As someone who’s fascinated by magazines as both expressions of and influences upon culture, I wanted to learn more about this insignia. I was intrigued that they were specifically said to be Canadian – and Genuine at that! This required investigation. What I learned made me reconsider the relationships among government, magazines, and innovation.

It turns out that the insignia is used by many of the Canadian magazines that receive funding from the Canada Periodical Fund’s CA$75 million Aid to Publishers program. This government program supports “Canadian print magazines, non-daily newspapers and digital periodicals to enable them to overcome market disadvantages and continue to provide Canadian readers with the content they choose to read” (source). The Fund is administered by the Department of Canadian Heritage. You can see a display of covers of some of the funded magazines (hit reload for another random array).

There is also a separate Business Innovation funding program for small and medium-sized publishers, and a Collective Initiatives program for industry-wide research and planning. Magazines Canada, the Canadian equivalent of MPA in the U.S., promotes the Genuine Canadian Magazine campaign to its members as well.

I knew that Canada has regulations that aim to ensure the expression of a distinctive Canadian identity within the nation’s media, but I didn’t know that magazines were included; I’d heard only about the broadcasting rules in the past.

Though the magazine subsidy programs have met some controversy, it’s fascinating to see which magazines are funded (even some from huge corporations, e.g., Rogers, which publishes newsmagazine Maclean’s), and how arts/literary and ethnic magazines have been affected.

These programs are also an acknowledgement that magazines play an important cultural role, even as print is fading. I find people often to be dismissive of this medium (“You study what?!”), but magazines are still significant in building our understanding of social and political reality, particularly within our specific places — which is why Canada values its genuine Canadian magazines and media.

I’d also like to imagine what independent American magazines could be and do with subsidies for innovative projects. I personally wouldn’t want to see funds allocated to major corporate publishers, but wouldn’t it be an interesting development in the U.S. to see indie magazine publishers able to access such funding?

I’m venturing into the debate over government subsidies of journalism here, but I think they are an increasingly real prospect; after all, as magazines increasingly become digital products, postal subsidies (which have already diminished) are less relevant. We should find other ways government might support quality magazines in the digital age. What could small magazine publishers achieve with even a small grant to support innovation? Perhaps they could lead the way with creative, open approaches to digital publishing, instead of having to ride the coattails of major publishers, for whom profit will be the prime consideration, into the digital age. This might be one way to ensure we have magazines with genuinely distinctive identities and financially sustainable operations, well into the digital future.

Here’s the Prezi I’m going to use in my talk with them, and after the jump, a long list of resources and examples of what I’m discussing. If you have suggestions for other links I should add to this page, please let me know in the comments.

Here are some links to resources and examples to illustrate this presentation.

Storytelling

Examples

• Long-form text stories: choose your favorite topic and study the stories (reverse-engineer them!) What makes them work?
• Using Facebook to tell a story
• “He took a Polaroid every day, until the day he died”: Photos and a few words tell a story
• This American Life tells the story of the housing crash (and it’s not boring)
• Ira Glass of This American Life offers his thoughts on storytelling
• Stories of one place
• A story with a message, but without words (note the title)
• Storytelling with a narrated slideshow
• Six storytelling projects at one link

How-To

• A quick, quality overview
• How good a storyteller are you?
• Storytelling for the web
• Telling a story on Twitter: can it be done?
• A textbook, but a good one that’s cheap if you buy it used

Curation

Examples

• A tool: Storify
• National Journal uses Storify to track discussion of the potential government shutdown
• “Is This the World’s Best Twitter Account?”: Andy Carvin of NPR provides amazing curation of news from the Middle East uprisings
• Mother Jones Libya explainer
• What one newsroom did when faced with a weather emergency: audience content and mobile reporting combined

How-To

• Using Storify and similar curation tools successfully
• Content curator job description
• Twitter tips for college newsrooms
• Accuracy and accountability matter, even (especially?) in social media: a checklist
• Evaluating links before you pass them on

