Report on User-Generated Content (UGC) in TV and Online News

Another interesting report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism: AMATEUR FOOTAGE: A GLOBAL STUDY OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN TV AND ONLINE-NEWS OUTPUT is by Claire Wardle, Sam Dubberley, and Pete Brown. 

This Phase 1 Report (April 2014) represents research that has been split into quantitative and qualitative phases with this report focusing largely on the former.  I couldn't find a timetable for when we might expect Phase II, which will focus on interviews with over 60 journalists and editors, but I'll keep an eye out for it.

Conclusions from the Executive Summary:

1) UGC is used by news organizations daily, but only when other content is not available to tell the story.

2) News organizations are poor and inconsistent in labeling content as UGC and crediting the individual who captured the content.

Our data showed more similarities than differences across television and Web output, with troubling practices across both platforms. The best use of UGC was online, mostly because the Web provides opportunities for integrating UGC into news output like live blogs and topic pages.

New E-Resource: A History of Journalism in China

New to Penn Libraries E-Resources is A History of Journalism in China, a 10-volume English language overview on the subject, the first of its kind.

This encyclopedic work from Enrich Publishing spans 200 BC to 1991 covering all aspects of journalism in China’s history-- including newspapers, periodicals, news agencies, broadcast television, photography, documentary film, and journals--all against the backdrop of the region's significant historical events. Not only Mainland China is included in this overview, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the larger Chinese diaspora.

All ten volumes were authored by Fang Hanqi, Professor Emeritus in Journalism, who is considered the “Father of China’s Modern Journalism."

  Content Highlights (from the Publisher):

• The Early Newspaper Publishing Activities of Foreigners in China
• Political Standpoints of the Chinese-Operated Newspapers
• Journalism in the era of the 1911 Revolution
• Journalism in the Early Republic Period of China
• Journalism in the May Fourth Movement
• The Founding of the Communist Party in China and Journalism during 1924–1927
• The CPC’s Journalism during the Chinese Civil War
• Kuomintang Journalism and Private Journalism during the Ten-Year Civil War
• Journalism in the Kuomintang-Controlled Areas during Anti-Japanese War
• Anti-Japanese Propaganda in Journalism in Hong Kong and Overseas
• Journalism in the Liberated Areas during the Second Chinese Civil War
• Gargantuan Changes of Journalism in China
• Journalism in the Construction of Socialism (January 1957–May 1966)
• Journalism in the Rectification Movement and the Anti-Rightist Movement

Post-Industrial News Spaces

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism has just published Moving the Newsroom: Post-Industrial News Spaces and Places. This 61-page multimedia report by Nikki Usher shows what The Miami Herald, The Des Moines Register, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and The Seattle Times have done "to turn from sadness to opportunity through a journey of physical space" and concludes that "symbols--buildings--matter."

Table of Contents

I. Introduction: Moving the Newsroom: Post-Industrial News Spaces and Places

II. Why Move Now?

III. Moving Out: From Leaving the Heart of Downtown to Resettling a Block Away

IV. Symbolic Space: It Matters

V. Reconfiguring Physical Space to Make Way for the Digital Future

VI. The System Behind the Hubs—Change for the Better

VII. Mobile Journalism: Leaving behind Physical Space

VIII. What We Can Learn From All of This

IX. Physical Spaces, Newsroom Places: Considered

Appendix: Newsroom Photo Galleries

State of the News Media 2014

It's that time of year again.  Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's STATE OF THE NEWS MEDIA 2014. The Pew Center's Journalism Project has been assessing the news media since 1997 and these annual reports, chock-full of data, researchers and students have come to rely on for insight on developing trends in the news media. If you want to compare new findings to previous years click on Datasets for data (in .zip files) from 2008 through 2013.

I've raided the Overview for these six findings you can
read more about in the whole report:

1) Thirty of the largest digital-only news organizations account for about 3,000 jobs and one area of investment is global coverage. 
2) So far, the impact of new money flowing into the industry may be more about fostering new ways of reporting and reaching audience than about building a new, sustainable revenue structure. 
3) Social and mobile developments are doing more than bringing consumers into the process – they are also changing the dynamics of the process itself.
4) New ways of storytelling bring both promise and challenge. 
5) Local television, which reaches about nine in ten U.S. adults, experienced massive change in 2013, change that stayed under the radar of most. 
6) Dramatic changes under way in the makeup of the American population will undoubtedly have an impact on news in the U.S, and in one of the fastest growing demographic groups – Hispanics – we are already seeing shifts. 
One thing that confused me about this year's offering is that there is no single pdf for it. When you go to the link the Report is broken down into separate boxes that add up to the full report. Don't be fooled by the Overview page that has a pdf called Complete Report--it's only the Overview. Go figure. 

