The annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is where faculty in the field, mostly American, present research and argue about where journalism is going. In 2009 it met in Boston, and the AEJMC was wrestling with change much like the industry it studies.
The complaint made here was about tone: a conservative and at times reactionary register in the discussions, summed up by the phrase “blogging isn’t journalism”, still in circulation at the previous year’s conference.
Steve Fox, multimedia journalism coordinator at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, made the same case from inside the Boston meeting in a blog post that told the AEJMC to wake up. It was his first AEJMC, and he was dismayed by how print-centric it was. He noted that Dan Gillmor and Eric Newton had argued on a panel that academic institutions ought to be exactly where innovation and experimentation happen, and that this thinking was absent from most corners of the conference. Lamenting the role of Twitter in news delivery, in his account, was not the way to go, and educators had an opportunity at such gatherings to set the agenda for the industry’s future.
Fox’s sharpest observation was that “the us vs. them characterizations of bloggers and the twitterverse has dominated many discussions” at an organisation that was itself on Twitter. His conclusion was that the conversations needed shifting.