Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds

Here's just one finding from the Kaiser Family Foundation's sweeping report on the media use of youth as quoted from the Press Release:

Big changes in TV. For the first time over the course of the study, the amount of time spent watching regularly-scheduled TV declined, by 25 minutes a day (from 2004 to 2009). But the many new ways to watch TV–on the Internet, cell phones, and iPods–actually led to an increase in total TV consumption from 3:51 to 4:29 per day, including :24 of online viewing, :16 on iPods and other MP3 players, and :15 on cell phones. All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, DVDs, online, or mobile.

Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people's media use. It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth.

The report was released on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at a forum in Washington, D.C. The report itself, as well as a webcast of the event surrounding it's release and a documentary on children's media use can be found here.

Introducing The Communication Initiative Network

The Communication Initiative Network (The CI) is an portal for the exchange of information between "the people and organizations engaged in or supporting communication as a fundamental strategy for economic and social development and change...This process is supported by web-based resources of summarized information and several electronic publications, as well as online research, review, and discussion platforms providing insight into communication for development experiences.

Currently, The CI Network process includes: The Communication Initiative: Global - in English, with a worldwide overview and focus; La Iniciativa de Comunicacion: Latin America - in Spanish, with a worldwide overview and focus on the Latin American experience and context; and, Soul Beat Africa - in English, with a focus on the African experience and context."

The site also includes a Policy Blogs section and Development Networks for such topics as Journalism in Crisis, Haiti, Communication and Climate Change, Polio Communication Consultation Group, and HIV/AIDS Strategy.

The Drum Beat, a weekly electronic magazine features new summarized information from the site.

The ASC community should be proud to know that The Annenberg School has become an associative member of "The CI." Here's hoping more academic institutions join us. Anyone interested in global communication, development communication or health communication beyond our shores should find something useful at this site.

Out of the Question: Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry

Out of the Question: Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry is a new 38-minute documentary by award-winning filmmaker Naomi McCormack. It charts the careers of five women and their experiences as researchers and audience members for the new media of their era. The film provides a compelling window into gendered cultures of work, media, and the social sciences in 1940s America and raises questions of ongoing significance about them.

The film is also supported by a website (still a little under construction) that includes teaching resources as well as new research on pioneering women in communication and media studies.

How News Happens Study from Pew

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a study on the "news ecosystem" of one city, Baltimore, Maryland. The report, How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City, looks at all of the outlets that produced local news in the city for one week. One of the more startling findings in the report is that that eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information. These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets. And while the news landscape is larger and more various than ever, 95% of what the public learns comes from traditional media, particularly newspapers.

The report is full of tables and charts that illuminate findings about the ten specific stories studied, namely the breakdown of news topics across media sectors, the amount of original information by media sectors, and news coverage triggers (government, press, citizen, college/university, spontaneous).

The full report is available at PEJ.

TALKERS Magazine

The ASC Library has just opened a subscription to TALKERS Magazine, a broadcasting industry trade publication which bills itself "the Bible of Talk Radio and the New Talk Media."

Launched during the summer of 1990 by Michael Harrison, a radio broadcasting innovator and trade journalist, "TALKERS Magazine features news stories about the non-stop happenings in talk radio and the new talk media including articles about top hosts and stations, developments at the networks, interviews with movers and shakers, the opinions of industry participants and leaders, and fast-breaking developments in technology. The publication also conducts ongoing research of the topics and opinions discussed and expressed on hundreds of talk stations and programs across America and compiles them into surveys and graphs which have become the standard of the industry."

Excepts from current stories in each monthly print edition of the magazine can be accessed at available at the Talkers website. Current issues are available at the ASC Library. In addition to our subscription start-up, I purchased back issues from 2004-2009 so we have a little bit of a research cushion for this title.

January CommQuote

I think a New Year's resolution for our monthly quote will be to call upon more poetry. Here's an excerpt from a poem by Raul Hernandez Novas featured in THE WHOLE ISLAND: SIX DECADES OF CUBAN POETRY (University of California Press, 2009). The poem is called Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

...Maybe we play in the same park
a mute telephone between us
and electric cord coiled vibrating
working in the white curve of distance
the path at whose end a sad snow falls
the flight of a silent bird
a migratory bird's promise
seen with the soil of Wisconsin my bone gone to pot
a telegram carried by birds and between us
nothing but a shining window
that I pass through without breaking the glass.

--Raul Hernandez Novas, trans. by Mark Weiss

Chicago Tribune 1849-1986, and Other Newspaper News

The Chicago Tribune is the latest historical newspaper option to be added to the Penn Library website. This Proquest database will contain full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue on June 10, 1849 through 1986. Newsbank, also available on the Penn Library website, picks up recent years of the title, 1/1/1985 to the present.

Another newspaper option for those tilted toward more visual content analysis: you now have access to full-image page by page content for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, 2008-current. Historical access to full image content of these titles is also available in Proquest (in the same suite as The Chicago Tribune) but this fills the gap between "historical" image access and Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, or Newsbank article coverage for recent years that does not provide newspaper facsimiles.