Data Interpretation

Examples

• Another Collegian offers access to a salary database
• The LA Times Data Desk
• New York Times: Mapping America
• Interactive timeline of Middle East protests from The Guardian
• Google Public Data Explorer explanation and unemployment example
• xkcd Radiation Dose Chart
• 50 “most stunning” infographics and visualizations
• The Daily Telegraph puts the audience to work to analyze data

How-To

• Using Many Eyes to build your own interactive graphics
• 10 useful resources about data visualization
• Making effective timelines for journalism
• Types of visualizations and things to think about
• Why journalists should learn to love data
• “Tools to help bring data to your journalism”

Other Interesting Stuff

• Commodity news, commodity pictures, commodity journalism: how can you break the mold?
• Checklist for multimedia accuracy: no matter what tools you use, the fundamental value of accuracy never changes!
• The Washington Post’s StoryLab: where stories are crowdsourced and discussed with the audience
• Thinking deeply about the purpose of links in your online stories
• You need the mobile journalism mindset, as well as the tools for reporting
• Doing radio reporting with nothing but an iPhone 4
• The iPad 2 for journalists
• Getting audio reports online quickly, from Al Jazeera’s work in Egypt
• Newsgames blog and information site and related site Play the News
• Newsrooms resist gaming: includes a couple of examples of games
• The concept of “gamification:” how will you apply it to news?

Photo by user Kuha455405 on Wikimedia Commons.

Moreover, if you’ve taught news and media literacy, or even just had conversations about news with adults, you’ve probably heard people say that one reason they don’t watch news is because of all of the depressing, sad stuff they see. After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, writer Steve Silberman posted on Twitter, “Since 9/11 or so we’ve all been watching videos that look like the world is ending. I’m getting PVSD or something.”

Perhaps a goal for media literacy instructors might be to help people deal with coverage of these tragic events so that they can stay up-to-date, but don’t develop “PVSD” by doing so.

Silberman’s term PVSD brings to mind PTSD, of course, though media viewers are obviously not frontline victims of the trauma. Yet are media viewers also at risk for psychological harm when they see hours upon hours of crisis coverage? Even though they lack direct contact with those suffering the effects of disaster and war, and do not necessarily experience personal loss or injury, the immediacy of and immersion in the tragedy that are offered by 24/7 news coverage could have a lesser but important effect on audiences.

Photo by Thomas Ahern on Wikimedia Commons.

• Viewing a tragedy live on television appears to strengthen the relationship between media exposure and symptoms of PTSD.
• Some images of tragedy seem more distressing than others. For example, among direct victims of the September 11 attacks, those who frequently viewed images of people falling or jumping from the WTC reported more symptoms of PTSD and depression. It is unclear however, how long this effect lasts.
• Given the sparse research literature, it is difficult to make generalizations. Furthermore, it is unknown if people who are more distressed choose to consume more disaster-related news, or if news of the disaster causes distress, or if there is some other causal mechanism. It is important to note that media coverage may serve as a traumatic reminder to those affected by the event.

So the research is inconclusive so far, but there may be a relationship between viewing media coverage of tragedy and ongoing distress from PTSD- or depression-like symptoms. Additionally, simply avoiding the coverage may not be an option, especially for media and journalism students who are often required to keep up with the news for their classes.

Strategies generally suggested for “self-care” of PTSD might be good ones to recommend to students and other adults finding coverage of tragedy difficult to take. The VA offers some standard suggestions for PTSD sufferers that could be useful in this situation (selected and adapted from this guide for those who have been directly involved in disasters):

• Remind yourself that stress reactions after disaster are common.
• Spend time with or help others. Disasters are unique types of trauma in that most often many people have been affected. Being with family, friends, neighbors, or others may help you realize that you are not the only one affected…Providing support or rebuilding lifts your mood and makes you feel less alone.
• If you are grieving, find a way to honor the losses…Try writing about your loss or creating a ritual, ceremony, or service to express your grief.
• Take a time out if you’re feeling angry. The stress that comes along with disasters can create irritability and anger. This can affect your health, sense of self-control, and relationships.

