Top 10 ways to get your paper disqualified by Pat Curtin

http://www.aejmc.org/home/2013/03/10-ways-disqualified/

Understanding AEJMC

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

• Divisions and interest groups
• Call for papers
• Paper acceptance rates

Bring on the Conference

Here's the link to the conference website. http://aejmcctec.com/midwinter/

 Remember that the deadline for Abstract submissions is Dec. 1, 2013, and you don't have anything to loose.

The more information we have, the less we know

News overload has been a research focus in the information age. Abundant news media compete for user’s attention. Information is no more a scarce resource, on the contrary, user’s attention becomes scarce. Perhaps the more information users have, the less they know due to news fatigue.  Earlier studies examined the factors influencing news overload(Holton & Chyi, 2012). Other studies also looked into the effect of news overload(York, 2013). Those studies address the influence on perception and attitude. Few study look into the impact of news overload on behavior (news consumption). As a result, I want to focus on how has news overload affected news consumption/media selection.

 Previous study indicates that the more exposure to news, the more people feel overload(York, 2013). It is important to see that will the feeling of new overload lead to selective exposure. If the relationship between news overload and selective exposure is positive, the implication would be that the more information news organization provide, the less readers will get.

On the other hand, readers are assumed to be “Consumer sovereignty”, which means readers can search the information based on their interest(Chyi,2009), in other words, readers should be more informed among overabundance information. Thus, based on the assumption of “consumer sovereignty”, readers tend to select the information they are interested or the information they need, rather than being overwhelmed. Thus here comes the hypothesis that

H1: the feeling of news overload is positive associated with selective perception

H2: the feeling of news overload is positive associated with selective exposure.

Previous study has proved that the positive relationship between news overload and news exposure, it is also important to know what would the news overload influence media use. Some study mentioned news segment and nichfication(Nordenson, 2008), but they didn’t points out the relationship between news overload and news segment or nichfication. It might be critical to examine the relationship between news overload and news segment or nichfication, which means, news overload may not be that bad. Readers know how to find what they need among overabundance information. Thus the media use under news overload is worthy to examine.

RQ1: What is the relationship between news overload and multiplatform news use.

RQ2: What kind of news media (news paper, TV news, online news, mobile news) will users tend to use under the feeling of news overload

RQ3: Will the users who feel less news overload tend to use more news media than the users who feel more news overload 

    Based on the previous research, more news exposure leads to the feeling of news overload. However, users may avoid too much information. Since there are the most information on the Internet. Comparing to the Internet, there are less information on the traditional media, so here come another hypothesis that

H3: the more feeling of news overload, users tend not to use Internet to get the news in order to avoid too much information.

H4: the more feeling of news overload, users tend to read newspaper to get the news rather than using Internet.

Chyi, Hsiang Iris. 2009. “Information Surplus in the Digital Age: Impact and    

          Implications.” In Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas, edited by Zizi   

          Papacharissi, 91–107. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. 2002. The Attention Economy:     Understanding the New             Currency of Business. Watertown, MA: Harvard  

 Doyle, G. (2010). From Television to Multi-Platform: Less from More or More for Less? Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 16(4), 431–449. doi:10.1177/1354856510375145

Holton, A. E., & Chyi, H. I. (2012). News and the overloaded consumer: factors influencing information overload among news consumers. Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking, 15(11), 619–24. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0610

Nordenson, B. (2008). Overload ! Columbia Journalism Review, (December), 30–42.

York, C. (2013). Overloaded By the News: Effects of News Exposure and Enjoyment on Reporting Information Overload. Communication Research Reports, 30(4), 282–292. doi:10.1080/08824096.2013.836628

When Temporal Physics and Journalism Collide

Something that may be under-appreciated about new media, at least in the present time, is its capacity to serve as a digital record of a person's lifespan content.

In 1984, I was a student at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) and working as sports editor of The Daily Helmsman, the four-day-per-week campus newspaper.  At the time, Memphis State's men's basketball team was a top 25 powerhouse, reaching the NCAA Final Four in 1985 before losing to eventual national champion Villanova.

