating account of how “K-State” University journalism professors helped rebuild the media infrastructure of a tiny Kansas town destroyed by a deadly tornado. Continue reading →

2010
08/16
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Journalism Fundamentals
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