New Alternative Press Resource

It's my pleasure to introduce a new open access database on the block, Independent Voices, a collection of alternative press materials from three pretty important decades of the last century--the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The database is the product of a four-year project by Reveal Digital to digitize over 1 million pages from academic library special collections across the United States.  Source libraries at Northwestern University, Duke Univeristy, University of Wisconsin, University of Buffalo, Michigan State University, University of Texas, University of Kansas and others are contributors.

So far the database is comprised of feminist, GI underground, LGBT, and the (literary) little press.  Other categories to be added will be the African American, Native American, underground campus, anarchist and right-wing press. In addition to newspapers and magazines, the archive includes little magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and calendars.

Access to proprietary alternative press resources, namely Left Index and Alternative Press Index, is available through the Penn Libraries/ASC homepage.

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. 

Government Shutdown: Comparing Newspaper Front Pages

Whether you have a fervent or just passing interest in front page coverage of big stories, the best place to start is the Newseum's Today's Front Pages Web site. Today's sampling includes 908 front pages from 87 countries, all weighing in in some fashion on the US government shutdown. Each day's  selection of front pages is available on the site by 8:30 a.m. Each morning editors choose a min-exhibit of that day's top 10 front pages. You can ignore such pre-selection and wade through them all yourself or, for more organized browsing, papers are sorted by region with lists and maps.

Today's Front Pages is also a permanent "bricks and mortar" exhibit residing on the 6th level of the museum (located in Washington, DC). The  museum as a whole is this librarian-blogger's favorite non-art museum on the planet. Good stuff for all ages!

Digital Microfilm for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News

Here's where Penn Libraries' newspaper e-resources stand with two important local papers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. Can you say options? You can find the Philadelphia Inquirer in both Lexis Nexis from 1994 to the present and in Newsbank from 1981 to the present. As for the Philadelphia Daily News, Lexis Nexis offers 1994 to the present while Newsbank goes back to1978 up to the present. Both Lexis Nexis and Newsbank are solid search engines so for most searching you can go with your favorite platform (Newsbank has pretty maps!) unless your query requires complicated search strings. In that case Lexis-Nexis would be the better choice as it allows for more complicated boolean logic.

But what if you want to see either title as they appeared as hand held newspapers? You want to see pictures or ads or where a certain story appeared on the page and what was next to it.  Here Lexis-Nexis and Newsbank can't deliver other than giving page numbers and article word counts. Before this month your option would be the Penn Libraries microfilm collection which for The Inquirer goes back to 1969 and runs to the present (we keep the newspaper for three months until the film comes in); same deal for the Daily News except the film only goes back to 1990.

Here's the news.  Now, thanks to Proquest Digital Microfilm, both The Inquirer and the Daily News are available in digital facsimile for recent years, 2010 -2012.  Look for holdings to expand all the way back like other titles from Proquest do, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal --but I'm not promising anything.

Speaking of the digital page turning experience as opposed to extracted text only newspaper files, don't forget the often overlooked Library PressDisplay (NewspaperDirect) which features the last 60 days of over 200 newspapers from 55 countries.  It includes the Philadelphia Daily News but not the The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Who Owns the News Media

Embedded in The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual State of the News Media is an interactive database of companies than own news media properties in the US. This database is meant to be a tool for generating  reports on statistical and audience sector data related to media company ownership. 

Their methodology is as follows:

The goal...was to create a tool that aggregated comparative information on the companies that own news media properties. We wanted to do this within each media sector as well as more broadly across news media over all. To do this, we took several steps. First, we identified the various U.S.-based companies within each media sector. In some cases, the list is so long that we determined a cut-off point for which companies to include. The newspapers sector, for example, includes all companies with a total weekday circulation of 100,000 or more. Next, we looked for relevant statistical data that were available for most companies and could be compared from one company to the next. Some data are compared within the media sector and other data, like total revenues, can be compared across all companies.

Try it on for size.  Highlights from a recent report generated from this year's data include:

• In transactions other than the Buffett deal with Media General, The New York Times Company sold 14 daily newspapers to Halifax Media and Journal Register Company (with 20 dailies) was acquired by one of its investors, Alden Global Capital. The Times Company's sale of its Regional Newspaper Group left it with only three remaining dailies, the flagship New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

• The Chicago Sun Times was sold to a new company called Wrapports LLC, an organization led by technology executive Michael Ferro Jr. and former Newsday publisher Timothy Knight.

