Full frontal nudity in a journalism faculty discussion

That’s what you might call a misleading sensational headline, but you are still reading.

The topic is a serious one: A North Carolina university’s dismissal of its student newspaper adviser over a story that might otherwise just sound like 1970s  nostalgia. A couple of months ago, the paper published photos of a streaker at a fall football game. Autumn leaves or not, the editors didn’t do any “digital fig-leafing” of the images.

Of course the university can’t comment on the details of a personnel matter, but the Student Press Law Center quickly came to the defense of adviser Paul Isom. (His position, incidentally, reported to a marketing and publicity official at the university, not to the journalism faculty.)

“They’re clearly punishing the adviser for something he not only didn’t control, but legally couldn’t control,” Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said.

The SPLC alert prompted a robust discussion by journalism faculty on an Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication mailing list — more than 30 messages in 24 hours, during a semester break. Professors addressed topics including the independence of student newspapers, community standards regarding nudity, the sensitivities of college administrators and public relations departments, and the responsibilities of student media advisers — as well as a need for student media advisers to get both their rights and responsibilities spelled out in advance.

You do not need to be a member to read the discussion here:

http://aejmc.net/pipermail/news-list_aejmc.net/2012-January/thread.html

I hope sharing the story with my intro class this semester will help me do a better job of addressing issues of sensitivity, diversity, community standards, taste and “responsibility.” Those issues aren’t just for editors-in-chief anymore, not when anyone can register a WordPress.com account like this one and start “publishing” to the world.

Along with my advice about “acting responsibly,” deciding whatever that means, I’ll also point out that student editors have a First Amendment right to ignore their advisers — but that they should be wise enough to listen, discuss and make thoughtful, informed decisions. For example, I wonder how many student publications have drafted their own editorial guidelines about possibly offensive images or language? I wonder if those guidelines were written when the publication’s audience was just on-campus, not a Web-published edition available to anyone in the world?

There might even be a nice research paper topic there for a grad student or two.

For inspiration, I’d point students to the ethics-related pages at: SPJ, SPLC and its FACT team, RTDNA and NPPA, and the College Media Association, including its page for advisers.

For the recent specific case, here are additional news reports mentioned in the journalism faculty discussion:

• http://theeastcarolinian.com/ (The school paper itself)
• http://theeastcarolinian.com/?p=2633 University fires student media director
• Greenville Daily Reflector
• WNCT.com Adviser Fired story
• WITN.com Adviser Fired story
• Raleigh News & Observer story (includes interview with adviser… N&O story has legs: Boston Herald)
• ScholarsAndRogues.com post by Denny Wilkins of St. Bonaventure, with its own discussion thread.
• Streaker isn’t college’s greatest embarrassment — by Gene Policinski, senior vice president/executive director, First Amendment Center, Nashville.

Nostalgic footnote: The first time I was on a television “Face the State” panel, it  was as education editor of The Hartford Courant, and the newsmaker was the relatively new president of the University of Connecticut, Glenn W. Ferguson. Between questions about political influence and university budget cuts, I threw in one about the Yale Daily News acknowledging that UConn led Yale in streaking that year. I thought his response — something about looking forward to Yale’s recognizing UConn’s excellence in other areas — was his best remark that day.

AEJMC conferencing via blog and tweet

While some ear troubles made me sensitive about flying to St. Louis, I still “made it to…” the AEJMC journalism educators’ conference there this past week by hanging out with my laptop and phone tuned to a Twitter “hashtag” of #aejmc11.

And, since I’m Web editor for the AEJMC Newspaper Division, I logged in and posted a list of the tweets that looked to be of the most interest to members of that division, updating the links a couple of times a day.

The division officially changes its name to “Newspaper & Online News Division” in a couple of months, so my page-of-tweets from the AEJMC conference should be timely. If nothing else, it’s a place where division members can find each other’s Twitter handles.

In the spirit of “walking the walk” of “Online,” I also did a little e-mail campaigning to invite other division officers to use the division blog to post news from the conference, and Rutgers University’s Susan Keith, teaching standards co-chair and past head of the division, came through in a big way. She posted several items after the division’s business meeting, including annual award-winners.

