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Interesting discussion on SSRC President Calhoun’s site, right here, with numerous heavy-hitters in sociology and communications studies chipping in on the question–what is the future of the newspaper? I chipped in too, my comment is awaiting moderation.

Laurels to Dave Cohn, working hard on promoting his spot.us project and encouraging other aspiring young journos to embark on their own entrepreneurial ventures.

The idea is very simple, break the processes of journalism down into its constituent elements and try to crowd source the part that seems to have the hardest time right now, which is not the content production (as in citizen media, user-generated content, what not), but the funding.

Hence, four stepts.

1. People submit tips (if they want to, or journos dig stuff up).

2. Journalists pitch stories (so we are talking professionally produced content).

3. People fund pitches (crowd sources funding).

4. Stories are reported, anyone can publish (unless some media company buys exclusive rights, but that’s fine to, it brings in money for reporting, and funding is a central problem).

You can point out a million ways in which this won’t replace or compete with ‘the newspaper’, but don’t even begin singing that song, since that isn’t the point at all. The point is to get some (not all) important reporting done.

I have another little thing I’d like to point out–the very nature of this process brings out in the open some of the steps that come before a story is published, and it seems to me it pulls the material that spot.us can do a little away from ‘breaking news’ in the purest ‘stuff you had never heard about before’ variety. Here, the tip is public, the pitch is public, the funding will accumulate over a period of time, and only then will the final work be done. That takes time and some of that time is spend in public. I actually think this is largely a good thing. If one can say so without sounding too cute, I personally think a central problem with much news journalism is that it is too focused on the newness of news, and too little with why anyone would care. Classic academic complaint, I know.

I think it is an interesting project, and wish him well.

Apropos the discussion we had Tuesday about the future of communications as a field.

Doug Anderson, Dean of Penn State University’s College of Communication, on Poynter

“This fall, we enroll 3,654 undergraduates and 79 master’s and doctoral students. Of our 3,654 undergraduates, some 1,647 are freshmen and sophomores with the remaining 2,007 enrolled as advanced sophomores or juniors or seniors in one of our five majors. Our largest major is journalism, with 717 upper-division students.

We had nearly 2,500 applications last year for this fall’s freshman class. To say that interest in mass communication remains strong would be an understatement.”

(more substance, less fluff, at http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=154931)

I will be the teaching assistant on a course on ‘The Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies’ that Todd Gitlin will teach this spring at Columbia. The course is Mondays, 2-4pm. The syllabus is available here. Comments and suggestions welcome.

The communications colloquium that I organize at Columbia hosted a roundtable today, with Michael Schudson (Columbia/UC San Diego), Shannon Mattern (New School), and Helga Tawil-Souri (NYU) talking about different graduate-level courses they have taught to introduce incoming MA and PhD students to the field of communications studies/media studies.

The conversation was wide-ranging and interesting, and obviously partly reflected the institutions the three of them work at. We discussed the distance between the seemingly somewhat ambiguous and indistinct conceptual and theoretical definitions of what exactly the field is supposed to be, and the considerable demand there is for education and research in this area–as reflected by the influx of new students at all levels, and the amount of money that floats to various forms of communications-related research (if not always done in communications departments).

I can’t hope to summarize everything here, but a few observations.

Michael Schudson talked about three different orientations or programs in research in communications, a ‘derived’ that sees communications as determined by something else (economy, politics, organizational logics, what have you), a ‘contextual’ orientation that doesn’t really have an a priori view of the explanatory role of processes of communications, but puts them at the center of analysis nonetheless, and a ‘strong’ program that takes communications as a central and foundational force in human existence. He pointed out that the strong program may still have many adherent in communication studies (various descendants of Marshall McLuhan springs to mind), but that it, in his view, has failed to gain wider currency in the broader intellectual world–and that that is a good thing too. He argued that communications studies doesn’t need a strong program to be viable as a field of inquiry.