To this list, I’d add the following suggestions, thinking particularly of my college students:

• Choose your conversation partners carefully. Yes, it’s good to discuss the things you’ve seen in the news with someone else, as the above guidelines recommend. But this is not the time to talk to friends who relish magnifying the drama of every life event, and who will probably not help you keep the current events in perspective. Find your grounded, even-tempered friends to keep you company and discuss these difficult topics.
• Don’t watch or read about the difficult topic too soon before bedtime. Not to sound juvenile, but the effects on your sleep and dream life can be very real. Experiencing events similar to the tragedy even in your dreams can make them feel more real and personal, especially if people from your real life are brought into dream-world situations like those happening in the news.
• Avoid social media discussion of a topic if you are having difficulty coping with it. On one hand, you can get some good information, and social media do let you share your feelings with others. On the other hand, the constant flow of (often unconfirmed) new developments may be overwhelming, and the inability to pre-screen the links on which you’re clicking may lead you to see things you aren’t emotionally prepared to see. Gathering information on the topic in a more deliberate way, using primarily media that have been produced with some time lag for verification, can ensure you stay up-to-date, but don’t have to ride an emotional roller coaster with every new tweet or Facebook status update.

We know that coverage of disaster and war won’t go away anytime soon, and perhaps it will become more graphic in various ways. If we want young people to be able to keep up with the news and deal with its potential consequences for their psychological well-being, it might be helpful to offer them some specific things they can do when faced with wall-to-wall coverage of potentially traumatic events.

Fascinatingly, it seems that surviving trauma, though it’s certainly not a good thing, may for some people result not in PTSD, but in what some researchers (New York Times link; more here) call post-traumatic growth:

P.T.G. research suggests that an encounter with severe trauma can actually lead to highly positive changes in individuals.

It can also increase their resiliency to subsequent adversity. Today, some researchers say that posttraumatic growth is far more common than long-term posttraumatic stress disorder. The norm is to adapt and grow following trauma.

By teaching coping skills for dealing with difficult media content, we can also perhaps help students see that these are, in fact, skills for dealing with a variety of challenging life situations. That’s a valuable lesson that reaches well beyond media literacy.

Whiteout: the simple solution of a bygone age.

A recent Online News Association event in New York included a panel of New York Times representatives discussing the newspaper’s use of and policies concerning Twitter, as described in this eMediaVitals report:

“One of the best things the Times has done in the past few years is have a hands-off policy toward Twitter,” he said. “People screw up every once in awhile, but that’s OK. We have to be able to push the boundaries of what we can get away with.”

Though Stelter’s noted personality still can’t creep up in a news story, on Twitter he has more freedom to blend news and personality in his tweets, particularly depending on the time of day. “More and more we program ourselves online the way that a [TV] network does,” he said.

This report caught my attention, as it seems to confirm in part some of my previous research (described here) with regard to journalism organizations’ policies toward their employees’ social media use.

In a paper I published on this topic, I suggested that organizations that trusted their employees to use their common sense and good judgment in using social media — as opposed to creating strict policies or screening social media content — would find the greatest success in maintaining journalists’ loyalty, allowing them to develop their own voices and brands online, and in empowering them to use social media successfully to represent the organization. As Liz Heron, the Times’ social media editor, stated at this panel, the paper’s lack of “draconian” policies “allowed us to blossom.”

But what about those occasional “screwups”? One social media innovation that could increase journalism organizations’ confidence in their employees’ free use of social media is the development of standardized, simple correction methods. I agree with those who argue that incorrect tweets should not simply be deleted, but the problem remains that leaving inaccurate information out there in the Twitter stream is misleading. Twitter does not currently provide a way to edit an earlier tweet (and merely editing a tweet is not a transparent practice), yet users might miss a “correction tweet” that came later in the stream.

