At the AEJMC conference, Richard Karpel, executive director of the ASNE, provided an assessment of the state of the newspaper industry in the US. He said the US had 1,400 daily newspapers. In 2009, the industry had lost 5,200 jobs, about 11% of full time jobs. This compares to 5,900 job losses in 2008 Now there were around 41,000 jobs in the newspaper business. Karpel expected the decline in positions

The state of the media in the US was the focus of one of the panels at the AEJMC annual conference. Bob Papper of Hofstra University reported on the state of TV news in the US from a survey of local TV stations. His message was that things aren’t as bad as they seem. TV news was still making money, though there has been a slight decline in revenue, coupled with

John Russial of the University of Oregon posed a provocative question at the AEJMC annual conference. In a research paper, he and co-author Arthur Santana studied whether the industry wants every journalist to have cross-platform skills. In a survey of 210 US newspapers, he found that different members of the newsrooms rated skills differently. Russial argued that if role convergence was real, then newsrooms would share a common view of the

At the AEJMC conference, Serena Carpenter of Arizona State talked about her experiences in teaching social media. She only spends between 6 to 8 hours teaching social media but tries to weave it into other parts of the course. Her main areas of focus are blogging, Twitter and reputation management. Carpenter said students tend to treat all social media like Facebook, so it is important to teach them the different

During a panel at the AEJMC annual conference on rebooting journalism education, Rich Beckman from the University of Miami in Florida highlighted one of the big issues in journalism schools. Beckman spoke about the need to have faculty with the skills, knowledge and experience to teach new and emerging forms of digital journalism. He argued that re-educating existing faculty members is a myth. In his view, taking a weekend course does not

An early morning session at the AEJMC conference, educators discussed one of the big issues in journalism education: what do journalism students need to learn to succeed in the industry. Amy Eisman of American University outlined six challenges to rebooting the curriculum within an academic environment: Glacial pace of change at universities Belief that established ways of doing things are best Slow acceptance of game changers such as wikileaks Hesitation