• The San Diego Union-Tribune was sold in November 2011 by the private equity firm Platinum Equity, which bought it in 2009, to a company owned by a local hotel developer.

• Freedom Communications announced on June 11 the sale of its remaining dailies, including the Orange County Register (163,000 print circulation) to the investment group 2001 Trust LLC. That sale ended the company's almost 80-year history as a newspaper publisher. And as was the case with Journal Register, Freedom had recently emerged from bankruptcy protection.

• Once known as the crown jewel of the now defunct Knight Ridder chain, The Philadelphia Inquirer (along with its sister Philadelphia Daily News) was sold in April for the fourth time in six years. A group of local businessmen bought the company for a reported $55 million, roughly 10% of the $515 million the papers fetched in 2006 when they were purchased by another group of local investors led by advertising executive Brian Tierney.

• Hedge Fund Company Alden Global Capital bought the Journal Register Company with twenty papers including the New Haven Register (CT), the Oakland Press (MI) and the Daily Times (PA). Alden Global has also invested in several other newspaper organizations.

• Versa Capital Management, which purchased a number of small dailies in Ohio in 2011, acquired the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in March of 2012.

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.

FCC on the Information Needs of Communities

The FCC Working group on the Information Needs of Communities has just released its eighteen-months-in-the-making Future of Media report—now called “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.” The 365-page report thoroughly assesses the current news media landscape, including policy and regulation, and provides recommendations, some directed at the FCC, others to the broader community of policymakers, philanthropists, and citizens.

From the Report's Overview:

Thomas Jefferson, who loathed many specific newspapers, nonetheless considered a free press so vital that he declared, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” If he were alive today, Jefferson would likely clarify that his dedication was not to “newspapers” per se but to their function: providing citizens the information they need to both pursue happiness and hold accountable government as well as other powerful institutions.

That sense of the vital link between informed citizens and a healthy democracy is why civic and media leaders grew alarmed a few years ago when the digital revolution began undercutting traditional media business models, leading to massive layoffs of journalists at newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV stations. Since then, experts in the media and information technology spheres have been debating whether the media is fulfilling the crucial role envisioned for it by the Founders. In 2008 and 2009, a group that was both bipartisan (Republicans and Democrats) and bi-generational (“new media” and “old media”) studied this issue at the behest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The group, the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, concluded: “America is at a critical juncture in the history of communications. Information technology is changing our lives in ways that we cannot easily foresee...The digital age is creating an information and communications renaissance. But it is not serving all Americans and their local communities equally. It is not yet serving democracy fully. How we react, individually and collectively, to this democratic shortfall will affect the quality of our lives and the very nature of our communities.”

The Knight Commission’s findings, as well as those of other blue-ribbon reports, posed a bipartisan challenge to the FCC, whose policies often affect the information health of communities. The chairman responded in December 2009 by initiating an effort at the FCC to answer two questions: 1) are citizens and communities getting the news, information, and reporting they want and need? and 2) is public policy in sync with the nature of modern media markets, especially when it comes to encouraging innovation and advancing local public interest goals?

A working group consisting of journalists, entrepreneurs, scholars, and government officials conducted an exploration of these questions. The group interviewed hundreds of people, reviewed scores of studies and reports, held hearings, initiated a process for public comment, and made site visits. We looked not only at the news media but, more broadly, at how citizens get local information in an age when the Internet has enabled consumers to access information without intermediaries.

This report is intended both to inform the broad public debate and help FCC Commissioners assess current rules.

Tracking the Crackups: News on the Net

Searcher Magazine features a roundup of go-to internet sites for breaking news. You can read the article, Tracking the Crackups: News on the Net, by Irene McDermott, online via the Penn Library e-resources. Or you can just rifle through the sites mentioned in the article without context with the useful resource list the magazine provides on the open web for free.
***************************************************************************************
These URLs appear in the column:
INTERNET EXPRESS: TRACKING THE CRACKUPS: NEWS ON THE NET
by Irene E. McDermott
Reference Librarian/Systems Manager
Crowell Public Library, City of San Marino
Searcher, the Magazine for Database Professionals
Vol. 19, No. 4 • May 2011

