Adaptation to electronic mail

This investigation proposes and tests a path model of the adaptation process to electronic mail using the Komsky (1991) data. The results demonstrate that the user satisfaction and frequency of use are predicted by features consistent with the “media richness”; theory (Fulk, Steinfeld, Schmitz & Power, 1987). The model demonstrates some useful information on understanding the ability of an organization to smoothly and efficiently adopt an electronic mail system that employees will use frequently and satisfactorily.     

The Tyranny of the Empty Frame

This study explores the notion of the “tyranny of the empty frame” within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists—newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism—are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for “any image,” online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs—their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a “symbolic photograph” to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical–iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.     

At Hospitality's Threshold: From Social Inclusion to Exilic Education

Abstract Describing actual museum‐wide events developed for the culturally charged arena of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, this article explores the philosophical and pedagogical double binds that have brought multiculturalism to a political impasse. Museums have strived to be valued resources in an increasingly diverse society. In aspiring to broaden their audience base, their work has shifted from developing educational policies that are “object‐centered” to those that are “community‐centered” — a change of strategy affecting everything from programs to exhibit design. Children's museums — distinct (if not marginalized) from the serious work of the traditional art or ethnographic or natural history museum — know and indeed say in their very name — “children's museum” — that they are for the sake of someone and not about something. They have always already been attuned to the visitor at the threshold.     

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: A Cautionary Tale Starring White Working-Class People

Depictions of white working-class people are steadily on the rise in reality television. To understand this phenomenon, and the ways in which it articulates white working-class people in the United States today, I analyze Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a popular reality series on TLC featuring a self-described “redneck” family. I argue that this series highlights the family's inability—because of their working-class status—to conform to “ideal whiteness,” a whiteness that displays dominant cultural standards bolstered by neoliberalism, such as wealth, rationality, personal responsibility, and self-control. The family members consequently become exemplars of “inappropriate whiteness,” a marginal identity presented as humorous and, through the use of surveillance and spectacle, authentic.     

The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.     

Blinded by the Light: How a Focus on Statistical “Significance” May Cause p-Value Misreporting and an Excess of p-Values Just Below .05 in Communication Science

Publication bias promotes papers providing “significant” findings, thus incentivizing researchers to produce such findings. Prior studies suggested that researchers’ focus on “p < .05” yields—intentional or unintentional—p-value misreporting, and excess p-values just below .05. To assess whether similar distortions occur in communication science, we extracted 5,834 test statistics from 693 recent communication science ISI papers, and assessed prevalence of p-values (1) misreported, and (2) just below .05. Results show 8.8% of p-values were misreported (74.5% too low). 1.3% of p-values were critically misreported, stating p < .05 while in fact p > .05 (88.3%) or vice versa (11.7%). Analyzing p-value frequencies just below .05 using a novel method did not unequivocally demonstrate “p-hacking”—excess p-values could be alternatively explained by (severe) publication bias. Results for 19,830 p-values from social psychology were strikingly similar. We conclude that publication bias, publication pressure, and verification bias distort the communication science knowledge base, and suggest solutions to this problem.     

6. FOREIGN/INTERNATIONAL

The following essay updates my TABLOID JOURNALISM: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH‐LANGUAGE SOURCES (Westport, CT: Greenwood “Bibliographies and Indexes in Mass Media and Communications, Number 10,”; 1996—$65.00, ISBN 0–313–29544–1, 187 pp.)

A. U.S. print journalism

IT'S ALIVE! HOW AMERICA'S OLDEST PAPER CHEATED DEATH AND WHY IT MATTERS by Steven Cuozzo (New York: Times Books, 1996—$25.00, ISBN 0–8129–2286–7, 342 pp.)

“Reversing the Romance: Class and Gender in the Supermarket Tabloids,” by Theron Britt (Prospect, 21: 435–451 [1996])

“Virgins, Vamps and the Tabloid Mentality,” by Linda Fairstein (Media Studies Journal, 12: 92–99 [Winter 1998])

SCOOPED! MEDIA MISS REAL STORY ON CRIME WHILE CHASING SEX, SLEAZE, AND CELEBRITIES by David J. Krajicek (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998—$24.95, ISBN 0–2311–0292–5, 230 pp., bibliographical references)

B. U.S. television

“The World Outside: Local TV News Treatment of Imported News,” by Raymond L. Carroll and C. A. Tuggle (Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 74: 123–133 [1997])

“Tabloid TV, Courtesy of the Education Department,” by Steven Drummond (Teacher Magazine 9: 14–15 [April 1998])

THE JOURNALISM OF OUTRAGEOUSNESS: TABLOID TELEVISION NEWS VS. INVESTIGATIVE NEWS by Matthew C. Ehrlich (Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, No.155 [1996])

“Presumed Innocent? A Comparative Analysis of Network News, ‘Newsmagazines’ and Tabloid TV's Pretrial Coverage of the O. J. Simpson Criminal Case,” by Steven A. Esposito (Communications and the Law, 18: 49–72 [December 1996])

