Why Pod? Further Explorations of the Motivations for Independent Podcasting

This article presents the results of a follow-up study examining the motivations of independent podcasters. Results from a web-based survey found that podcasting continues to be dominated by educated, professional males over 30, most of whom are not podcasting full-time. Podcasters are highly engaged with their audiences and continue to seek new business models to support potential full-time podcasting. Motivations for podcasting are consistent with the theory of produsage, which stresses the importance of community, feedback, and continual improvement. Podcasters take their activities seriously and see podcasting as an alternative to traditional radio.     

Being in the archive: affect and scholarly distance

Working in the archives of living writers provides exciting possibilities for extended interpersonal research as well as ethical challenges. This article explores the author’s experience of working in Helen Garner’s restricted archives and negotiating the demands of scholarly objectivity with an increasingly felt empathic engagement. The author traces a chronological path through the archives relating to Garner’s three substantial works of non-fiction: The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). She draws attention to some of the ways in which distance and objectivity can be influenced not only by contact with a living writer but also by the space in which the archive is encountered. With a deliberate focus on the lived experience of researching, rather than a scholarly examination of archival theory, the author offers a case study of how the interaction of archives and living subject can shape research and publication.     

Generating and Framing Content: Strategic Multi-Platform Content Marketing in Academic Libraries

This column is adapted from a presentation given at the 2018 Library Marketing and Communications Conference. In it, we describe our marketing team’s approach to developing sustainable marketing practices with our library’s strategic goals in mind. In an effort to create reusable, platform-flexible content, we developed social media posts that highlighted concepts from the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. Our success on social media inspired us to consider how this content could be implemented on additional platforms. With this column, we invite you to engage with new ways of developing content for use on multiple marketing platforms.     

Sacrifice,Consumption, and the American Way of Life: Advertising and Domestic Propaganda during World War II

This paper explores the themes of sacrifice and consumption in World War II advertising, including content analyses of advertisements and editorials in the Saturday Evening Post as well as a textual analysis of articles in the advertising trade publications Printer’s Ink and Industrial Marketing in 1942 and 1943. Results are discussed in terms of Cohen’s (2003) concepts of “citizen consumer,” “purchaser consumer,” and the ultimate American postwar dual-identity: “purchaser as citizen.”     

‘A Fine Healthy Place’

This paper presents a close reading of Australian local newspapers The Queenslander, The Week, and The Logan Witness. It argues that by representing triumph over local challenges these newspapers also constituted a late-nineteenth-century civilizing process. They played a vital role in generating community cohesion. Stability and civilization were represented to the target audience of families and entrepreneurs as ‘natural’ and appropriately embodied by colonizers. Embedding a sense of belonging established a ‘civilising (sic) goodness’ through disavowal of the displacement of indigenous peoples as familiar community practices were enacted. In this highly literate population newspapers, rather than books, provided local Australian content. A case study of the Lahey family, who arrived as South East Queensland became available for serious settlement in the early 1870s, personalizes the settlement ideology produced by local newspapers.     

The BBC,Group Listening,and ‘The Changing World’

This article examines the content and impact of a series of BBC lecture courses broadcast in the early 1930s. The Group Listening Scheme was established in 1928: experts working in a variety of fields were invited to broadcasts a series of evening lectures. Adults across the country were encouraged to gather for the lectures and stay on afterwards to discuss them. ‘The Changing World’ consisted of half-hour talks over six evenings a week during a six-month period. The broadcasts amounted to a two-term syllabus, with 24 talks devoted to each of the six themes (the modern dilemma, industry and trade, literature and art, science, the modern state, and education and leisure). This article will sample some of these broadcasts and explore the listener response to the series in order to reach an understanding of the BBC’s achievements in adult education during the interwar period.     

Trades,techniques—and a fable

A generation of broadcasters has grown up without a firsthand knowledge of the now‐out‐of‐print FCC “Blue Book.” Mr. Meyer's personal overview of the content and effects of this document will be followed by a future article on “Reaction to the ’Blue Book’.” It is accepted that any one individual's summary of a controversial document will itself be controversial. Richard J. Meyer is Assistant Professor and Director of Educational TV at the University of Wichita, and wrote the MA thesis on which this article is based under the direction of Professor Stanley Donner at Stanford University. He also has worked in broadcasting at stations KZSU, KSAN‐TV and KQED (TV).     