As for the tweets list, although it was a “blog post,” I returned to it several times during the weekend and finally had posted about 40 Twitter handles and links provided by conference goers, including conference papers, reports and slide presentations.

It was so much like being in St. Louis that I’m tempted to go out and buy a $5 Budweiser! (You have to read the list of tweets to get the reference.)

Telecommuting from the Blueridge to the Rockies

I couldn’t go to the AEJMC convention in Denver this week, but I feel like I’m halfway there, following Twitter feeds and other online activities…

I’ve been updating the Newspaper Division’s blog with whatever I find online that might interest its members…

• For the stay-at-homes and back-at-homes
  (Twitter feeds and an archived “live” video about some online hyperlocal innovation involving newspaper companies)
• Virtual Denver: Twin presentation of twin surveys
  (Narrated Powerpoint slides online about the educational needs of today’s journalists, plus the related conference paper, online at a document-sharing site)

I’m still waiting to hear whether the “Newspaper Division” is still that, or has added “and Online Journalism” to its name, or named a committee to write a clarifying “statement of purpose” for one of AEJMC’s oldest and largest groups… and, come to think of it, to find out whether I’ve been re-elected its Web editor despite my perennial inability to get to the conventions.

Meanwhile, I keep thinking of an Eddie from Ohio song, with this lyric…

you think you’ll find some mountains
in western colorado
fifty weeks of snowy peaks
is where you’re gonna be
but babe the rocky mountains are gradually eroding
the hills of coors are nothing more
than blue ridge wannabes…

Celebrating first “summer of code,” Web launchings, 15 and 20 years ago

A few months more than 20 years ago, the pleasure boating monthly Soundings published an article headlined “Computers link boaters oceans apart,” probably the first time I managed to get something about the Internet into good-old-fashioned print.  The piece actually had more to do with commercial computer networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and BIX than the free-for-all Internet, but it did mention the ARPANET, BITNET and UUCP, all components of the pre-Web ‘net.

That was February of 1990, the year that computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee started defining the HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol that would link Internet resources together like never before. I guess that means this is the 20th anniversary of the Web’s first “summer of code,” now an annual ritual for programmers.

Berners-Lee had proposed his “World Wide Web” idea in 1989 and spent a year at it, delivering the first browser and server by Christmas, and introducing it to an audience of physics researchers and technologists over the next year or two. The thing really took off in 1993 and 1994, after the University of Illinois’ NCSA released Mosaic, a free browser that used graphics and worked on  PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the Unix machines the research community used in the Web’s inaugural years.

That was enough to send me back to grad school — for a faster Internet connection — at the University of North Carolina, home of some of the first hypertext research and some of the first Web servers in the U.S., including sunsite.unc.edu, which I had been reaching from a Connecticut boatyard over a modem, a service called BIX and a text-only browser link to “laUNChpad.unc.edu.”

In Chapel Hill, Sunsite’s boss, Paul Jones, told me to give him my resume in HTML, so I figured out just enough of the language, using (I think) an early ncsa.uiuc.edu tutorial. But before Sunsite came up with an opening, the Raleigh News & Observer launched NandO.net, and I landed a part-time job preparing news stories for the Web at what was one of the Internet’s first 24/7 news sites.

In the beginning, we were publishing Web versions of stories from all or most of the wire services the N&O subscribed to for its print editions — treating the Web site as just another edition of the newspaper, but one that could handle dozens of new or updated stories every hour, drawing on the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times wire service, Bloomberg News and more. (There must have been some very interesting executive discussions of just what publication rights were covered by those wire contracts!)

The real surprise for me came as the school year was wrapping up — a call from Soundings‘ editor, Marleah Ross, announcing that my old employer, the monthly tabloid subtitled “The nation’s boating newspaper,” was launching a Web site of its own, and that I was invited to write the cover story for the August 1995 issue, then follow up with a regular column called “Data Waves.” The goal was to tell boaters why on earth they should care about the World Wide Web.