https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/ http://www.nytimes.com http://english.aljazeera.net http://www.huffingtonpost.com http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/ Twitter for News http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2011/02/ontology-of-twitter.html http://search.twitter.com http://muckrack.com http://www.twitterfall.com http://listorious.com http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/ News Aggregators http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com http://www.storyful.com http://theweek.com http://globalvoicesonline.org Newspapers Online http://www.onlinenewspapers.com http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp http://www.abyznewslinks.com http://ipl.org/div/news/ Reports from Responders and International Media http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/ http://www.livestation.com http://www.inciweb.org http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/ http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi News Analysis http://www.wikistrat.com http://www.theatlantic.com http://www.thedailybeast.com http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com http://www.amconmag.com/larison/ The New Media Revolutions http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/learning-to-love-the-shallow-divisive-unreliable-new-media/8415/1 THE NEWS DISAPPEARS http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/ http://searchengineland.com/where-have-all-the-old-tweets-gone-33579 http://www.google.com/realtime http://www.google.com/reader/

JTA Jewish News Archive

JTA, The Global News Service of the Jewish People, (formerly the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) has just launched a digital archive containing 250,000 articles dating from 1923.

A video about the archive is available here.

From the JTA press release:

The JTA Jewish News Archive, which is searchable and free for the public to use, was launched officially Tuesday, May 3 with a celebration at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Highlights of the archive include extensive reporting from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s -- including perhaps the first article on what has become known as the Babi Yar massacre -- JTA’s reportage on the founding of the State of Israel, close and sustained coverage of the Soviet Jewry movement, and decades of articles chronicling the changing roles and responsibilities of Jewish women.

“The JTA Jewish News Archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future,” said Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University.

Sarna, a member of JTA’s board of directors, spearheaded the effort to digitally preserve the news agency's reporting.

JTA’s coverage of the Holocaust may be of particular interest to historians.

“There was and still is a lot of conventional wisdom that Americans didn't know about the Holocaust while it was happening, and couldn't have known about the Holocaust while it was happening," said Northeastern University journalism professor Laurel Leff. "One of the values of this archive is that people can actually look at the bulletins that JTA sent out during this period and see what information was, in fact, available."

April CommQuote

Newspaper blackout poetry is a pretty cool idea. It's a bit of a gimmick, but nice things happen.
Invented by Austin Kleon, it works like this: Grab a newspaper. Grab a marker. Find an article. Cross out words, leaving behind the ones you like. Pretty soon you’ll have a poem.

Said The New Yorker: "[The poems] resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead...like a cross between magnetic refrigerator poetry and enigmatic ransom notes, funny and zen-like, collages of found art..." (The New Yorker)

So our April CommQuote is a one of these poems. More can be found in Kleon's book, Newspaper Blackout (Harper Perennial, 2010). Happy Poetry Month and long live newspapers!

Since you probably can't make most of it out from the copy-paste, here's the text of Time-Traveling: so/they look/as they did when I was 10/the Old King/and his queen/ my parents/ The size of/Egyptian/ sculptures, all/ Secrets/ that/ I didn't know

International Media and Communication Statistics from NORDICOM

Even the most qualitative researcher from time to time asks me for media use stats and I'm not always able to deliver. "There is a lack of comparative statistics on media communication," NORDICOM editors point out in the Foreword of their compilation of world media stats. A copy of A Sampler of International Media and Communication Statistics 2010, compiled by Sara Leckner and Ulrika Facht, is available on the web. (We also have a copy in print here in the ASC Library.) The volume provides access, distribution, revenue, and usage numbers the internet, radio, television, and newspapers for countries throughout the world.

Introducing NewspaperCat

Nice news from a colleague at the University of Florida, announcing a new resource called NewspaperCat.

NewspaperCat is an online database providing links to over 1000 full-text digital newspapers in the United States and Caribbean. The project’s current coverage, which began with the Southeastern United States, is growing rapidly and will soon cover all fifty states. The purpose of NewspaperCat is to improve access to historical newspapers digitized by libraries, archives, historical societies and other non-profit organizations that remain buried within search engine returns such as Google PageRank. These newspapers represent a rich source of primary research material for researchers, students, and the general public. The project to build NewspaperCat was funded by the George A. Smathers Libraries and developed with the cooperation of the Digital Library Center of the University of Florida.

Searching Pictures in Lexis-Nexis?

