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College Media Review’s Research Annual is now available for download from this site.
Click to Download
Volume 54 for CMR contains peer-reviewed research relating to college media and its practitioners that was published by the College Media Review (CMReview.org) during the 2016-2017 Academic Year.
To download a copy of this volume, CLICK HERE. Non-member downloads here will be available for a limited time. Members can access past CMR material inboxed the members only section of there CMA website.
For previous editions of the Research Annual, see the “Archive” link on the left column of the home page.
Students can surprise us for the good and the bad.
As is inevitable in college media advising, I experienced both.
And sometimes, we may forget that students arrive with life experiences, and as a result, may handle changes and challenges more readily than we might expect.
For example, this past spring, I dreaded, for whatever reason, telling the editor-in-chief and assistant editors of The Journal, the University of Illinois Springfield student newspaper, that i was retiring after 23 years on the job and that the university seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace to hire my successor. I wanted to tell then first before telling the entire Journal staff.
When I told the editor-in-chief about my upcoming retirement and plans to develop a home-based free-lance writing and editing business, she said something to the effect of, “Retirement isn’t a time for sadness. It’s a time to celebrate the person, recognize accomplishments, and consider opportunities ahead. We will have a party for you.”
Lighting it up — Journalism as a conversation at the private university
By Matthew Salzano
and Joanne Lisosky Pacific Lutheran University
Figure 1
Abstract — Student journalists at private universities do the hard work of turning the lights on in the darkened, pseudo-public spheres on their campus. Without a clear idea of who is obligated to be the teller of unsavory truths on the private university’s campus, student media must often take up the torch. Building on Jurgen Habermas’s and Alexander Kluge’s work on the “public sphere” and Doreen Marchionni’s “journalism as a conversation,” student media publications can be examined for their coorientation, informality, and interactivity. Using two stories from the student media of Pacific Lutheran University as a case study illustrates how a robust student journalism outlet is a vital component of initiating important conversations in the public sphere of the private university. This investigation includes suggestions for implementing these strategies at other private universities. Continue reading “Research (Vol. 54) — Joining a conversation at private schools”
150 members provide information on budgets, locations and operations
Special to College Media Review
A benchmark survey of members of the national College Media Association provides snapshots of how student print, broadcast and web media operate, how they’re supported, where they’re located, and how many student and professional staff they employ, among other findings.
“Many of our members routinely ask questions on our listserv about school demographics. That prompted the board to recognize the need to compile this sort of information and make it available to our membership,” said Rachel McClelland, vice president for CMA Member Services.
The association conducted the online survey in April and early May 2017. A total of 150 respondents participated, but the goal is to gain a broader response with future surveys, McClelland said.
CMA President Kelley Lash said the survey helps the organization answer questions, track trends and make predictions, but it is not comprehensive.
The College Media Association is accepting submissions of original, non-published research in the form of either abstracts or research papers on all aspects of college media and advising college media. Papers will undergo a blind review process, and top research will be presented at the 2017 Fall National College Media Convention in Dallas (Oct. 25-29).
Submission deadline is August 1.
College Media research is published online at CMReview.org and in print through the CMA online bookstore.
Either abstracts or full-length research papers are acceptable. Abstracts should be between 250 and 500 words. Full papers should be no longer than 25 pages, excluding references, tables and appendices. If accepted, full papers are due by August 31.
Papers are welcome on any topic that addresses an issue surrounding college media. Submissions from all theoretical and methodological perspectives are invited. We particularly encourage submissions that are theoretically based and clearly relate to a current issue in college media.
Print and broadcast journalists from around the country were among 2017 commencement speakers.
Speaking to graduates of Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, NBC chief correspondent Richard Engel said, in part: “What is the good news? You have to be the good news,. We can’t be complacent, and you especially can’t be complacent, because we can’t afford it. We have to work hard to defend human rights around the world and the freedom of the press in general.”
Brooke Baldwin, a CNN anchor and 2001 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism school, encouraged UNC graduates to dream and “learn their worth.”
For a look at what Engel, Baldwin and other journalists said the 2017 college graduates, a sampling follows, along with a Q&A The Daily Tar Heel did with Baldwin in January 2017, when she was slated for the 2017 commencement address.
Floyd Abrams’ latest book compares free speech laws in United States and elsewhere
Reviewed by Carolyn Schurr Levin
Attorney Floyd Abrams, who represented The New York Times in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case and is described by the Columbia Journalism Review “as the country’s leading First Amendment litigator,” has published a new book: “The Soul of the First Amendment.”
In 2013, Abrams, senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindell LLP in New York, published “Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment.” In 2006, Abrams wrote “Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment,” which focused on cases with which he’d been involved.
“The Soul of the First Amendment,” a 150-page book published April 25, 2017, may be Abrams’ most significant yet. Abrams focuses on why freedom of speech matters and compares U.S, First Amendment laws with laws governing free speech in other democratic nations. Abrams also looks at “how very much more protective of freedom of speech we are than other democratic nations by insisting on what they view as our rather manic devotion to it.”
