In case anyone reading this is interested, the Newspaper Department at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, seeks an experienced journalist with strong multimedia skills to join a department committed to preserving core journalistic competencies while teaching students to tell stories in online media. Work in the school's new Collaborative Media Room, and teach many of our 400 undergraduate and graduate students in the Newspaper and Magazine print majors to deliver content interactively and using multiple media.

Qualifications: At least 10 years of experience in the news environment, with a strong reporting and writing resume and facility with still and video capture and editing and/or interactive and database reporting. You must submit a portfolio that demonstrates your hands-on storytelling talent for multiple platforms. Master's or other advanced degree preferred. Tenure-track position at associate or assistant professor level. Previous teaching experience is not required, but you must show potential in the classroom.

Expect to teach traditional reporting and writing for print as well as for online delivery, and to also work with some of our broadcast professors and students. You should be able to play a significant role in our new visual storytelling class being prepared as a requirement for incoming freshmen in every one of our eight majors. The school is launching a content-managed, student-produced Web site in 2009, and it is a participant in the Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative.

This is a tenure-track, nine-month appointment, with a requirement to teach five classes per year and to pursue a research-creative agenda -- preferably related to manufacture and delivery of news and information online. The Newhouse School is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty and especially welcomes applicants from underrepresented groups. Syracuse University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Review of applications begins November 2008. Start: August 2009.

How to Apply: Candidates should visit http:www.sujobopps.com to read the detailed faculty postings and apply electronically. All positions require a cover letter, CV or resume and a list of four professional references. If you have any questions about the opening please contact Steve Davis, chair, Newspaper Department, at jsdavi02@syr.edu.

By Vin Crosbie at 04:27 PM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)

In May, when after a year of teaching graduate school courses, I wrote a ClickZ.com column lamenting how resistant to change many media schools are about New Media, I was amused when my friend Jeff Jarvis tried to hijack my column and turn it into an advertisement for his smaller and competing school.

"Reading Vin Crosbie's piece about the resistance to change and general obstructionism he has found teaching at journalism school (he doesn't say it, but he has spent the year at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University), it makes me triply glad I am teaching at CUNY [City University of New York] Graduate School of Journalism. This will come off as blatant self-promotion for the school but so be it....When I arrived at CUNY, I feared I would find what Vin did. But I haven't, not at all. I thought I might be marginalized as the crazy guy. But that hasn't happened....Instead, in the last few months, I've been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues' receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We've had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education."

Reading that, I felt like an American does when he reads a Hungarian or Malaysian write, 'Look at all the trouble the U.S. economy is in! Come start your new business in my country, whose economy is growing.'

Well, much as I love Budapest and Kuala Lumpur and congratulate their countries about their economy's growth, I'd much rather be working here in the United States. Indeed, when my one-year contract to teach graduate school courses at Syracuse University expired a week after I wrote my column and that university offered to renew it, I did so without hesitation, despite offers from other media schools.

There might be some old-fashioned professors, including a few obstructionists, in my school, as there are at most schools, but I'd rather help navigate a supercarrier with its awesome firepower, than serve in the navy of a smaller country of lesser prowess. When I recently read about Arizona State University receiving a $552,000 grant "to create an incubator where students will learn how to create and launch digital media products," I had a similar feeling as I sat in my office within Syracuse University's 72,000 square-foot, $32.5 million dollar Newhouse III building, which is devoted to New Media.

With all due respect to Jeff and his school, I was miffed about seeing my column hijacked into an ad for another school. I've been meaning to respond. Had I known someone would use what I wrote to tout another school, I would have balanced the disadvantages I mentioned by also mentioning my school's overwhelming advantages.

Jeff is improving CUNY. As he has written, he's teaching his school's faculty how to use blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and Twitter. We're doing that here at Syracuse, too. Moreover, the other New Media professors and I have begun cross-training Syracuse faculty, whose ranks number several times larger the size of those at other media school. We've begun teaching photography, audio, and video to the professors in the newspaper, magazine, advertising, and public relations departments, and also teaching all of the schools' professors how to build and operate Web sites (including Dreamweaver and XML), nonetheless to use RSS, blogware, etc. Our efforts are helped by having all three Newhouse School buildings networked with 25 miles of 100-gigabyte Ethernet onto a 72-terabyte server array. Our supercarrier has nuclear propulsion.

At Syracuse, we've also been lucky to have some wonderful guest speakers in the school. Sports broadcaster Bob Costas was in today, as was ESPN's Mike Turico last week. I want my New Media Business students to listen in particular to Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts and Optimedia CEO Antony Young, who each will be here next month. Last semester, I had Rob Curley, Bob Cauthorn, and Rafat Ali each meet with my New Media Business class.

Those are only some of the reasons why I'm now in my second academic year of teaching at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Last year, I taught New Media Business as two weekly classes over 15 weeks, a total of 28 classes not counting mid-term and final exams. This year, because of the school's class scheduling and my classroom preference, I'm teaching it as 14 once per week classes. So, the course's syllabus can vary semester by semester. However, here is what I'm teaching this semester:

Continue reading "Life Aboard an Academic Supercarrier" »

By Vin Crosbie at 09:48 PM | Permalink Comments (1) TrackBacks (0)

Defining what the term New Media means and its potential. Ten minutes from a New Media Business conducted at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on September 3, 2008, by Adjunct Professor and Senior Consultant about Executive Education in New Media Vin Crosbie.

By Vin Crosbie at 08:42 PM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)

In the second part of my essay, Transforming American Newspapers, I mentioned several corollary effects that occur when the sheer number of Media vehicles radically increases. However, I inadvertently omitted two other corollary effects.

The primary business model of most Mass Media vehicles (newspapers, magazines, broadcast programs, etc.) is to attract sufficient numbers of consumers so that the vehicle will attract advertisers who will pay to place their advertisements either adjacent or interstitial to the content that attracts the consumers. The more consumers the vehicle attracts, the higher the rates the advertiser are willing to pay and the more money the vehicle earns.

Yet when the sheer number of Media vehicles radically increases, the median number of consumers attracted to any vehicle decreases because the total number of consumers are spread across many more vehicles (the so-called 'fragmentation' of audiences). That tends to reduce the median revenues of those vehicles. Mass Media vehicles try to compensate for this by (1) 'dumbing' the quality of their content, attempting to attract a larger audience by appealing to a lower common denominator and restore larger numbers of consumers.

That corollary effect is why so many television networks have 'dumbed down' (a wonderful technical term) their programs. The plethora of 'reality' programs are examples. Other examples are how formerly 'quality ' programs or 'quality' networks are now purveying content of questionable quality. For instance, the Biography television program on the Arts & Entertainment Network used to broadcast biographies of Einstein, Picasso, and Michelangelo, but now broadcasts biographies of Madonna, Jim Carey, and Britney Spears. Or, for instances, how the Learning Channel used to broadcast programs about mathematics, science, and the humanities but now broadcasts programs about purchasing real estate, upgrading wardrobes, and home furnishings.

The another corollary effect that I inadvertently omitted is similar. When the sheer number of Media vehicles radically increases and the median number of consumers attracted to any vehicle decreases, (2) Mass Media vehicles become more timid, fearing further loss of consumers. No surprise.

Both of these effects are caused by the radical increase in the supply of media vehicles consumers now have. Both doom us to increasingly crass content on television and, more often than not, more timid content in all Mass Media nowadays.

By Vin Crosbie at 09:43 PM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)

Expert at estimating and forecasting the amount of unexpected chores my clients might face when completing tasks, I can woefully underestimate and overlook the unexpected when I'm trying to complete my own. I'm now more than two weeks past when I promised to post the third part of my four part essay Transforming American Newspapers. I didn't expect the reaction the first two parts received.

I expected negative reactions and disputes from newspaper executives and media academics. The contretemps I received instead were requests from American and European journals to write derivatives of the essay. I've written those articles (choosing to write for those trade journals that would pay for the work), but doing so had consumed almost all my free time during the past two weeks, when at Syracuse University I'd simultaneously begun teaching my graduate school class in New Media Business for news organizations, a full-time job in itself.

So, please pardon my delay. Part Three of the essay is written (most of it was written a year ago) and I hope to post it midweek, once I have time to review and edit it one last time. Meanwhile, I has class lectures, slides, and presentations to prepare by Wednesday, and that paid academic work takes precedence over providing free consulting advice online.

±
Speaking of academia, I was writing categorically, not personally, when last month I wrote that:

"I went back to school approximately this time last year. I'd hoped that news media academics might have the answers. What I found was that...the academics don't. In fact, most media academics are even further behind than the industry executives."

I know dozen of media academics who are very savvy about the problems facing American daily newspapers. So if you're an academic, you're probably one of them. Don't take my criticism of all academics personally.

My criticism of media academics distills to this: In the fields of engineering, medicine, law, science, and computer science, the academics conceive the new theories and solutions, which those industries follow and adopt. But in the field of media, it is the academics who follow the industry. At this time when the media industry is lost and desperately needs new theories and solutions, where is the media academy?

±
Did you know that one-third of all the journalists imprisoned worldwide are online journalists? Or that more online journalists are imprisoned than broadcast journalists? Those facts shouldn't be surprising when you realize that objective journalists who live or report in repressive regimes cannot get broadcast licenses, so they report via online.

I'm formulating a graduate school course next Spring about Using New Media to Circumvent Censorship. I'm hoping to draw upon case studies and experiences from the Media Development Loan Fund, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières), the World Press Freedom Committee>/a>, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Albert Einstein Institute, and other organizations devoted to the free press in repressive regimes. If you happen to know of a case worth study, please let me know.

±
Entering an Apple Computers store to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office 2008 for one of my Macintoshes (I use both Macs and PCs), I was surprised to see there are still long lines to purchase iPhones. I wonder how they'll feel later this year when the first of the gPhones appear in competing stores? The first 'Google phones' will be on sale as early as next month.
±

By Vin Crosbie at 01:53 PM | Permalink Comments (1) TrackBacks (0)

(Continued from Part 1)

Violating the Principle of Supply & Demand

If the major reason for the American daily newspaper industry's demise were its stories contained too many dangling participles, then the industry could more easily comprehend its situation than instead hearing that the reason was it had violated the Principle of Supply & Demand.

The understanding of economics, particularly media economics, has never been its strong suit, except if the topic is how many tons of newsprint to buy, how many points a major stock market dropped, or how cut expenses to match revenues. Most newspaper publishers, editors, or journalists tends to equate economics as solely the science of government financial policy, household spending, Wall Street speculation, and petroleum pricing. They don't understand or have forgotten that a major branch of it is the behavioral science of Microeconomics - the study of how individuals make decisions to allocate their time and activities.

The main paradigm of microeconomics is known as rational choice theory or rational action theory, which states that individuals choose the best action according to their preferences and what constraints of supply, demand, time, and access face them. In it now lays the demise of American daily newspapers as we know them.

How did the American daily newspaper industry violate the Principle of Supply & Demand by failing to adapt the industry's core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 35 years? To understand how, both start and end at the roots of the newspaper industry.

Start in the European city of Strasbourg during 1605 when the world's first newspaper began publication. It used a technology developed there 164 years earlier by the metalworker Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented a device for producing innumerable copies of the same text. (Please keep that concept in mind, because it's now moldering the newspaper industry). The Supply & Demand equation for accessing daily changing information was then quite the opposite it is today: Consumers had little or no supply of daily news until the daily newspaper. So to produce newspapers, this adaption of Gutenberg's book printing technology spread quickly worldwide.

Some modern critics of newspapers say the industry is leaden and 'doesn't think outside the box.' They probably don't realize the historical irony that underlay their criticisms. The core of Gutenberg's technology was a box containing lead type whose impressions could print innumerable copies of the same thing. In that core is the inherent limitation that it produces the same edition for everyone. Although in the 19th Century steam and later electrical power speeded Gutenberg's technology and the introduction of offset lithography during the middle of the 20th Century eliminated its use of lead, the analog technology used to produce today's daily newspapers is still Gutenberg's. Indeed, today's analog printing technology still has the same limitation that it had in Gutenberg's days - it produces the same edition for everyone.

That technological limitation delineated the newspaper industry's editorial and advertising practices during the past four centuries. Because each edition had a finite number of pages and was printed by analog technology had to produce the same for everyone at once, newspaper editors had to select stories according to two criteria:

Continue reading "Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2)" »

By Vin Crosbie at 11:15 PM | Permalink Comments (2) TrackBacks (3)