It would be great to see an error-correction function added to Twitter, or some way of noticeably linking an erroneous tweet to an update/correction tweet. Something similar to the Post Revision Display plugin for WordPress would be a great option. If we had this sort of function, an erroneous tweet could be marked with a message: something like “You are viewing a tweet that has been corrected or updated. Please click here for more information.” (Some great posts on this issue are available from Craig Silverman here and here, and from Scott Rosenberg here.)

Empowering journalists and others to spread corrected information just as widely and easily as an initial error would build journalism organizations’ confidence in allowing journalists to reach out to audiences more freely online — while also building public confidence in Twitter as a news source.

If magazine publishers can identify stories that provide rich, deep reading experiences, and then add engaging multimedia to develop that experience even further, they may be able to leverage their brands and editorial authority to market individual stories successfully. Other possibilities might include packaging stories on one topic together in one download, or combining stories from different magazines in a collaborative product. Individual stories or packages of stories can be sold through apps, websites, and vendors like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Go check it out, and please comment while you’re there!

I recently published a paper in the academic journal Electronic News titled “Social Media under Social Control: Regulating Social Media and the Future of Socialization.” Soon after, I saw this blog post by Todd Defren at the SmartBlog on Social Media that addresses a similar topic:

As the Millennial Generation comes online in the business world, corporate leaders will increasingly need to figure out how to deal with their young employee’s [sic] “personal brands.”

While we’ve all grown accustomed to the fact that prospective employers will be Googling us and scouring our Facebook profiles for incriminating photos, at some point the reverse will also be true:  Star employees will carefully evaluate the reputation and socialstreams of their would-be employers, to determine whether they want to associate their personal brand with that of the corporation.  This will only accelerate as the improving economy increases young employees’ options.

Defren’s post is a practical look at one of the major issues I address in the paper (though naturally he’s not among the five people who have probably read it!), and provides advice for corporate leaders and young professionals on how to balance the needs of the corporate brand with the need for employees to feel that their carefully constructed personal brands are still honored and valuable.

I haven’t written about this paper on my blog yet, as I was waiting for it to get published (yes, this is a problem of academic publishing; it’s been a year since I finished the paper and presented it at a conference, but it’s just now seeing print). Clearly, though, now’s the time!

Social Control in the Newsroom (or somewhere)

In the paper, I discuss how many journalism educators – like me – are encouraging students to start developing their personal brands, even as undergraduates just starting out in the field. In the past research about the socialization of journalists – the ways that professionals learn the norms, routines and culture of the field – we have always thought about socialization as beginning primarily when a journalist takes a full-time position at a news organization. The classic research by Warren Breed in 1955 on this topic suggested that a subtle process of “social control,” not explicit rule-setting, shaped new journalists’ early work and so helped them learn how to gain acceptance from superiors and colleagues. Breed, however, and the primary researchers on this issue who followed him (e.g., Gans, Tuchman), were obviously doing their work prior to the Internet and its use for personal branding.

The Internet and the new opportunities it has presented for personal expression have made it possible for what Dan Gillmor and others call “acts of journalism” to be feasible well before an individual takes a job at a news organization. For example, a young person in middle or high school can now, in theory, do “journalistic” things with a blog or a Flickr account. Journalism isn’t just something that happens during one’s adult years when one is employed as a journalist.

Job Insecurity and Corporate Needs

That’s just one factor that complicates our understanding of socialization. The other is the increasingly fluid nature of media employment and the likelihood that many of today’s young journalists will have what Mark Deuze calls a “portfolio lifestyle,” with no long-term commitment to a news organization. When a journalist’s career consists in large part of contract or freelance work, who “socializes” him or her? There’s no editor waiting day in, day out, pencil in hand, ready to socialize the newbie into the profession. There are editors, but there aren’t necessarily the kind of long-term, repetitive interactions that researchers have observed in the past as socializing forces. Add to that an ongoing sense of job insecurity and doubt, as well as the need to work in multiple media, and today’s young journalist has fewer fixed points of reference for his or her development within the norms of the profession.