“Tabloid and Traditional Television News Magazine Crime Stories: Crime Lessons and Reaffirmation of Social Class Distinctions,” by Maria Elizabeth Grabe (Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 73: 926–946 [1996])

TABLOID TELEVISION: POPULAR JOURNALISM AND THE “OTHER NEWS” by John Langer (London: Routledge “Communication and Society,”; 1998—$24.99, ISBN 0–4150–6636–0, 192 pp., appendix, bibliographical references)

“Human Nature and Crime Control: Improving the Feasibility of Nurturant Strategies,”; by Bryan Vila (Politics and the Life Sciences, 16: 3–21 [1997])

C. Legal implications

‘Get That Camera Out of My Face!”: An Examination of the Viability of Suing ‘Tabloid Television’ for Invasion of Privacy,” by Eduardo W. Gonzalez (University of Miami Law Review 51: 935–953 [1997])

“Punishing the Press: Using Contempt of Court to Secure the Right to a Fair Trial,” by Stephen J. Krause (Boston University Law Review 76: 537–574 [1996])

“The Confluence of Sensationalism and News: Media Access to Criminal Investigations and the Public's Right to Know,” by Jimmy R. Moye (CommLaw Conspectus, 6: 89–99 [1998])

D. International perspectives

“Public Discourse/Private Fascination: Hybridization in ‘True‐Life‐Story’ Genres,” by Ib Bondebjerg (Media Culture &; Society 18: 27–45 [1996])

“Anthropology in the Body Shop: Lords of the Garden, Cannibalism, and the Consuming Desires of Televisual Anthropology,” by Rosalind C. Morris (American Anthropologist, 98: 137–146 [1996])

“The Media's Impact on International Affairs, Then and Now,” by Johanna Neuman (SAIS Review, 16: 109–123 [Winter/Spring 1996])

“Core of the Problem: Newspaper's Fate Will Gauge More Than Press Freedom,”; by Andrew Sherry (Far Eastern Economic Review, 160: 61–63 [3 July 1997])     

Digitally Empowered

In January 2013, Peter Bradshaw, a film critic for The Guardian, said that Twitter users had become the favourite “critics” of the film industry. The implicit concern in this article on a subject dear to cultural journalism—“Would be criticism bankrupted when we are all ‘critics’ on the Web?”—became evident in the following years. It is pertinent, then, to explore the media answer not only to this subject but both to sourcing and expertise in general in the culture section. Did they embrace these new news sources (and which) that emerged in the digital environment, such as the reader, blogs or artists tweets? Assuming the first hypothesis, how did they include them in their editorial model, alongside with the “traditional” experts and sources? We conducted a content analysis to the culture section of an international media—The Guardian—between 2014 and 2016 (n?=?992), identifying the role of what we would like to call digitally empowered sources and the presence of new “experts” in cultural criticism. We concluded that these digitally empowered sources play an important role in the overall editorial, business and engagement media's strategy and are deeply engaged with a new digital feature: hypertextuality. New patterns of expertise also reflect an editorial positioning supported in an engagement strategy and in the recognition of the readers’ added value to content.     

Facsimiles,fakes, and forgeries: Concerning punctuation in Shakespeare's King Richard II

While T. M. Parrott's proposal that Shakespeare may have written the title‐role of King Richard II "for his own interpretation as an actor” suggests an interesting area of bibliographical research, the prevailing unreliability of facsimile editions of Shakespearean quartos makes investigation of presumed authorial pointing in Q₁ —theoretically rhetorical or dramatic, rather than syntactical—both hazardous and frustrating. Still, the neophyte American bibliographer (who must resort to such texts), if forewarned concerning the nature of tamperings in photo‐lithographic facsimiles—made‐up lines, editorial “emendations” of original punctuation, occasional alteration of details in printers’ ornaments, and sometimes even outright forgeries—should find the liabilities well worth braving.     

Emerging Issues in Academic Library Cataloging & Technical Services

This article responds to Jonathan Tuttle's article “The Aphasia of Modern Subject Access” in which Roman Jakobson's semiology of “shared codes” consisting of preexisting signs is offered as the explanation for two redundant linguistic tools associated with cataloging: LCSH and LCC. The article criticizes Tuttle's terminology, his semiology, and his argument that selection and combination are both necessary for the operation of language but each are associated with only one of these tools.

“The Aphasia of Modern Subject Access” by Jonathan Tuttle appears in Cataloging &; Classification Quarterly, Vol. 50, Issue 4, 2012, pp. 263—275. doi: 10.1080/01639374.2011.641199. Jonathan Tuttle's “Jakobsonian Library Science? A Response to David Bade” appears in Cataloging &; Classification Quarterly, Vol. 51, Issue 4, 2013, pp. 439—440. doi: 10.1080/01639374.2013.763321.     

