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Journalists’ Socialization and the Personal Brand

5 Nov

Social Media Overlap

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.]

Edited Version of First Book

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.

Assessing Journalism Education from All Directions

23 Sep

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.

New MediaShift Post: Digital Debates for Magazines

16 Sep

I have a new post up at MediaShift today, and it focuses on the role of digital media for print magazines that try to provoke public thought and debate on serious issues. I look at Mother Jones and Orion as two examples of the use of digital tools to supplement print editions.

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.

Do Social Media Users Link to Magazines?

31 May

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.)

Choosing Textbooks for “Mass Communication & Society”

15 Apr

I didn’t manage to blog last week, and this week’s post is going to be a bit different; it’s probably most relevant to my fellow journalism and media educators. I’ve been struggling with the question of which readings to assign for my introductory course called “Mass Communication and Society” (admittedly not the title I’d choose), which is a course enrolling about 100 students per semester and that I’ve taught in various iterations at three institutions for the last six (six! wow – time flies) years.

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:

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.

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