[By the way, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Breed, the pioneer of research in this area, pointed out even in 1955 that the "social control" process of socialization led to a narrow understanding of the field and an "old boys' network" that restricted entry into the profession and limited news coverage in undemocratic ways. Questioning our definition of journalism and its norms - though that questioning is currently causing plenty of upheaval - is a valuable enterprise.]

Personal Branding and New Journalists

So, what does all that have to do with personal branding? Think of today’s young journalists – like many of my students – who have followed their instructors’ and mentors’ advice to develop some sort of personal brand or distinctive identity in the online world. What happens when these enterprising students do end up working for a news organization? They will have to balance their personal brands against the corporate brand, and decide how much they are willing to sublimate their personal efforts to build and maintain a distinct identity (a valuable asset, especially if they’re uncertain how long their employment will last) to the corporate brand.

The primary area where I can imagine these values (personal vs. corporate brand) clashing is in the realm of social media policies at news organizations. Though I get the impression overall these have become in many cases somewhat more liberal than they were when I first began researching the paper, it’s apparently still common for news organizations to restrict their employees’ use of social media for various reasons, including fear of appearing biased, fear of libel suits, and fear of damage to the corporate brand. However, the value of allowing an employee to maintain his or her personal brand as an asset, I would argue, is likely to become an overriding consideration in the years to come, as more young journalists whose priority is their own career survival resist corporate policies that infringe on their use of social media to sustain their personal brands.

Research and Management Implications

Two implications of these changes as a whole are that: 1) researchers must think of the socialization of journalists differently, as beginning earlier than we previously considered, and need to consider the “portfolio lifestyle” and personal brand as part of our research on journalists’ attitudes and routines; and 2) news organization managers and journalists must consider how they can let personal brands shine and enrich the corporate brand, while still meeting the needs of the larger organization.

For news organizations, this consideration likely means establishing guidelines – not strict policies – governing employees’ use of social media, and permitting individuals to use their best judgment. As Alfred Hermida notes, for example, the BBC’s new social media guidelines suggest that employees “be mindful that the information you disclose does not bring the BBC into disrepute.” These kinds of reasonable guidelines are likely to cause less strife among the journalists of the future when they seek to balance their need to maintain their personal brand with the need to contribute to a news organization’s mission.

So there’s the nearly 9,000-word scholarly paper distilled into 1,100 words! If you’re interested in the full paper, let me know; I’m happy to share it.

I’ve recently become more involved with assessment efforts at my university, partly out of an initial skepticism about the concept, and partly out of a realization that the implementation of assessment activities is now out of the hands of university administrators and instead increasingly required by outside accreditation agencies and state/federal government. Therefore, I wanted to understand assessment better and try to help influence it positively on our campus as much as possible.

One of the first steps in assessing students’ learning in any context is to define the outcomes [PDF]: what do we want students to learn? Then we can determine which standards to use to assess their learning. In today’s journalism programs, this process is challenging.

Certainly we want students to learn the varied skills they need to produce journalism and eventually find jobs: reporting, writing, editing, multimedia. These are professional, vocational skills, and therefore their success would be best measured by the standards for quality used by journalism professionals.

We also want students to learn to be critical and thoughtful [PDF] regarding journalism and its place in our society. That outcome is in some ways in opposition to professional ideals, which today may too often value speed and SEO over reflection and independent critique. The standards used to assess students’ development as critical thinkers about journalism, then, are rather different from the vocational standards used to measure their work. In the academic setting, these standards usually stem from the study of journalism’s role as a societal institution, but perhaps also could come from public critiques of journalism, especially for students whose programs are engaged in producing news for their local communities. I think that’s an exciting opportunity for assessing student work and helping students understand their true impact of their work.

