The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference brings together academics from all over the US and beyond to present research, discuss trends and network with colleagues.

The hotel lobby is full of people with laptops, as the wifi is free there but paid for in the rooms. But as J D Lasica found out, you’d be hard pressed to find out what people are saying at the conference unless you are actually here in Washington DC.

Despite the number of laptops, no one seems to be blogging from the event. Ironically, though, the AEJMC has assembled a crew of undergraduate and graduate students, led by faculty, to produce a daily newspaper on the talks and discussions.

So J D Lasica should be able to get all the information he wants. The problem is that he needs to be in DC as the AEJMC Reporter is not available online. It is only available as a print product.

I find this astounding, especially since last year’s AEJMC Reporter was on the web. For a profession all about the diffusion of ideas, this seems a staggering step backwards.

The only information on the AEJMC site is a handful of entries on its blog and none of it is that informative. As the print paper says, “student reporters will also be posting stories and images, occasionally, on the AEJMC forum”. They should be posting ALL the material online, not just some bits and pieces.

If you are really desperate to get an idea of the research being presented here, at least you can read the abstracts. The full papers are supposed to follow.

UPDATE: Since this posting, the AEJMC has put up a bunch of articles about the conference on its forum. They were all posted on Sunday, the last day of the conference. It is good to see this material online, but it would have been better to have the reports posted in a more timely fashion.

Print PDF