Book Spotlight: Mimi Sheller's Aluminum Dreams

The genre of commodity histories has a great new addition in Mimi Sheller's Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014). The book is much like the material it chronicles.  While there is a density of thought to it (that is exhilarating), it is not a heavy, obfuscating read like a lot of academic writing can be. It's sleek and beautiful, too, including "a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions" (publisher's description). That's why I've decided not to bury it in my Booknotes list of a few dozen titles but give it a post of its own. 
 
Dr. Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University, visited The Annenberg School last week as a guest of PARGC. While she was there to deliver a talk on  The Ethics of Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World: Bridging Uneven Topologies of Hertzian Space in Post-Disaster Haiti she had her new book with her which I was lucky enough to get my hands on. This led to one of those on-the-spot library purchase decisions that remind you why you got into the profession.

"This book tells the story...of space machines and streamlined gadgets, mobile homes and soaring cities, and the double-edged sword of utopia and catastrophe that hastens us toward the accelerated metallic future envisioned in the twentieth century. The chapters that follow go beyond existing business histories that celebrate the age of aluminum as if it were an inevitable product of this "magic metal," but also beyond the important but one-sided environmental diatribes against heavy industry and transnational corporations, which sometimes ignore the realities of cultural dreams and efficient mobility...The chapters that follow will trace the flow of aluminum around the world, like a ribbon of metal running through the fabric of modernity from one end of the world to the other. Following this thread will allow us to knit together the First World and the Third World, capitalism and communism, the North and the Tropics, battlefields and home fronts, industry and ideas, text and images, the 'modernizing' past the the 'sustainable' future. It will also challenge us to confront some of the most basic questions about the future of life of earth, the amount of energy we can sustainably use, and what our lives would be like if we tried to live without certain modern conveniences predicated on aluminum's contribution to lightness, speed, and mobility." --Mimi Sheller "Overview of Book" from the Introduction
 
You can borrow the book from Annenberg Reserve (see me about extending your loan time).  Van Pelt will have a copy soon, too. 

April CommQuote

I love this bleary mixing of media morphing into other media forms/formats. That's what artist Jim Campbell is all about as reported in Benjamin Sutton's Why Is Jim Campbell’s Low-Res Video Art So Compelling, Even Captivating? for artnet news.

"In Topography Reconstruction Wave (2014) [pictured below], the footage of a crashing wave plays behind a thick layer of resin sculpted to represent a photograph of a wave. This work, part of a new series employing more sculptural elements than much of Campbell’s preceding works, culminates when the blurred video of the wave seems to line up perfectly with the sculpted resin wave encasing it....In addition to the process of stripping away visual information in his low-resolution videos, he is increasingly interested in the conversion of one type of media into another—in the case of the resin works, transforming black-and-white images into three-dimensional sculptures. The effect is deeply unsettling because of the way in which the video’s flickering lights interact with the translucent resin.

'As the lights change it distorts based on how thick the resin is, and what that does is that as the light passes through the face it feels like the face is moving, which goes back to this theory about some of the very earliest cave paintings that we have found; some people have suggested that with fire in there that they were actually animated,' Campbell explained."

You can take in the full article here.

Digital Newspaper Archive Research

The special issue of the latest Media History (Volume 20, Number 1, 2014), devoted to digital newspaper archive research, grew out of a conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2011 of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities

Research Council) Research Network, Exploring the language of the popular in American and British newspapers 1833–1988.

As John Steel explains in the issue's Introduction, "The papers in this volume...signal developments and opportunities in the production, use and development of digital archives themselves. The papers either explicitly address the range of challenges and opportunities of using digital newspaper archives while at the same time presenting research made possible by the archives. Other papers are less evaluative or prescriptive and demonstrate the scope and depth of analysis that such archives allow for media historians."


Articles include: Elemental Forms: The newspaper as popular genre in the nineteenth century, by James Mussell

Nineteenth-Century Journalism Online—The Market Versus Academia? by Clare Horrocks

Jingoism, Public Opinion, And The New Imperialism: Newspapers and Imperial Rivalries at the fin de siècle, by Simon J. Potter

King Demos and His Laureate: Rudyard Kipling's ‘The White Man's Burden,’ Transatlanticism, and the Newspaper Poem, by John Lee

The development of discourse presentation in The Times, 1833–1988, by Andreas H. Jucker and Manuel Berger

Archiving the Visual: The promises and pitfalls of digital newspapers, by Nicole Maurantonio