Bouncing off the Paywall – Understanding Misalignments Between Local Newspaper Value Propositions and Audience Responses

ABSTRACT

Declining advertising revenue and print copy sales have propelled extensive paywall experiments in local newspapers to generate new revenue and fund local journalism. The success of these experiments is ultimately depending on whether or not they deliver the value that customers require. This article studies local newspapers’ potential to build successful paywalls by conducting a two-sided analysis of paywall value propositions and local news audiences’ responses to these value propositions. Drawing on mixed methods – in-depth interviews with 20 newspaper managers and a national survey (N = 1586) among local newspaper audiences – our study identifies a major gap between intended value of paywalls and customer value perception and behavior. These are misalignments between the intended attractiveness of paywalled content and audience attitude toward this content, and misalignments between access to paywalled content and use. Local newspapers’ offerings are particularly misaligned with younger, lower income and lower news interest customers. When these groups hit a paywall, they most likely bounce off.     

Self‐perception of gifts and talents among adults in a longitudinal study of academically talented high‐school graduates

Definitions of giftedness and self‐perceptions of abilities were examined among adults who have been participating in a longitudinal study of academically talented students since their high‐school graduation in 1988. For the present study, participants answered open‐ended questions and completed scales measuring adult giftedness and adult self‐perceptions of abilities in 12 different domains. Gender differences in perceptions were examined. When participants were asked if they believed they were gifted in high school and now, more men than women responded affirmatively to both questions. Further, significant gender differences were identified for perceived competencies in four areas: job competence, nurturance, athletic competence, and morality. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.     

Promoting intergenerational learning in higher education: older adult perspectives on course auditing

ABSTRACT

As the population ages, colleges and universities have opportunities to promote intergenerational learning by inviting lifelong learners to engage with students in the classroom. This article outlines an initiative to enroll older adults as auditors and to describe their experiences. Thirty of 40 older adult auditors completed a hard-copy survey administered in 2017 (75% response rate). Results indicate that auditors were motivated to enroll in a college course due to the self-satisfaction of learning, subject of the course, and time of course offering. Over half described completing course assignments and a majority accessed content on Blackboard at least once per week. Older adults reported engaging with students in and out of the classroom and described the benefits of intergenerational engagement as learning about younger adults’ perspectives and the reciprocity of learning and mutual respect between generations. Suggestions for improvement relate to offering more courses for auditing and greater assistance with course technology. Implications for promoting this type of lifelong learning initiative are discussed.     

Training maltreating parents in elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing with their preschool-aged children

Objective

In the current study, the effects of training maltreating parents and their preschool-aged children in elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing were examined.

Method

44 Parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to a training (reminiscing) or wait-list (control) condition. All participating parents had substantiated maltreatment and were involved with the Department of Child Services at the time of enrollment. Children were 3–6 years old (M = 4.88, SD = .99) and living in the custody of the participating parent. Dyads in the reminiscing condition received four, weekly, in-home sessions in elaborative and emotion rich reminiscing.

Results

At a follow-up assessment, maltreating parents in the reminiscing condition provided more high-elaborative utterances, references to children's negative emotions, and explanations of children's emotion during reminiscing than did parents in the control condition. Children in the reminiscing condition had richer memory recall and made more emotion references than did children in the control condition during reminiscing with their mothers, but not with an experimenter.

Conclusion

The findings suggest that maltreating parents can be taught elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing skills, with benefits for child cognitive and emotional development. The potential clinical utility of a reminiscing-based training for maltreating families with young children is discussed.     

Toward a general model of instructional communication

A general model of instructional communication is advanced and the linkages of four components in the model are tested. Data were drawn from college teachers and college students through a split‐class design which permitted collection of unique data from teachers and two sets of their students. Using by‐class analyses of data it was determined that teacher self‐reported temperament is significantly correlated with students' perceptions of the teachers' communication behaviors and the students' evaluation of teachers' source credibility and task attractiveness. All of these measures were also found to predict learning outcomes and teacher evaluations of another group of students. The results support the general model and provide a foundation for future research in instructional communication.     

The West Wing and Depictions of the American Presidency: Expanding the Domains of Framing in Political Communication

This study uses framing to assess how the office of the President of the United States is depicted on NBC's The West Wing. This work represents a theoretical and empirical domain extension of framing in political communication, an area of study dominated by analyses of news content. Three distinct presidential depictions are analyzed: chief executive, political candidate, and private citizen. This quantitative content analysis of the 2001–2002 The West Wing television season addresses the frequency with which the fictional president performs these three roles and posits several hypotheses concerning the relative presentation of personality characteristics across contexts. All three roles are represented with substantive frequency, with the chief executive role dominating. Principled character traits are evident more often when the fictional President Bartlet is acting as chief executive than as a private citizen. Conversely, Bartlet presents more engaging personality traits when acting as a private citizen than as either chief executive or political candidate. Implications for these finding are outlined and future lines of research are detailed.     

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Recent findings (Keysar, 1994 Keysar, B. 1994. The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text.. Cognitive Psychology, 26: 165–208. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Weingartner & Klin, 2005 Weingartner, K. M. and Klin, C. M. 2005. Perspective taking during reading: An on-line investigation of the illusory transparency of intention.. Memory & Cognition, 33: 48–58. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) have shown that readers are not always accurate at taking a story character's perspective. When readers evaluated a character's understanding of a written message, they mistakenly took into account information that was inaccessible to that character. The results from the three experiments reported here demonstrate that this “illusory transparency of intention” is not dependent on the message readers' communicative role: Even when the message was composed for one character but read by another, readers assumed that the message was understood as it was intended. The results are discussed in the context of two theoretical accounts for these perspective-taking errors: the “knowledge projection hypothesis,” which appeals to readers’ expectations about cooperative behavior during communication, and “construal,” which attributes the illusory transparency of intention to a general cognitive bias that occurs during the perception of ambiguous stimuli.     

How medical know-how progresses

The conventional wisdom regarding the source of progress in medical practice highlights the role of basic scientific research into the nature of disease pathologies. This perspective neglects the important role of two other sources of progress in medicine. One is the advance of technologies that have enabled the development of new modalities of treatment and diagnosis. The other is learning in clinical practice. In many cases the advance of treatment has involved the interaction of all three of these pathways to progress.     

On-chip collection of particles and cells by AC electroosmotic pumping and dielectrophoresis using asymmetric microelectrodes

The recent development of microfluidic "lab on a chip" devices requiring sample sizes <100 μL has given rise to the need to concentrate dilute samples and trap analytes, especially for surface-based detection techniques. We demonstrate a particle collection device capable of concentrating micron-sized particles in a predetermined area by combining AC electroosmosis (ACEO) and dielectrophoresis (DEP). The planar asymmetric electrode pattern uses ACEO pumping to induce equal, quadrilateral flow directed towards a stagnant region in the center of the device. A number of system parameters affecting particle collection efficiency were investigated including electrode and gap width, chamber height, applied potential and frequency, and number of repeating electrode pairs and electrode geometry. The robustness of the on-chip collection design was evaluated against varying electrolyte concentrations, particle types, and particle sizes. These devices are amenable to integration with a variety of detection techniques such as optical evanescent waveguide sensing.     

Thinking Thru Making: Mapping Computational Thinking Practices onto Scientific Reasoning

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This paper shares findings from a teacher designed physics and computing unit that engaged students in learning physics and computing concurrently thru...