Doesn't seem possible does it? Since there are hardly any images in Lexis-Nexis Academic documents. All true, but when an image is included in an article it is tagged with metadata that is maintained and can be searched on. As Jennifer Matheny explains in a Lexis-Nexis Wiki post a couple months back:

Are you curious to see how many newspapers re-ran an Annie Liebovitz photo on a particular day? Do you want to know how many Getty Images are used by newspapers this month? Use the GRAPHIC section in your search!

On the Power Search form, select a publication or a group file. Then, the Add Section search should pop up. Select "GRAPHIC" from the drop-down box. Type in your term and click the blue Add to Search button.

Of course you still can't view the pictures but sometimes all you want are counts, pictures of Palin versus pictures of Biden, for instance, or such search results provide an interim step for locating pictures elsewhere--on microfilm or electronic files that offer page facsimiles.

Research Feature: Press coverage of Michael Vick

Here's a timely bit of research, at least for us folks here in the Philly area. In the Journal of Sports Media you can read Pamela C. Laucella's (Indiana University of Journalism-Indianapolis) findings on media coverage of the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal.

Michael Vick: An Analysis of Press Coverage on Federal Dogfighting Charges, Journal of Sport Media (Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2010) pp. 35-79. Available at the ASC Library, also as e-journal from the Penn Library homepage.

Abstract: Michael Vick's superstar career as a quarterback in the National Football League seemingly came to an end when he pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges on August 20, 2007. This research studied press coverage of Vick's indictment, arraignment, and guilty plea in Richmond, Virginia by analyzing 243 primary documents from The New York Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today. It offers a longitudinal examination of the scandal and elucidates the intersecting worlds of sport, media, race, and culture. This research adds to work on the cultural impact of media and sport, reinforces the criminal-athlete discourse, and elucidates the egregious practice of dogfighting.

August CommQuote

The Mr. Cogito (Pan Cogito) poems of Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert are among his most intriguing. Lucky for CommPilings, Mr. Cogito reads the newspaper. But first a little insight into his character:

… Both from the stylistic and from the grammatical point of view, Mr. Cogito is a combination of the self and others. This ambiguity reflects the major philosophical theme of the volume [Pan Cogito]: man’s identity and the problem of his relationship to others. In reply to a letter inquiring about Mr. Cogito, Herbert wrote the following: “As for Mr. Cogito – well, if I knew exactly myself? In any case it is neither a persona nor a mask, but rather … a method … An attempt to isolate, to ‘objectify’ what is shameful, individual, and subjective" ...Mr. Cogito is clearly a little man and some have called him petty. His concerns are frequently ordinary and practical; he enjoys reading sensational newspaper articles, he tries transcendental meditation and fails, his stream of consciousness brings up detritus like a tin can, he needs advice and so on. ...Mr. Cogito is a device allowing Herbert to admit this ordinariness we all share, to establish it and, once this is done, to build upon it. Herbert wants to underline ordinariness and imperfection because he wants to deal with practical, not transcendent, morality.

--Carpenter, Bogdana, and John Carpenter. "Recent Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert." World Literature Today 51.2 (Spring,1977): 213.

Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper

by Zbigniew Herbert

On the first page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers
the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it

close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer

the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror

a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children

it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details

for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain

too great a distance
covers them like a jungle

they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction

a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion

Report on the Media and the Immigration Debate

This is not a new report, folks (sorry), but it's still well within the statute of limitations for importance. The Brookings Institution's Governance Studies program teamed up with the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California to investigate the role of the media (mostly television news, newspapers, and blogs) in the ofttimes incendiary issue of immigration. They published their findings in a 2008 83-page report which is divided into two parts. The first and largest part is devoted to a content analysis of media coverage of immigration since 1980 with greater emphasis on recent years. The second section is composed of two essays, one focusing on coverage for one year (2007), the other on the role of public opinion in the debate. The Report does not hold out much hope for the media playing a role in resolving the crisis which, though the message is bad, is at least honest.

Report on the Media and the Immigration Debate is freely available in PDF.

Day After Election Front Pages From Around the World

Two journalism sites, Poynter and Newseum, feature newspaper front pages of post election day coverage. Both include foreign press as well as national but the Newseum site has more papers.

Page One Today: Obama's Historic Victory
Selected images of newspaper front pages from November 5th and 6th, 2008. From the Poynter Institute.

Today's Front Pages: Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Hundreds of newspaper front pages from 66 countries reporting Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election. Papers can be viewed alphabetical (newspaper name) or by geographic region. From the Newseum website.

See this blog's previous post on Today's Front Pages.

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.