The Impact of Pretrial Publicity on “Eye for an Eye” Retributivist Support and Malicious Perceptions of Criminal Offenders

This study explores the associative influence of pretrial publicity on (a) an individual’s perceptions of a criminal offender as malicious and (b) an individual’s judgment of the criminal offender’s punishment for the crime. Expanding on the uses of agenda-setting and framing theories, this research indicates that attention to pretrial news media about a specific criminal is significantly associated with negative judgments of a criminal offender. The criminal offender in the Colorado theater shooting case, James Holmes, was the criminal offender used in this study. Results from a national survey (N = 236) indicated that pretrial publicity significantly influenced participants’ perceptions of James Holmes as malicious and resulted in increased retributivist support (i.e., views of the offender deserving a harsher punishment). Mediation scenarios were also detected, whereas pretrial publicity exposure mediated the relationship between case interest and judgments of James Holmes as malicious and deserving retributivist punishment.     

Podcasting at the University of Virginia Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library co-sponsors a History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series in the fall and spring of each year. Each lecture is produced and recorded for the benefit of the University of Virginia Heath System and members of the surrounding community. In the fall of 2005, the Library decided to begin podcasting the lectures via the Internet. This article describes the investigation process for creating access to the content via podcast, Webcast, and direct download. The article also addresses how the Library is teaching podcasting in its annual Multimedia Bootcamp and exploring additional uses for podcasting. doi:10.1300/J115v26n01_02.     

Witnessing and the Failure of Communication

This article examines the Romani Holocaust experiences by mapping out the silences that haunt this question. As a case study, the article uses the testimonial documentary Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust and argues that the Romani Holocaust question is entangled in a moral discourse described in Lyotard’s Le Differend. Bearing witness to the differend can give new insights into the understanding of the Holocaust, the conceptualization of Romani identity, and the framing of media witnessing. The article concludes with a discussion of the face and its relation to witnessing arguing that the affective feel of the differend that interpellates one as a witness is delivered through the face.     

Sensemaking and crisis revisited: the failure of sensemaking during the Flint water crisis

ABSTRACT

This study operationalized Weick’s [(1988). Enacted sensemaking in crisis situations. Journal of Management Studies 25(4), 305–317 and (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652] theory of enacted sensemaking to examine the communication processes associated with the Flint Water Crisis of 2014–2015. A content analysis of 389 emails and attachments from a total population of N?=?37,376 pages of publicly released e-mails and documents pertaining to Flint’s water issues, identified examples of failed sensemaking by government officials. These failures hastened and intensified a growing crisis of lead contamination and an outbreak of Legionnaires disease associated with Flint’s municipal water system. Analysis of email messages suggests that strong commitments by top leaders and limited capacity were important factors as were efforts to create and maintain consensus among officials. The Flint Water Crisis offers an important application of sensemaking theory and its utility for both organizational and risk communication scholars and for practical application. The authors emphasize the importance of questioning previous assumptions and commitments, insuring that communication practitioners are involved in decisions, and avoiding over reliance on image repair as a strategic response.     

How did Americans Really Think About the Apple/FBI Dispute? A Mixed-method Study

ABSTRACT

Second-level agenda-setting suggests that news media influence how we think. As a case study examining the nature and effects of mainstream news media’s coverage of the 2015 Apple/FBI dispute about data privacy versus national security, this study found via content analysis that a majority of articles covering the dispute (73.7%) made the same potentially misleading claim about how the American public feels about the dispute. Nearly half (45.6%) of those articles made public opinion claims without offering empirical evidence, and almost all articles (97.4%) that cited the Pew survey appeared to have inadvertently created an unsubstantiated social reality. Then, this study found in a subsequent experiment that, consistent with impersonal influence, the above-mentioned news portrayals significantly affected the participants’ view on Americans’ collective opinion towards the Apple/FBI dispute. The long-term effect of this journalistic oversight is notable. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations for future science communication in the news are discussed.     

