AAPOR's Other Publications

We all know the American Association for Public Opinion's flagship journal, Public Opinion Quarterly, since 1937, available full text from OUP.  But you may not know about two other publications from AAPOR. Survey Practice, an e-journal with public opinion and survey research articles and commentary by and for practitioners. This bi-monthly blog of sorts is available on the AAPOR site going back to 2008.



Also on the site is the 7th edition of Standard Definitions, Final Dispositions of Case Codes and Outcome Rates for Surveys: RDD Telephone Surveys, In-Person Household Surveys, Mail Surveys of Specifically Named Persons, Internet Surveys of Specifically Named Persons (2011). 

Pew's News Media 2012 Annual Report

Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Media 2012 for lots of interesting findings and data.

From the press release:

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
More than a quarter of Americans (27%) now get news on mobile devices, and for the vast majority, this is increasing news consumption, the report finds. More than 80% of smartphone and tablet news consumers still get news on laptop or desktop computers. On mobile devices, news consumers also are more likely to go directly to a news site or use an app, rather than to rely on search — strengthening the bond with traditional news brands.

The full report is freely available here.

March CommQuote

From The New Yorker's March 5 "On Television" column, Net Gain:How “The Good Wife” became the first great series about technolog, by Emily Nussbaum.

What has received less notice than the show’s complexity and its bold female characters is its unprecedented emphasis on technology. This season alone, Lockhart Gardner took a case involving the online currency bitcoin; used Twitter to upend British libel laws; handled a military case involving drone warfare; litigated crimes featuring violent video games and a “date rape” app; and dealt with various leaked-image disasters (a corporation fighting a viral video, an Anthony Weiner-like dirty photograph). In one dizzyingly self-reflective story line, a Zuckerbergian entrepreneur sued a Sorkinesque screenwriter; the episode had a confident structural wit, subjecting a writer who defended distorted portrayals to his own distorted portrayal. Over time, such plots have become a dense, provocative dialectic, one that weighs technology’s freedoms against its dangers, with a global sweep and an insider’s nuance. In this quality, “The Good Wife” stands in contrast not merely to other legal shows, with their “The Internet killed him!” plots, but also to the reductive punditry of the mainstream media, so obsessed with whether Twitter is making us stupid. Put bluntly, “The Good Wife” is to the digital debate as “The Wire” is to the drug war.

The series is often at its best when it uses technology as a lens to examine the Florricks’ marriage. Like the Clintons, the Florricks train their teen-agers to be discreet. In one of the season’s most affecting sequences, Alicia tells her children that she is leaving their father—but that they must tell no one. “But Mom, that’s lying, that’s hypocritical,” her daughter, Grace, blurts out. Alicia argues that it’s O.K. to deceive people who want to hurt you—what’s important is that they are honest with each other. “You need to protect us more,” Grace responds, and Alicia bursts into tears. While their mother clings to an older ethic, her children can see that no bright line exists between their private and public lives. This season, Grace is drawn both to a YouTube preacher and to a cheerfully self-exposing video artist (played by an actual YouTube dancer, Anne Marsen); she’s fascinated to meet a girl who feels free to make art so spontaneously, without fear of judgment. Meanwhile, her brother stalks a schoolmate’s Facebook page, collecting oppo research that gets his father elected, a dirty trick that his mother never discovers.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2012/0305/120305crte_television_nussbaum#ixzz1ps9Yzrj9

Special issue of Spectra on Academic Publishing

Spectra, a publication of the National Communication Association, is devoted to the issue of academic publishing in its March 2012 issue. There's a lot to read these days about academic publishing and open access but this is a good way to focus on the topic through the filter of our field.

Spectra: The Future of Academic Publishing includes the following articles which address what Rachel Hartigan Shea, NCA Director of Publications, characterizes as the "turbulent" state of publishing in academia today.

Tenure and Promotion in the 21st Century Academy: A Chancellor's Perspective, by Pam Shockley-Zalabak

The Changing Landscape for academic Book Publishing by Todd R. Armstrong

Journal Impact Factors: Uses and Misuses, by Michael J. Beatty and Thomas Hugh Feeley

Exploring the Landscape of Digital Publishing, by Katherine Burton

Spectra is available in the Annenberg Library; oddly, no online access even for members on the NCA site. 

Citing tweets

It was only a matter of time until Twitter feeds found their way into academic writing which like other new media artifacts that came before it (emails, websites, etc.) begs the question, how to cite, how to cite?  Amit Agarwal in his excellent blog, Digital Inspiration, has a nice little post on how to do just that, The Proper Way to Cite Tweets in your Paper.


You might want to consider adding Digital Inspiration to your blog feed. It's an award winning technology blog whose goal is to "help you take maximum advantage of the software tools and web technologies at your disposal so that you spend more time doing things your really love."

I like getting the weekly Newsletter in my email. 

Steve Jobs/Apple and IBM Bibliographies

No one produces better annotated bibliographies for our field than Christopher Sterling.  The latest Communication Booknotes Quarterly, which he edits, features two bibliographies, the lead CBQ Review Essays, Steve Jobs and Apple Computers, and IBM's First Century. While the recent Walter Isaacson biography will surely be the definitive one for a while, Sterling rounds up many other titles on Steve Jobs, Apple Computers, and other players at Apple.  An even longer annotated list of books on IBM follows--a 14-page bibliography divided into History, Critiques and Surveys, Business Management, Biography, and Products: Hardware and Software.