This year, the ONA annual conference has provided a platform for academics to share their research with the industry.
Leslie-Jean Thornton from the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University and Susan Keith at Rutgers [initially I incorrectly said she was at ASU] looked at how newspapers and TV stations were adapting to the web.
Broadly, what they found was that newspapers were far more dynamic in using the web, particularly in providing video online. In their words, print was “eating the broadcasters’ lunch”, whereas TV operations were not moving significantly into the text arena.
Unfortunately, they also found that newspapers and TV were still approaching online journalism as an extension of their current operations, rather than as a separate medium. As a result, 100% of newspapers and TV stations repurposed content for online.
Thornton and Keith concluded that their study showed that journalism students should learn either to work in the traditional disciplines of print or broadcast, with a strong grounding in multimedia.
This is how journalism has been taught for years. But as journalism changes and the media environment becomes increasingly digital, it seems an out-dated approach. After all, j-schools face the dual challenge of preparation students for the newsrooms of today and tomorrow.
The findings in the research from Thornton and Keith contrasts with how students get the news. Marcus Messner from the School of Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University looked at how students communicate.
Unsurprisingly, virtually all of them carry mobile phones. Only 3% turn to print for the news, preferring instead the web and TV news shows. And when they go online, students turn to Google, CNN and Yahoo, with only 4% going to a newspaper’s website.
Only a handful of students regularly visited the websites of major newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times, even though they were ranked as highly credible. The students didn’t use political sites like Politico or the Huffington Post.
The session was live-blogged by one of the student journalists at the ONA, so you can get a good rundown of everything that was said there.
PDF