Data and analysis can aid recruitment, retention—and growth
By Jessica Clary Savannah College of Art and Design Atlanta
Introduction — To get to my office, you have to leave the main classroom building, drive (or walk) to the freshman residence hall (which is a mystery to many at a college with mostly commuters), go through a lobby without signs, past an elevator, then take a sharp turn down an unmarked hallway, past the bathrooms, and then knock on a locked door. If someone is there, they’ll come open it, unless you’re standing too close. The door opens out. I can’t tell you how many people have leaned in and hit the door. If you’re trying to get involved with Student Media at my college, there’s a chance your first experience will be getting lost, then getting hit in the face with a door.
But, nearly 10 percent of students at SCAD Atlanta are involved with student media in some way. Since 2011, I have been trying to figure out how they got here.
I learned early on that my pleas for huge, institutional changes (better office space, a more visible presence for our online-only student media, better racks for our print media, etc.) wouldn’t be easy, but finding out how we recruited and held on to the committed students I saw every day couldn’t be that hard.
Over the past six years, I have gathered and tracked data to be able to explain how, at SCAD Atlanta, our student media recruits and retains students. I can see what has worked, what hasn’t, and what has changed. I’ve been able to use the data to better prioritize and use the resources we do have, to continue to grow these programs within the college.
Research — SCAD Atlanta collects a lot of data about students involved with the program, but most of it is quantitative: dates, meeting sign-in sheets, application forms, etc. Once a year, we do a brief, easy qualitative survey to get feedback from involved students about their experience with the program. The survey is sent through Qualtrics to official university email addresses in April, collected and tabulated in May, and then analyzed over the summer by student leaders to implement changes in the fall.
The Survey and Opinion Matrix — The survey asks some factual, multiple-choice questions about how students found out about student media, when they got involved, etc.: Continue reading “Surveying student media staffs”
Out of the box ideas may sound intimidating, but they’re really not
By Holly J. Morris University of North Georgia
Students are plenty comfortable with the melding of pictures and words. That’s what memes are (this kind) and, arguably, emoji. So the alternative story form — a broad journalism genre that often combines graphics and text in ways beyond “story block with photo” — seems like a natural idiom for college media.
Or maybe not, based on a scouring of the engagement table at this year’s CMA conference in New York. Most of the examples on offer were traditionally texty.
“My students are becoming really proficient creating that fundamental foundational content of print and broadcast media,” said Lee University assistant professor and student media adviser Michael Finch. (For the record, the Lee Clarion wasn’t on the engagement table — it’s online-only.) “I’ve found a little bit of resistance in moving away from that. It’s actually taken a lot of work to get them broaden the horizons of their imaginations.”
Adding alt story forms to a publication, online or off, need not be intimidating. As shown by the examples below, it helps to have designers on staff. But tools like Piktochart and Canva put infographics, for example, within reach of the non-graphically inclined. Qzzr makes embeddable Buzzfeed-style personality quizzes. Odyssey enables map-based storytelling.
Here’s a look at seven alternative story forms — online and print, simple and design-heavy — and how the publications they appeared in made them happen.
The Union, El Camino College, Torrance, California
Between its 1949 dedication and 2013 demolition, El Camino College’s original Murdock Stadium (its replacement opened last year) hosted movie shoots, World Cup matches, Olympic soccer and six decades of college football.
“I knew how important the stadium was to so many,” said Jessica Martinez, who in 2014 was a second-year student at El Camino College when she started building an interactive chronology of the stadium. “I created the timeline as a way to preserve and remember some of the many things that had happened there.”
put together the Murdock interactive, Martinez used Knight Lab’s TimelineJS, an open-source tool that generates timelines from Google spreadsheets and assorted sources of multimedia content. There’s no need for coding skills (though if you have them, you can do some serious futzing).
Martinez worked on the timeline for much of her spring semester, going to the school’s library and unearthing newspaper clips marking milestones in the stadium’s history. The finished timeline won CMA’s Pinnacle Award for Best Online Infographic in 2015.
Martinez, now a senior at New York University, encouraged journalism students to give TimelineJS a go.
“We worked with [it] in my advanced reporting class at the beginning of this semester,” she said via email. “I impressed my professor and classmates with how much I already knew about it.”
The Lee Clarion is taking the tried and true “get to know an average freshman” story from static profile into innovative UGC (user-generated content) territory. That “average freshman” is creating some content herself through a series of vlogs; the Clarion staff will write/produce some segments; and the #FreshLee hashtag will tie it all together.
Finch, the Lee professor and adviser, said the format was inspired by Clean & Clear’s “See the Real Me” campaign, in which teens — the non-celebrity kind — talk about their lives and challenges in short videos.
“I was looking for ways to engage with the students in a completely digital world,” Finch said. “If we have a freshman going through x, y or z, her narrative would be something that could be instructional or help students feel like they’re not alone. That’s a different thought process than legacy press thinking.”