We’re also starting to see the evolution of journalism curricula that incorporate a new range of business-oriented skills into students’ training, such as the Entrepreneurial Journalism graduate program at CUNY spearheaded by Jeff Jarvis. Students in such courses and programs learn how to brand themselves, represent their work independently, create collaborative projects, and thus develop an entrepreneurial mindset that is different from someone seeking to conform to a supervisor’s expectations. Assessing these entrepreneurial abilities and attitudes is rather more challenging. We don’t yet have clear standards for what it means to have achieved these outcomes. We can determine whether students have the factual knowledge of, say, business law that they need to be successful entrepreneurs, but assessing whether they have acquired the inventive, resilient mindset needed for success is difficult. Whose standards apply to this assessment? Not those of traditional professional journalism, and those of journalism critics don’t quite apply either.

I think one of the biggest challenges journalism educators face today in developing effective, authentic assessment activities for their departments is reconciling these myriad perspectives on what it means to be a successful journalism student today. I can think of few other disciplines in which students are pulled in so many directions.

Are you a journalism educator who has worked on these kinds of assessment issues? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

A spread from Orion Magazine.

A great part of writing this piece was the chance to visit with Veronica Barassi, a fellow academic and magazine researcher at the Institute for Contemporary European Studies at Regent’s College in London, about her scholarly work [especially this article (PDF)] on the role of print and digital formats for specifically activist magazines. As I write in the MediaShift piece, she said:

“Even with younger generations, people kept on telling me the importance of keeping the magazines. They wanted that sense of smell, feel, touch,” she said. “It gave them a sense of ownership. It conveyed a feeling of belonging and affiliation with the magazine.”

… Drawing on anthropological research, Barassi also suggested that the transaction involved in selecting and buying a magazine creates a bond between the reader, the magazine, and the magazine’s professed ideals.

“You need that material culture. If you think about human relationships and the creation of human bonds, they need to be created through an exchange of objects,” she said. The exchange of the printed magazine creates a stronger relationship.

I find this aspect of magazines fascinating. What is it about the materiality of print that makes us connect more deeply to a topic, to an editorial voice, to our imagined community of fellow readers? Can we connect as deeply online when we see people’s names and sometimes avatars tied to comments on a magazine’s digitized articles?

I wonder how that sense of connection to other readers will change when magazines more fully integrate social media into their digital editions. As I mentioned last week in my post about my early magazine experiences with the iPad, I have been reading digital replica magazines via the Zinio app, but missed the ability to tweet and post to Facebook the items that I found especially interesting. I’ve become accustomed to that ability on the web.

When digital magazines become more social, it might help us to feel part of the imagined community of fellow readers, just as the print editions do today. Can that be an adequate replacement for the bonds formed through receiving print copies? I guess we’ll have to patiently await the answer to that question. I’ll put that on my research schedule for, oh, 2012 or so.

But do they link to magazines' web sites? Photo by Annie Mole on Flickr.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has posted a summary of its recent study “New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press.”

The study compares the variety of topics included in news-related blog posts and tweets with the range included in mainstream media coverage, and found that:

Social media and the mainstream press clearly embrace different agendas. Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda – the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied.

I don’t find these results particularly surprising, but – as a magazine person – I wanted to know how often social media users linked to magazine stories online. I checked out the tables summarizing the PEJ data [PDF] and found that they had added newspapers and magazines together in their breakdown of the sources of links provided by bloggers and Twitter users. Unfortunately, this means that the study – unless the raw data can be broken apart once they’re made available – doesn’t tell us much about whether social media users are linking to magazines’ sites in their conversations about news.

The researchers note that:

In producing PEJ’s New Media Index, the basis for this study, there are some challenges posed by the breath [sic] of potential outlets. There are literally millions of blogs and tweets produced each day. To make that prospect manageable, the study observes the “news” interests of those people utilizing social media, as classified by the tracking websites. PEJ did not make a determination as to what constitutes a news story as opposed to some other topic, but generally, areas outside the traditional notion of news such as gardening, sports or other hobbies are not in the purview of content.

