Regular readers will know that I was blogging from last week’s Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina. For PBS Mediashift, I’ve put together a post looking at how journalism schools are using digital tools in the classroom, from geo-tagging to wikis to iPhones: The educational projects showcased at the Convergence and Society conference offered just a snapshot of what is happening in classrooms across North American

US newspapers don’t appear to be making the most of multimedia. A study from Missouri Western State University presented at the Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina found that the US press lagged behind the UK. The study, by Prof Robert Bergland, together with his students, Lisa Crawford, Sarah Noe, & Melody Ellsworth, studied 360 newspapers in the US, chosen at random. Here’s what they found: Video: 65% (97%

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Day two of the Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina starts off with an early panel on the internet and political engagement. The first presentation on the political power and the web, by PhD student Laurel Gleason at the Ohio State University, raises more questions than answers.  But they are all valuable questions. Gleason looked at how researchers and academics tend to view

Edie Rubinowitz of Northeastern Illinois University provided a fascinating insight into Chicago Public Radio’s community radio project, :Vocalo, at the Convergence and Society conference. And yes, it is supposed to be “:Vocalo”, as Rubinowitz explained at the start of the talk.  The colon is a deliberate attempt to create an emoticon. :Vocalo is its own distinct radio station which downplays its relationship with Chicago Public Radio (CPR).  Rubinowitz explained that

Preliminary research presented at the Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina suggests that comments on a news story affect the perception of bias in the story itself. Michele Jones, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina, wanted to investigate the impact that comments had on credibility and reader perception of bias in the news She conducted an online experiment with 76 participants reading a story about abortion

Bartosz Wojdynski and Jessica Smith from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looked at whether there are demographic predictors of online content creation in their presentation at the Convergence and Society conference. Using data from Pew from 2005, they tried to work out whether it is true that young people tend to create more content online than an older generation. They found that this was generally true –

The Convergence and Society: The Participatory Web conference at the University of South Carolina kicked off with a session on convergence and citizen journalism. First up was Thomas Baggerman of Capital University, who has looked at US TV stations application of citizen media. His findings after looking at 103 TV websites confirms what other studies have shown. Most seek to control the kind of content from the public that is