"Raising the Ante:
The Internet's Impact on Journalism Education and
Existing Theories of Mass Communication"
A Symposium in Honor of Philip Meyer, Knight Chair in Journalism,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
March 27-28, 2008
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Approaches & Projects
Compiled by Symposium Moderator J. Walker Smith, President, Yankelovich Partners
1. Build new theories to address new media
• Know less about the Internet than we realize
• Nature of this medium is wholly different
• Know less about the interaction of the audience with this medium than we realize
• Particularly the place of news
• Start from the ground up – exploratory research
• Data mining new databases
• Ethnography
• Incorporate automatically collected data
• Turn to other techniques that better address new questions
• Learn from things being experimented with – do evaluation research
• Borrow theories from other disciplines
• Network analysis
• Look at user data from places like Shyam Sundar’s lab
• Do this research faster – make it more continuous and iterative
• Understand how opinion leaders find it useful
• Understand how news decisions made on these Web sites
2. Examination of audience needs & expectation
• How the capabilities of technology changes cues and expectations
• Importance and meaning of identities and communities as a tie to media
• Gatekeepers used – for what purposes and why
• The individual, psychological, social, cultural facts that drive audiences to use, watch, read, interact in certain ways
• The “getting around the gatekeeper” model
• How information is passed along
• What’s credible, accurate, interesting, relevant, worth paying for
• Particularly for younger audiences
• Who talks, with whom, how many, where, how feel, what talking about
• A longitudinal panel study of media usage and news attention
• Internet could facilitate this is a distributed, coordinated study
• Knowing audience uses leads to better decisions about how to package information
• Especially from the point of view of news not just broad information
• Importance of social exchange and social experience and initiators
3. Cataloging of new demands on journalists and impact of this on the practice of reporting
• Interactivity
• Unfettered access
• Engagement with sources in virtual communities
• Short bursts
• New definitions of political involvement (e.g., making video for YouTube)
• Bundling of media
4. Assess ways to address the tension between the economic impact of the Internet on journalism and the need for independent journalism
• Quantify the threat
• Investigate other economic models (like non-profits)
• Engage J-Schools in initiatives such as Barry Sussman’s ideas
• Explore ways for Internet reporting to fulfill investigative and public service needs
• Understand knowledge gaps
• Look at best practice models to make newsrooms more audience-sensitive
• Ditto for the business side
• Understand the dependence of online news to traditional news
• And then better wrap them together
5. Better understanding of what students want, expect and need
• What is a “journalist” today?
• What skills must journalists have (e.g., write code)?
• What is the new curriculum?
• What aspirational model motivates students?
• An “audience course”
• More methods
• More on business models
• Then…what do we not teach?
• Learn from the students – they’re teaching us
• Always keep learning, keep changing