Journal of Sports Media

The Journal of Sports Media provides a broad-based exploration of sports media in terms of their practices, value, and effect on the culture as a whole. The journal features scholarly articles, essays, book reviews, and reports on major conferences and seminars. While the majority of the articles are academic in nature, it also includes articles from industry leaders and sports media figures on topics appealing to a non-academic audience.

The most recent issues features articles on interactive media and sports journalists, NFL agenda-setting in relation to programming, the birth of national sports coverage at the New York Herald with its use of the telegraph to report America’s first “championship” boxing match in 1849, and an essay on developing a sports media mafor.

The journal is available online fat the Annenberg Libary webpage.

Selected titles from Qualitative Research Methods Series

Now available at the Annenberg Reserve desk: 12 titles from the Sage Qualitative Research Methods Series. They are:

Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research

Semiotics and Fieldwork

Systematic Data Collection

The Long Interview

Ethnostatistics: Qualitative Foundations for Quantitative Research

Analyzing Visual Data

Narrative Analysis

Strategies for Interpreting Qualitative Data

Ethnomethodology

The Active Interview

The Ethnographer's Method

Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction

I selected these titles out of the 50 available with the help of some Annenberg student qualitative "elves." I'm open to further suggestions of must-haves. Also, these little blue books (Sage's Quantitative Series, QASS, are the little green ones) are on Reserve but you can easily negotiate for a longer borrowing period. Just ask.

Introducing The Journal of E-Media Studies

The Journal of E-Media Studies is a new on-line, open access journal that has recently launched their first issue. Focusing on the history and theory of electronic media, especially television and new media, its editorial board includes a rich assortment of scholars--Toby Miller, Lynn Spigel, Robert McChesney, and Anna McCarthy, to name a few. Its inaugural issue features the following essays: Toward A Visceral Scholarship Online: Folkvine.org and Hypermedia Ethnography by Craig Saper; E-poetry: Between Image and Performance -- A Cultural Analysis, by Jan Baetens and Jan Van Looy; Que'est-ce qu'une madeleine interactive? Chris Marker's Immemory and the Possibility of a Digital Archive by Erika Balsom; Horace Newcomb in Conversation with Tara McPherson by Tara McPherson; A (Very) Personal History of the First Sponsored Film Series on National Television by Stanley Rubin, in addition to review pieces.

The Scarbourough Newspaper Audience Ratings Report 2008

Earlier this year, Scarborough Research, a leading authority on newspaper audience ratings, issued their annual Scarborough Newspaper Audience Ratings Report for 2008 which highlights newspaper ratings for 161 papers in 81 local markets across the United States. The report provides single-source print, website, and Integrated Newspaper Audience (the combined print and online weekly audiences) ratings for newspapers in local markets (DMAs) measured by Scarborough. It is a useful guide for agencies, advertisers, and others in the media business who plan, buy and sell local advertising.

September CommQuote

The recent death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn brings to mind not only his famous novels but also his famous and controversial address to the graduating class at Harvard on June 8, 1978. Titled A WORLD SPLIT APART, it was a surprising, at times bitter indictment of the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of the West. Our quote is the section of the Address titled The Direction of the Press and A Fashion in Thinking.

The Direction of the Press
The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

A Fashion in Thinking
Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.

--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard University