March 22 cover, via AisleOne.net

I explored my subscription options:

• Through the Businessweek website: 50 issues plus 4 “bonus issues” for $40, including a free subscription to digital iPad editions ($ .74/issue)
• Through Zinio, the digital magazine newsstand company: $46 for 51 issues, digital replica-style ($ .90/issue…wait, 22% more for digital only? Nope.)
• Through the new Bloomberg Businessweek+ app for iPad (iTunes link): $2.99/month, charged automatically each month through the Apple in-app purchase function. (free for print subscribers, or about $ .75/issue for non-subscribers)

I really wanted only a digital edition because this weekly magazine will hit my recycle bin so often, and because business isn’t a huge personal interest for me. The price is reasonable. (Businessweek will get $2.09/month after Apple’s 30% cut.)

While it might not let me experience the magazine’s intriguing print design, the iPad app is a good deal comparatively – and received rave reviews on iTunes – and so I tried it out.

I have to say: I’m impressed. The first issue did take a few minutes to download, but far fewer than the 11 minutes required by the free May iPad edition of Wired (iTunes link) that I downloaded this morning. A few interesting moments in the app are below:

Provide my personal data to Businessweek? Hmm...

Downloading my first issue (bottom right), with previous issues available for individual purchase

Watching an introductory video linked to the cover images, with editors explaining the chicken on the cover

Finding topics connected to the names mentioned in the story and realtime data through the Related button

Integrated social media connections...yes!

So far, I’m pretty impressed with the app. It provides enriched content, beyond just a digital replica, that is smartly designed for greater usability, not mere novelty. It’s reasonably priced, easy to access, and has clean design. It will automatically alert me to new issues.

It lets me stay in my social reading mode that I have come to enjoy so much, rather than putting me in the “walled garden” so common among digital magazines to date.

And, finally, there’s just the right amount of interactivity – enough that it’s interesting and suits the iPad, but not so much that I’m distracted from reading, which is still – obviously – a major draw of magazines.

My only tiny issue? I wish there were pagination for stories, not just scrolling; personally, I’m a more effective reader in Instapaper’s pagination mode, and I’d prefer it here too. But I can live without it for now.

Worth $ .75/week? Time will tell – but this is an auspicious start.

Two more reviews are here and here for some additional perspectives. Add your thoughts in the comments.

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.

Most of my reading these days is grounded in social connections. With the exception of the (mostly guilty pleasure) fiction I read in the evenings before bed, I read online all day, almost every day. I read things that have been shared by my Twitter and Facebook communities, or I find things on my own and consider whether to share them myself.

During my forced period of lonely reading, I recognized some of the skills that I have to apply during my social reading. It seems to me that these are exactly some of the types of awareness we try to cultivate in students who are developing their skills as readers and writers. Some of these are obvious, others maybe not so much.

The first set of questions to consider is based on a standard media literacy approach, applied in the social media context when we examine content shared by our contacts:

• Who’s the source? Who shared the link, and who actually created the content? Are they connected? If so, does their connection matter? If not, why did my contact share this content? What’s his or her motivation to share, or his or her personal interest in this content? (See also Howard Rheingold’s advice on “crap detection.”)
• What comment did my contact attach to the content? Why? Has it altered my interpretation of the content, and if so, how? Do I agree or disagree with my contact’s commentary? If there is no commentary, is there a reason why not?
• What is the main point of this content? (When so much information flows forth from social media, we have to be able to quickly “get the gist” of what we choose to read more closely.) What is my reaction to it?

When I choose to retweet or re-share information, I have an additional set of considerations:

• To which audience do I distribute this content? My Twitter and Facebook communities overlap by a few members, but are really quite different. I have to consider my audience’s interests and preferred content consumption styles in making this choice. The constant challenge to “think of your audience” issued to students in writing courses takes on an immediate relevance in social networks.
• Do I distribute this link with my own contact’s commentary attached? How would my audience respond if so? (How might they respond just to my sharing of content from the contact him- or herself?)
• If I substitute my own commentary, I must quickly summarize my response in a few characters, or I must responsibly shorten my contact’s commentary to be able to add my own. How do I best capture his or her response and complement it with my own? How do I respectfully disagree, if necessary, to maintain a civil tone in my network?
• If I summarize the content of what I am sharing, how do I do so accurately? How do I also write my summary in an intriguing way, inviting my network to click on it themselves? (This is akin to good headline writing, and indeed, some instructors have used tweet writing as a way to teach headline writing skills.)

In this post, I’ve tried to make explicit some of the sophisticated interpretive skills required by active participation in social networks and sharing content. For those who diminish social media as mere narcissism or distraction (yes, they’re still out there), I challenge them to see these media as another place where students can develop their critical thinking skills, in many of the same ways we ask them to attempt in traditional reading and writing. This is a new format, to be sure, but an increasingly important one, and also a format in which students can find much that interests them personally.

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.

What are you doing, and who are you? Photo by Sasha Wolff on Flickr.

My large introductory media studies class often takes unexpected turns. With 120 students of widely varying backgrounds and interests, I am frequently surprised (and pleased) by new insights, interdisciplinary connections, and individuals’ anecdotes that challenge and enrich our class content.

During our Thursday class last week, we were discussing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and I described the basics of Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of social media recently printed in the New Yorker as a way of illustrating possible alternatives to Shirky’s perspective. I was curious to see if my students – who are Facebook fans (so to speak) but Twitter skeptics – tended to identify with Shirky or Gladwell.

Our discussion strayed to interpersonal relationships, rather than focusing on social movements. One of my students described a personal experience that demonstrated his own view of the types of interpersonal ties created by social media. He stated that he had an acquaintance with whom he interacted primarily on Facebook, and thought that he had a great deal of common ground with this person and would enjoy the friend’s company in person. But when they met, he found the Facebook friend to be completely incompatible as an offline friend. Their personalities clashed. He’d had no idea that their interaction would be so uncomfortable.

His experience led the class to explore a question I’d never really considered before. One of the benefits of participating in interpersonal relationships – offline, where difficult personality quirks can’t be avoided – is that we ourselves grow personally from learning to cope with other people. Though that might sound a bit self-centered, it is certainly one of the side effects of participating in relationships, for most of us: we become better able to, well, participate in relationships.

But in social networking, we all present to each other only our best faces. We rarely post things that could lead others to think poorly of us (i.e., we post “self-promotional content”). Like my student’s difficult acquaintance, we all have difficult aspects of our personalities, but we don’t make those public if we want to continue interacting with social networking tools. The witty status updates, the cautiously selected profile pictures, the tidbits of personal data that we provide to our networks are those that we hope will cause others to think well of us. Even text messaging and e-mail – with their lack of spontaneous, unedited interaction – provide fewer opportunities for our more distasteful characteristics to surface.

So what about those difficult personality quirks? What about the opportunities for growth we have in our relationships when we deal with each other and all aspects of our natures, even those uncomfortable characteristics?

For older people and those less active in social networking and other types of online communication, these questions may seem irrelevant. Many people’s online friends are still also those with whom they also interact in person during daily life. But for most of my students – who laughingly admit that they chat online and text message with people in the same room at times – these online modes of relating are the norm. I wonder if the types of interaction among all of their ideal personalities online will reduce their opportunities to learn to have effective relationships, or will alter their methods of growing from their personal relationships.

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.

Forgot to mention here that I have a new post up over at MediaShift. This one covers the innovations that Interweave Press and Gourmet are trying out for their new digital products. I think these are both pretty exciting projects that are exploring the “kinesthetic” potential of digital magazines, while also experimenting with social functionality and the possibilities for exciting user interfaces. I’m looking forward to seeing how these evolve.

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.)

I’m presenting on Saturday at the 13th CSU Symposium on University Teaching at CSU San Bernardino. My talk title is “Social Networking and Screencasts: A Powerful Combination.”

Some things have changed since I submitted my session proposal; I’m now using WordPress blogs to manage my classes, with help from Blackboard’s gradebook, and we’ve also learned that Ning – the site I planned to present about – will be eliminating free accounts. Ning may decide to offer some discounts or special programs for educators, but its path isn’t yet clear. So, my presentation will be a bit less definitive on the social networking angle than it might have been a month ago, but I hope I’ll still be able to offer my fellow CSU faculty some useful tools to consider for their own classrooms.

With regard to screencasts, I’m arguing that including them in a social networking-enabled course site, as I did on Ning, gives students not only the chance to benefit from multiple reviews of class content or demonstrations, but also the ability to discuss them with each other and the instructor at their leisure. The screencasts also save time for instructors and students on topics where multiple explanations are often necessary, as with some class procedures and content questions.

There are a number of other alternatives to Ning (a long crowdsourced list is here; the short list of possibilities I’d personally try is in this PDF handout). I’m sure some of these will offer a similar experience, and I’m also excited that many of them have mobile apps and texting capabilities so students can access their class materials and communicate with their classmates wherever they are.

Below are my slides and notes for the presentation. I welcome your feedback either before or after the talk!

The lines distinguishing magazines’ print and online content, their social media projects and their advertising will probably continue to blur.

“It might take 10 years until we figure out how to master this,” said [Matt] Milner [vice president of social media and community for Hearst Magazines Digital Media]. “Social media transcends departments — it’s beyond edit, beyond sales. It will inform more and more content decisions in a good way, but it’s going to take a little while.”

In my introductory media class today, I showed a video created by Wired magazine displaying their iPad/tablet edition prototype, and discussing their process of developing it.

Screenshot by Flickr user myuibe.

The big question that arose both in developing my MediaShift post and in my class this morning was: how will editorial and advertising content work together and yet also still remain distinct in this new form?

This seems like an ethical issue that hasn’t been explored fully just yet, as we ogle the iPad and consider its possibilities for shiny new content. (I include myself in that ogling.)

I’d like to know more about how magazines plan to deal with monetizing editorial content by increasingly integrating revenue-generating opportunities – like product purchase options – into editorial content, and how interactive advertising will co-exist with more traditional forms of editorial content. Advertisers will definitely want to take advantage of these opportunities, and magazines need to begin transitioning to this paradigm, as do other print media.

Though the editorial and advertising wall has always been more porous than it appeared, will the iPad bring it crashing down? I don’t think that’s too likely, but there are certainly some significant ethical and editorial concerns involved in its integration into the magazine world.

How far are readers willing to endure the integration of ads into content? What about e-books with built-in ads and links to the Web sites of products that are mentioned? This will be an interesting journey.