U.S. Web Advertising Exceeds Newspaper Print Ads in 2010, eMarketer Says – Bloomberg.
A trend worth watching and knowing about. Digital strategies are as important for news organizations as for marketers. Glad we cover both in so many of our courses.
Many of you have heard of the Google Books Project, an effort to digitize as many books as possible in three main categories — public domain and out of copyright, out-of-print but still in copyright, and in-print — in order to make them all Google-able. The project involves both cooperation with public research libraries to scan books on the supply side, and efforts to sell electronic versions of these scanned books though a new Google Bookstore on the demand side. It is an effort not without controversy.
Recently Google has begun to roll out some tools for scholars to mine this incredible database of scanned literature. One of the most intriguing of these is the Google Ngram Viewer. Here’s the description:
When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years. Let’s look at a sample graph:
This shows trends in three ngrams from 1950 to 2000: “nursery school” (a 2-gram or bigram), “kindergarten” (a 1-gram or unigram), and “child care” (another bigram). What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are “nursery school” or “child care”? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are “kindergarten”? Here, you can see that use of the phrase “child care” started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking “nursery school” around 1970 and then “kindergarten” around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.
I went ahead and made a Google Ngram graph of “journalism, advertising, public relations“:
Not sure this chart offers any easy conclusions, but it’s a fascinating opening to ask some more interesting questions. Any other ideas for using this tool?
Glad to see SJMC and our Center for Journalism Ethics as part of this group of “major players” helping journalism move forward in uncertain times.
MediaShift . J-Schools Shift from Learning Labs to Major Media Players | PBS.
But these are days of uncertainty for journalism schools, as well. Colorado is facing a decertification and massive restructuring. Other schools, including ours, struggle for resources to keep moving forward.
Investments in journalism schools and centers are investments in society. Our founder, Willard Bleyer, once said the future of our democracy depends on the character of our newspapers. It depends on the strength of our schools and centers, as well.
This NPR piece is worth a read/listen.
Whats The Point Of Journalism School, Anyway? : NPR.
I’m troubled by the gloom-and-doom talk about j-schools for a number of reasons.
First, j-schools provide valuable training to prepare students to work in journalism, which is central to an informed and responsible democracy. Our founder, Willard Bleyer, once said, “the future of democratic government in this country depends upon the character of its newspapers.” I believe that (though I’d tie it to news organizations, not a paper medium). People can go on to be excellent journalists having never set foot in a journalism school. But universities that dedicate resources to training those who do want to serve as a check on government and institutions are properly recognizing the critical nature of robust and ethical journalism.
Second, j-schools are about more than training reporters. The gloom stories tend to be reductionist … 14,000 jobs lost in newspapers means no one will get a job, so why have the journalism schools in the first place? Baloney. Our j-school is about so much more than “j.” We educate kids who want to go into strategic communication, kids who want to go into public service, lawyers, teachers, even a doctor or two.
The central premise of all this is that no matter how you use the education we provide, we’re going to teach you how to write and teach you how to think. (Note to critics: that’s “how” to think, not “what” to think. I’m not about viewpoint orthodoxy.)
I cannot imagine a time in human history when these skills were more needed. The explosion of information available screams out for people who can gather it, analyze it and communicate about it. Pretty good justification for a journalism school, I think.
J-Schoolers, what are you going to do with the degree we help you earn? Alumni, what have you done with it?
A number of us around SJMC are sporting iPads this semester — either because we’ve purchased our own or because we’re involved in a nice pilot project to get iPads into several SJMC courses this year, funded by the UW Library System. So I’ve found myself being asked “What do you use your iPad for?” — or more specifically, “How do you consume news on your iPad?”
For me, much of that answer is that I make little icon shortcuts for online news sites that I visit often. But I have some favorite apps as well. I like Instapaper because it helps me clip articles when I’m on my laptop and pick them up later when I’m on my iPad (or iPhone). The NPR app is great, though I find I just use my normal iTunes NPR podcasts more than the spiffy NPR app. I also use NetNewsWire for my RSS feeds now (since Bloglines is folding) because it integrates well with Google Reader. Again, NetNewsWire has an app for the iPad, an app for the iPhone, and a regular software package for my Mac — I like it when I’m using the same program on all three platforms. The NYT Editor’s Choice app is usually interesting. But honestly my main “news” app is — get ready — the Nook app for iPad. Yes, the Barnes and Noble rather clunky Kindle competitor has an iPad app, and they allow you to subscribe to periodicals. It’s not flashy but it gets the job done. I subscribe to the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New York Times through Nook. (Please hold the snarky jokes about how I’m incapable of reading anything not produced in the east coast megalopolis. It’s partially a function of what periodical subscriptions are available to be purchased right now.) The one thing I really like about the Nook app — and that I liked about my physical Kindle, too — is the distraction-free, text-heavy, no-advertisement format of those periodicals. And I should mention I’m reading a lot of e-books on my Kindle app for the iPad as well. In other words, I end up using my iPad for lots and lots of reading, even more than I do for web browsing.
How do the rest of you use these new tools?