So though newsmagazines’ web sites might be included in the analysis, we probably won’t see many other magazines in the dataset. That’s an understandable limitation of the study, given its specific interest. Magazines are also likely to be less represented because they don’t usually relate to breaking news, as Twitter users would most often be interested in sharing. But if magazines aren’t offering even slower-paced bloggers something to write about, perhaps publishers should be concerned.

I would guess that magazines’ web sites are also rarely linked to by social media users due to their typically poor layout and usability. But I’d like to see some data on social media users’ links to magazines – and think it would be helpful to the magazine industry to see how far they’re being left behind as web users share information and favorite stories using social media. (Or not. But I’m pessimistic.)

Here’s our course description at CSU Fresno:

Examines the political, economic, cultural, and behavioral impacts of mass media in national and international contexts. Analyzes the historical factors that have shaped the structures, practices, and products of mass media industries, and assesses contemporary trends in media-society relations. G.E. Breadth D3.

That “G.E.” bit at the end means this is also a general education course that satisfies graduation requirements beyond just those of majors in our department – so the course needs to be of interest, and ideally lasting value, to students who may never take another media or journalism course.

The book selection project.

One of the biggest challenges for me in teaching this course has been choosing readings that are contemporary, interesting, well-written and thoughtful. I have skipped around among textbooks in my six years of playing with this course: from Media/Impact by Shirley Biagi when I taught at a community college, to Media Today by Joseph Turow when the course was required to have a more media economics focus, to The Media of Mass Communication by John Vivian in my first year at Fresno State, and then to Media Literacy by W. James Potter this year.

I’ve just never been satisfied with any of these books, though the Potter textbook has come the closest to fulfilling my hopes. I like its focus on timeless media literacy skills that will be applicable regardless of the evolution of media in the coming years, and I like its rather critical approach to media overall. But its writing style is not especially compelling to students, and it’s a bit heavy on media effects and employs a specialized terminology that I think overwhelms students, especially early on in the semester when that material is covered.

Inspired by this post by Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed, I started thinking more about how I could use popular nonfiction to bring both breadth and depth to this course, while also allowing myself a chance to catch up on major nonfiction relevant to my field that I could explore with my students. So then the question became: which books?

Given that incredibly broad course description, it might seem I could choose just about anything. But here’s the list I’ve come up with, and the rough order in which I might use the books this semester:

• Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction, by Jake Halpern
  • An engaging read to get students thinking about the real significance of media in our culture.
• Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, by Carrie McLaren, Jason Torchinsky and Rob Walker
  • I admit I’ve only seen the Kindle preview of this one – but it looks lighthearted and even got a good review from Advertising Age despite its critical content.
• Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy, by Alex S. Jones
  • I know Jones’ position is largely a defense of traditional journalism – but it will be a starting point for our discussions of the following books. (Newsonomics by Ken Doctor was a runner-up in this spot; I like his focus on the future of the news business, but I felt it focused a bit too much on the financial outlook of journalism and not enough on its societal role. For a more specifically journalism-focused course, I’d give it a serious look.)
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
  • This one will help us look not just at news and media, but also more broadly to examine the power of the Internet in social interactions.
• True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo
  • The title says it all. That’s where our students live: better get them ready to deal with it as they venture out into the world.
• Republic.com 2.0, by Cass Sunstein
  • Probably the heaviest of the bunch, but gets into some nitty-gritty about regulation and democracy, extending our discussions into governance and politics.

Look like a lot of books? It’s about 1,800 pages, which averages out to about 60 pages per class session (and only $59 for all used copies). I think it’ll be manageable, and all of these books are written in language that should be accessible to most freshmen and sophomores. I also like that most of these books have gotten enough public attention that I can find ample articles, videos and interviews online to supplement our class discussions.

Have a suggestion of a book I should substitute or subtract? A resource that would complement one of these? I’m looking forward to keeping this class on the cutting edge by exploring these texts next fall.