Shannon Mattern pointed to the challenge of introducing very different students with various backgrounds and expectations, and often decidedly non-academic interests (in management, in production, in performance) to theories of media and communication. She highlighted how the media program at the new school has tried to move away from an emphasis on ‘key thinkers’ and pre-packaged readers, and towards a thematic approach and an emphasis on theory as practice and live ideas, concretely asking the students to grapple with theories in the fields of media and technology, media and power, plus media and aesthetics. She mentioned that the relatively large size of the media program at the New School helped the department maintain a critical mass where both students and faculty would routinely be asked to step out of their comfort zone and deal with new areas of production, practice, and theory, and mentioned the interesting idea of offering university-wide skills courses in media production akin to writing courses, and for much the same reason–everybody should be equipped to communicate effectively, and that arguably takes more than writing today.

Helga Tawil-Souri spoke about NYU’s transition from the media ecology paradigm inherited from Neil Postman, and towards an uncertain (but no doubt interesting) future. She described how the faculty and comparable programs across the U.S. had been canvassed to map out a master list of core readings that individual courses could then be build from. In contrast to a model of introducing students to the field by introducing them to the faculty at the school they attend (one that Michael mentioned Stanford has used, and that plays a role in the proseminar taught at Columbia too), she explained that at NYU, a conscious decision had been taken to bascially ban work by NYU’s own faculty from the core. The idea being that students would be introduced to their work in other courses.

In the discussion, we talked about the strengths and weaknesses of communication studies as a multi-disciplinary field that arguably imports more than it exports. Todd Gitlin remarked that the lack of export probably has more to do with the protectionism of adjacent fields, and that we therefore shouldn’t worry too much about it–what looks like a weakness to some, a conceptually and empirically heterogenous field, can in fact be precisely the strength of communications research–no one will tell you, ‘that project does not beling in communications!’, no ideas or avenues of inquiery are barred in advance (even if they are of course still always explored at the investigators own risk and cost in terms of time and effort). Julia Sonnevend provided a happy note towards the end by basically validating this idea by pointing out that precisely the fluid and open nature of the field was what had made her decide to opt for communications as the disciplinary and institutional home for her work, over more established and clearly demarcated neighboring disciplines. Cheers to that. And thanks to all for a good dicussion.

With the elections over, this phase of my field work on U.S. electoral campaigns is over. It has been exhilarating, and I am deeply grateful to candidates, campaign staffers, and volunteers for their hospitality and willingness to answer (most) of my questions. Now, I’m back to doing interviews, attending conferences, and reading and writing. Bits and pieces of my findings will make their way into papers I hope to present at MPSA and ICA in the Spring.

I will be in Turkey for the next couple of weeks. I hope to meet a couple of local journalists, intellectuals, and activists, so all contacts are much appreciated. I’ll be in Istanbul and on the Western coast mainly.

on the conference front, I’ve just returned from the International Communication Association‘s annual conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. I presented two papers, one about the public that is still only the raw material for an argument, and one on blogs I want to submit for publication some time soon. Email me at rkn2103 [at] columbia . edu if you have any questions or would like to read one of the papers.

in addition to presenting, I saw very interesting presentations by a number of people, including a great discussion of media ethnography amongst Georgina Born, S. Elizabeth Bird, and others, a very interesting analytical paper on media output concentration in France and the U.S. by Rodney Benson, and many others.

April 29, Professor Charles ‘Chuck’ Tilly died. I was fortunate enough to be in the last class he taught, and to learn not only from his classroom presence and wonderfully orchestrated class, but also from his geniunely collaborative contentious politics workshop, his prolific writings, and the comments he generously offered on my own work. Let this post join the flurry of emails amongst former students and collaborators, all bearing testimony to all that he has done as a person and an academic to show what it can all be about. Though he is gone, I still think of this as the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Thanks, Chuck.

I’ll be in London Thurday and Friday for a conference at Royal Holloway, University of London, called Politics: Web 2.0. I am presenting work-in-progress on ‘The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload’. Based on some field research I have done on the role of new media in primary campaigns here in the US, I want to give some push-back on the notion that new media simply lowers the costs of communication. While that is certainly true, and has been argued forcefully, most recently by Clay Shirky in his very, very interesting book, Here Comes Everybody, I want to add to that the complications that follows from precisely that–when costs of communicating are low for every individual, and the number of platforms of communication is increased, there will simply be more communication, and the aggregate transaction costs are not easy to keep down, and this creates all sorts of complications of overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload.

my paper is available here. Comments are most welcome!

abstract below

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