Giving the freshman the chance to speak her own mind gets at another value integral to communicating with the college audience: authenticity.
“A real reason that the user-generated content works and can be a valuable part of a student media content strategy is because Gen Z and millennials value authenticity to such a high degree,” Finch said.
Molly Morris’ totally tubular flowchart was inspired by her formative years in the 80s and 90s.
“I’m like a ‘borderline’ millennial,” said the graphic design student at Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus, via email. “Most students who work at SCAN (and attend SCAD) have only heard about these decades as some alternative universe of pegged pants and Aqua Net,” she said.
After research that required watching episodes of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Full House” and “Step by Step,” Morris created a spread rooted in ‘90s pop culture’s splashy aesthetic, rather than “a modern design that served a different time in history.”
SCAN magazine’s editors always try to add a visually driven spread to each issue, Morris (or “Homeslice,” according to her flowchart) said. The staff’s creative process lends itself to the approach.
“As an art school, I think we’re different than most publications in that the people creating the content see how something looks first, and build the story to match that visual inspiration,” Morris said.
Infographics and visually driven layouts abound in Ball Bearings Magazine. Its Fall 2016 issue, for example, included graphics illustrating the horrors of climate change, an easy-to-parse one-page table of voting data and an annotated illustration showing how the human brain makes decisions.
The chart above, which uses landmarks from Mid-American Conference universities to compare annual student expenses, accompanied a Spring 2016 story about rising costs and the university’s lack of financial transparency. The designer created the building illustrations and the chart in Adobe Illustrator.
Roth Lovins, the art director of Ball Bearings when the chart was created, said the staff approaches story format by asking first, “Would it be easier for the reader to interact with this information in a visual format or in a traditional story?” The art director takes it from there, usually working with a designer who does both the research for and the layout of the graphic, Lovins said via email.
Graphics draw readers into a story — or might be the only thing they read. “So we make sure that [a graphic] doesn’t explode information at them, but shows them something in a simple-to-read format,” Lovins said.
The Rice Thresher’s energetic layouts and plentiful visual elements make it a standout in a field of college papers with more demure aesthetics.
“We’ve been striving to emphasize design elements in the past year,” Christina Tan, art director of the Rice Thresher, said via email.
Ideas flow both directions at the Thresher: Editors can request graphics and illustrations, and designers can suggest graphic treatments. The staff look to Behance and Pinterest “to generate ideas on aesthetics and flow,” Tan said.
For example, the content of the “Constitution in Brief” graphic, above, Tan said, “as a story would have been rather dry — so instead, we made it into a fun infographic that highlighted the word count changes, who helped make the changes, and more.”
An image and a bit of text can be as effective as a full-fledged infographic, Tan said. (It’s also easily doable by a non-designer.) Take the starting quarterback story, above: “Sometimes placing text in an appealing manner over a photo makes the graphic interesting and explains content in a concise manner.”
The GIF listicle (as massively popularized by Buzzfeed) is one tool in Grand Central Magazine’s repertoire of multimedia and visually compelling stories.
“For particularly broad, ‘wow-this-is-so-relatable’ type stories, our audience seems to engage better with listicles over, for example, a long-form written piece with stories from other students relaying their back-to-school horror stories,” said Grand Central staffer Tessa Harvey, who created the listicle above.
Such shareable content is “particularly important to building a following early in the school year,” Harvey said via email.
Gif listicles are relatively easy to create: Just grab some Creative Commons gifs off giphy.com and go crazy with the gifsticles.
Not too crazy, though. “Too much, and our audience won’t take us seriously,” Harvey said.
Holly Morris
Holly J. Morris is a lecturer of journalism and the student media adviser at the University of North Georgia. She worked at the Washington Post Express for 12 years, as well as National Geographic and U.S. News & World Report. She holds a master of science degree in journalism from Columbia University and a couple of wholly unrelated degrees from Emory University.
Gisondi’s second edition of his book, “The Field Guide to Sports Reporting,” comes out in June. Writing on Sports Field Guide | Author of “The Field Guide To Covering Sports …, Gisondi says the second edition “dives deeply into digital, mobile and social media approaches and includes new and expanded chapters on advanced metrics, game coverage, features, interviewing, fantasy sports, sports media ethics and prep coverage.”
And sometimes, we may forget that students arrive with life experiences, and as a result, may handle changes and challenges more readily than we might expect.
“Many of our members routinely ask questions on our listserv about school demographics. That prompted the board to recognize the need to compile this sort of information and make it available to our membership,” said Rachel McClelland, vice president for CMA Member Services.
Speaking to graduates of Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, NBC chief correspondent Richard Engel said, in part: “What is the good news? You have to be the good news,. We can’t be complacent, and you especially can’t be complacent, because we can’t afford it. We have to work hard to defend human rights around the world and the freedom of the press in general.”
In 2013, Abrams, senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindell LLP in New York, published “Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment.” In 2006, Abrams wrote “Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment,” which focused on cases with which he’d been involved.