That meant I got to cover a lot of home games that were also being nationally televised.  It was a rather exciting scene for a 19-year-old journalist, but I was more focused on my work for the campus newspaper during each game and didn't think much about games once they were completed, unless it was to review statistics or consider an angle for an upcoming article.  As time passed and I moved on to other places and people to write about, I gave little, if any, thought about my basketball beat at Memphis State.

But that was before this occurred last weekend:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGHzrExfei0

While on YouTube after looking at a college basketball-related link, I unexpectedly discovered that someone had uploaded several full game broadcasts of Memphis State basketball from 1984 and 1985.  Although you can't make out the faces in the background (this was well before HD broadcasting), I am one of the people sitting at the media table between both team benches in these videos.  As I began watching the game and the TV camera panned across the court, I became acutely aware of what I was experiencing -- here I was in Austin, Texas, in 2013, watching a college basketball game that I was also watching in Memphis, Tennessee, nearly 30 years earlier.  Not only that, but my present self was watching my past self watch the game, and my past self was sitting there on press row with no idea that his future self would one day be watching the same game through technology that didn't exist yet and a concept called "new media."

Granted, it's not exactly the same game; one is a live event, the other is an electronic recording of the event.  However, it does provide a strange type of parallax effect, psychologically and sensorially.  The content is the same and so is much of the stimuli - things like the sounds of the pep band playing, the sight of players running back and forth on the court, and the feelings of drama and excitement as the game continues.  All of this triggers memory, which produces its own stimuli and it isn't long before I start to re-experience other details of that point in time and space, like chowing down on hot dogs and chips in the media hospitality room before the game, or patiently awaiting a sports information department assistant to bring paper copies of the game stats at halftime.

Until this particular Saturday evening, two journalists, actually the same person, were blissfully unaware of such a peculiar connection across the time-space continuum.

One of us still doesn't know. 

Sample Experimental Study mentioned by the NY Times

http://cn.tmagazine.com/health/20131017/t17desk/en-us/

Qualitative Research Trustworthiness

Qualitative research has similar practices to the Validity and Reliability of quantitative methods; they're classified as Trustworthiness.

Gaining Trustworthiness:

• Credibility:
• Activities increasing the probability that credible findings will be produced
• Prolonged engagement
• Persistent observation
• Triangulation
• Peer debriefing
• Keeps the researcher "honest"
• Test working hypotheses
• Opportunity to develop and test next steps in methodology
• Catharsis to provide objective judgment
• Negative Case Analysis - adjusting and testing the hypothesis with hindsight
• Referential adequacy - recording materials
• Member Checks - testing data, analytic categories, interpretations, and conclusions with participants
• Transferability
• Thick description
• Dependbility
• Dependability audit
• Confirmability
• Confirmability audit
• All of the above
• Reflexive journal

All of this information comes from   Lincoln, Y. S. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry (Vol. 75). Sage.

Big Data

What is big data?

What's the implication for research methods?

An interesting/scary application --
http://cn.tmagazine.com/education/20131024/t24workscience/en-us/

What was the answer again?

I'm super interested in how memory might effect media consumers and the information that they process based on the ideas of Mere Exposure Effect which states that "mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus object enhances his attitude towards it." (Zajonc, 1968)  I'd like to look at this by performing a survey similar to that of Tavassoli, Shultz, and Fitzsimons in 1995 where they surveyed a number of people shortly after watching a television sporting event in order to verify whether they could recall the ads they saw, and whether their attitudes towards the company were positive or negative. I would hope to be able to eventually address the needs for news organizations to treat consumers of their respective mediums as clients that they are trying to engender that recall and positive attitude with.

Tavassoli, N. T., Shultz, C. J., & Fitzsimons, G. J. (1995). Program involvement: are moderate levels best for ad memory and attitude toward the ad?. Journal of Advertising Research.

Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of personality and social psychology, 9(2p2), 1.

Determining Sample Size

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pd006