Full discovery: What is the publisher's role?

Key points

• Our collective authorship and publishing practices do not always end up ensuring that scholarly content is discoverable by readers.
• Readers of all kinds rely on a variety of ‘discovery pathways’, such as search engines, library systems, and various electronic links, some of which are blind to the content they desire.
• Efforts over the years to improve content discoverability have made great progress, but an increasing amount of freely available content brings up new issues.
• The National Information Standards Organization (NISO)’s Discovery to Delivery (D2D) Topic Committee has developed a grid comparing various ways in which content is shared with various ways in which users discover such content.
• This article brings to light a few of the current obstacles and opportunities for innovation by publishers, aggregators, search engines, and library systems, and invites Learned Publishing readers to step up and identify others.

     

The zine anthology as archive: archival genres and practices

Jessie Lymn is a PhD Candidate at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and a casual academic in the Information Studies programs at both UTS and Charles Sturt University. Her doctoral research focuses on the archival practices of subcultural communities and how this furthers temporal and spatial understandings of archives.

Building on Eichhorn’s concept of ‘archival genres’, this article considers the recent spate of zine anthologies published in Australia and the United States as examples of these genres. It proposes that the anthologies are archives of content, form and practice, given that they commonly reproduce entire zines as visual material, not just text, and are produced by members of zine communities. This article argues that the anthologies’ narratives, presentation and distribution preserve ideologies of zine culture and that archival genres create spaces for the preservation of practices.     

Latina Magazine and the Invocation of a Panethnic Family: Latino Identity as It Is Informed by Celebrities and Papis Chulos

Latina magazine is a bilingual women’s magazine that was launched in 1996 for a target audience of bicultural college-educated Latinas between the ages of 18 and 45. In an attempt to reach such a wide range of Latinas, the magazine makes an appeal to familial forms of identification, often presenting discourses of familial allegiances alongside calls for panethnic solidarity. This article presents a case study of the construction of Latinidad through a textual analysis of Latina articles on entertainment and romance and through interviews with the magazine’s editorial staff. Latina oscillates between celebrating the inclusion of Latina/os in the U.S. entertainment industry and speaking out against the criminalization of Latino men and the hypersexualization of Latina/os. This study situates the creation of Latino media in relation to theories of panethnic identification and research on the ideological function of popular culture and the marketing of ethnicity.     

Hacking the Collection: Changing the Collection in Response to a Migration

Abstract

In 2016, the Munday Library at St. Edward’s University migrated to a new discovery layer. The Library had been an EBSCO Discovery Services (EDS) customer for six years, and the migration to Ex Libris’s Alma-Primo negatively impacted content discovery and collection usage due to issues with EBSCO’s proprietary metadata and Primo’s OpenURL link resolver. This article discusses switching the library’s collection using collection data analysis to respond to the change in discovery layer. The data-informed changes made to the collection improved collection usability and access.     

The Role of Language in a Journalistic Interpretive Community

Drawing on anniversary-edition articles and interviews with journalists at Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s largest English-language news outlet, we argue that language of publication directly informs the narratives a journalistic interpretive community [Zelizer, Barbie. 1993. “Journalists as Interpretive Communities.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10: 219–237] develops to position itself as a news authority. Analysis showed that associations with English as a foreign language in Indonesia influenced stories of the newspaper’s professional values and practice, and the ways it conceptualized readership. The study contributes to the growing body of literature that examines intersections of journalism and language—in this case, English as a language of publication in a global context.     

New media–new voices: satirical representations of Nigeria’s socio-politics in Ogas at the top

New media are increasingly providing spaces and opportunities for media houses and activist groups engaged in socio-political reform in Africa. In Nigeria, social media are becoming platforms for communicating messages of resistance against oppressive political and exploitative economic power structures. This study analyzed Ogas at the top (OATT), an online puppetry series by Buni TV, as a way of examining new platforms and message content in Nigeria’s rapidly changing media sphere. Relying on semiotics and critical discourse analysis perspectives, the study analyzed select episodes of the series, to gauge how producers constructed powerful visual and linguistic messages to boldly satirize social injustices perpetrated by Nigeria’s political elites.