Fifteen years later, Soundingspub.com is still online, and I’ve just spent some nostalgic weeks documenting its online beginnings, and paying tribute to its late publisher, Jack Turner. See the current issue of the aptly titled Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. My essay “Getting Under Way in New Media” is downloadable as a PDF file here, but I also recommend the other articles in the journal, including editor Carol Schwalbe’s essay on “Finishability: An Antidote to Information Overload.” (Note, as of this writing the edition’s directory is at a “current issue” address, but it will be moved to an archival page in the fall, when a new edition comes out.)

So what’s ‘a newspaper’?

Update: Remembering when an attempt to give away New York Times failed. See end.

Does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?

That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”

So today I “founded” two newspapers:

Well, maybe I just founded one and “found” the other, or just found both. I can’t tell whether Paper.li required any action by me — or anyone with a Twitter account.

In both cases, the paper.li/feedname site (http://paper.li/bobstep or paper.li/aejmc) includes links to items from feeds the person or organization by that name subscribes to. It doesn’t mean the person even read any of those items.

A sidebar shows selections from the person or organization’s own feed, calling their author “curator” of the paper.li page.

Background: AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which — like a newspaper — is broken down into sections. One section is the Newspaper Division, for which I keep a Web page and co-author a blog. Coincidentally, our division is pondering whether its name “Newspaper” is still relevant in this day and Web-age.

Apologies  if anyone reading the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog came over here for more details and got only a sense of deja vu. Originally, that post didn’t have any pictures, this one did, and I was going to say more here, but getting the images to show up in two different WordPress systems was too much distraction. (Worth 1,000 words, but also many minutes.)

Update (as promised above): I must add one more thing, inspired by wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.

While I understand the technology and can find the list of 199, I wonder whether the keepers of the Times brand name will understand… and whether anyone stumbling on that page will realize that the stories might not have been written by anyone at the Times. Actually, most of the feeds twitter.com/nytimes subscribes to look like feeds from Times reporters, departments or associates, but their Tweets could be links to non-Times sources. In fact, while I’m typing this latest update the lead item on paper.li/nytimes is actually a story from The Guardian about that other Times in London.

When it comes to use of the “New York Times” name, I wonder if the institution has developed a sense of humor (or modesty) in the past 24 years?

That’s because when I saw that “New York Times Daily” nameplate, I flashed back to 1986 in computer land. That was when the Infocom software/game company, publishers of Zork! (and my favorite, “Leather Goddesses of Phobos”) were convinced by NY Times lawyers to change the name of their little 8 1/2 by 11 user-group newsletter, The New Zork Times, because someone thought a Zork was too much like a York, or something.

The Cambridge company’s response was a name-the-newsletter contest, with the winner to get a free subscription to The New York Times.

In the end, the winner wanted an Infocom game instead, and the headline read “NY Times Can’t Be GIVEN Away.” (Holy cow, it’s still around at an NZT archive.)

J-School Introspection for Thanksgiving Break

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review has enough discussion of the role of universities in the future of journalism to cover the Thanksgiving table… or many of the hours during the holiday school break, for those of us who get one.

• Academe and the Decline of News Media
• University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive
• Let’s Strengthen the Supply Side of Serious Journalism:
  Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News
• Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Tenure:
  Embedding Journalists in Academe
• I’ve Read the News Today, Oh Boy
• We Need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’
• Nota Bene: A Peripatetic Press:
  News from Far Away

(In cases where the Chronicle put one headline on its link list and another one on the page, I’ve included both.)

Follow-up and related articles:

• from UNC’s J-school dean

New Blog for AEJMC Newspaper Division

After a half-dozen years struggling to find time to keep the AEJMC Newspaper Division’s Web pages up to date, I’ve added a WordPress blog and — more importantly — a co-editor to help.

The blog is: http://aejmc.net/news
The home page (with a headline feed from the blog) is http://aejmc.net/newspaper

Bill Broun of East Stroudsburg University is the co-editor — and probably will make more use of the site than I do, now that we have it up and running.