Jumping the Shark

What is the effect on media coverage of politics when political actors conform to market aspects of media logic by “jumping the shark”—staging dramatic political events to fit the demands of the media—thus reflecting what Strömbäck characterizes as the fourth phase of mediatization? Our paper answers this question with a large-scale, longitudinal analysis of how The Globe and Mail, Canada's leading national newspaper, covered 13 Canadian party leadership contests held between 1975 and 2012. We analyzed changes in the amount and style of reporting over the course of this 37-year time period, finding that the Globe has provided less coverage of party leadership competitions overall. The diminishing number of stories printed on the subject increasingly feature opinion writing, photos, combative language and the elevation of the individual candidate over the party organization. Our findings support a key element of the mediatization thesis: the shift from political logic to media logic as an organizing principle for political communications.     

John Morley and the Irish question: Chart‐prayer‐dream

Attempts to circumscribe “the Burkean method” of rhetorical criticism can be frustrating. Critics more profitably might use Burke as an example and a prod, appropriating—as was done in this study—whichever of Burke's concepts, methods, and metaphors seem applicable to a given rhetorical event. Burke's “chart‐prayer‐dream” trilogy, together with his understanding of “strategies,” was employed to examine Morley's “Home Rule” speech before the Oxford Union in 1888. Morley's reply to Randolph Churchill abandoned propositional argument in favor of reviv‐alistic‐exhortation early in the speech; his strategies of form, argument, labelling, style, and mimesis are best understood as those of the High Priest seeking a confessional and an act of expiation from his auditors.     

In it for the Long Run?

While previous research has focused on the uses of a variety of online services—such as Web pages and, more recently, Twitter—by media organizations and their audiences, a rather limited amount of empirical inquiry has been directed towards the often more and broadly used Facebook platform. The current paper contributes to the research field by providing a longitudinal study of journalist and audience engagement on the Facebook pages of Sweden's four major newspapers—Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Svenska Dagbladet. Employing state-of-the-art methods for data collection, the results indicate that while audiences appear to be increasing their engagement with news organizations on Facebook—albeit mostly through so-called “likes”—the media organizations themselves are decreasing their engagement with audiences.     

The Millennials: How and Why They Are Using Public Libraries. Reporting from Kyrgyzstan,the United States and Italy

Abstract

The Millennial Generation, sometimes referred to as Gen X—those young men and women born between 1981 and 1996—are the first generation of “digital natives.” This column reports on how their use of technology has changed public library services in Kyrgyzstan, the United States and Italy.     

Programmer's choice: Eight factors in program decision‐making

In the introduction to Charles Woodliff's “Catch Me if You Can” in the Fall, 1965 issue of the Journal it was, prophesied that it would be not “the last that will be published on the question of the proper curriculum for training professional broadcasters.” In this issue, on the preceding pages, is an article by Professor John Pennybacker answering Professor Woodliff's article disagreeing with the one that started it all, Pennybacker's “Working with Universities.” The following comment by Woodliff is intended only as a brief comment upon Pennybacker's “Leadership and the Educator: The Middle Way” and does not, of course, attempt to make full reply in this brief form. Professor Woodliff (Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio‐Television‐Film at the University of Denver) hopes that the dialogue between him and Dr. Pennybacker represents their respective points of view fairly—and that other positions will be heard from in the future. The airing of these points of view is not just another rehash of the old “liberal arts vs. professionalism” debate. Recent surveys have shown that broadcasting education has not yet made its mark on the industry—if it is to do so in the future, teachers of broadcasting must constantly reassess their goals and the means to achieve these goals.     

The Active Citizen's Information Media Repertoire: An Exploration of Community News Habits During the Digital Age

Digital technologies have reconfigured how active community members know about local news. Sampling one Midwest community's most engaged citizens—collectively, a “community of practice”—this research formalizes one emerging media-information repertoire around the issue of homelessness. Components of this repertoire include motivations, structuring conditions, norms of usage, and perceived consequences for media-source selection. Commenting, sharing, and other information exchange become “acts of news” for individuals involved in communities of practice. Through shared information-exchange practices, citizens can not only advocate their social causes but also reinvigorate their own affiliations to the community of practice and to the city itself. The use of this media repertoire by these individuals reconstitutes and amplifies their role in the pursuit of fostering a civil society focused on homelessness. The findings illuminate the process of how community activists work as an informal organizational form and, as a result, build a stronger commitment to civic action.     

Jakobsonian Library Science? A Response to David Bade

This article comments on “Jakobsonian Library Science? A Response to Jonathan Tuttle's Article 'The Aphasia of Modern Subject Access'” by David Bade, appearing in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Vol. 51, Issue 4, 2013, pp. 428—438. doi: 10.1080/01639374.2012.750637. Jonathan Tuttle's “The Aphasia of Modern Subject Access” appears in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Vol. 50, Issue 4, 2012, pp. 263—275. doi: 10.1080/01639374.2011.641199.     

Lincolns in Latex: Exploring Lincoln's Legacy at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum

This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness,” of horror vacui.—Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality