With journalism trends shifting, the audience is becoming more active gathering news. No longer are readers just reading a news story. They are commenting on it, blogging about it and sharing it widely via e-mail. Shyam Sundar, professor and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, no longer calls Internet news gatherers “the audience.” “The idea of audience itself is gone,” he said. “They are not audiences anymore. They’ve actually become users. This is a key terminological, metaphorical and also a key reality term.” With the expanding demographics of Internet users and the blurring of the line between the sender and receiver of information, many participants agreed that mass communication research should focus on the users or audience rather than the message.
PHIL MEYER
Graduating journalism students now have to be “superjournos” equipped with a broad skill set to land jobs in an increasingly competitive industry, said Gil Thelen, executive director of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors and former editor and publisher of The Tampa Tribune.
both old and new media forms to get their information. The news industry needs help balancing economic stability and journalistic integrity – and quickly. Journalism scholars must respond by choosing the right research to explore. “Any research that would be done, it would have to be done very fast because the way we’re assembling our news site today is different than it was six months ago, which is different from the way it was six months before that,” Briggs said. “The only way the industry is going to find out how to make money with journalism or journalism-related things is to keep experimenting, to keep trying lots of things, to increase its rate of failure,” said Meyer. The symposium encouraged new approaches for the industry to which participants have dedicated their careers. Karen Jurgensen, former editor of USA Today, called the experience “cathartic.” » continued on page 47
Photo by York Wilson
“I think navigators need to know even more about the nuances of the media landscape that their audiences are using and to try to ask not just what their audiences are using or watching or reading, but why they’re adopting new ways of watching and reading these and how they’re combining that,” said Anne Johnston, associate dean for graduate studies and professor in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Johnston said that how audiences assemble their media needs to be explored, citing that many people today bundle above: Phil Meyer speaks at the symposium as J. Walker Smith and Kenneth Blake look on.
Photo by York Wilson
left: The “Raising the Ante” symposium assembled in the Freedom Forum Conference Center at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
SUMMER 2008
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