Convergent Journalism

Editor Positions

2009-04-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

In a biography of George W. Bush, Ronald Kessler writes that one of Bush’s leadership strengths was “surrounding himself with smart, capable people.”

While I am no fan of the former president and question much of the advice given by those smart people, I too feel that good leaders put their ego second and aren’t afraid to be surrounded by people who are more intelligent and accomplished than themselves.

Such is the case with this editorial board. You are an outstanding group of editorial board members, almost all of whom have better credentials than I. I am honored to be working with you.

Such is especially the case with the new section editors for Journalism Innovation, who were chosen after consultation with some other members of the editorial board. Any one of these editors could head up not only his or her section, but the entire journal, and it’s been a humbling experience turning down section editor candidates with more teaching, scholarship and industry experience.

Please join me in congratulating the new section editors:

Research: Dr. David Domingo
David teaches at the Universitat Rovira I Virgili and is the co-editor (with JI editorial board member Chris Paterson) of last year’s excellent ethnographic research collection Making Online News. He has authored/co-authored numerous articles and book chapters in English, Spanish and Catalan and has been a webmaster and has written for numerous magazines as a staff writer and freelance journalist. He has taught at four universities, including the University of Iowa last year.

Education: Dr. Tim Brown
Tim brings a wealth of experience in broadcast to the position, having worked as a reporter, editor and anchor for several radio and TV stations in South Carolina and Georgia for over a decade. He’s won numerous awards not only for his broadcast work, but also for his scholarly work while at the University of South Carolina and his present institution, the University of Central Florida. In addition to his media-related research, Tim has authored several teaching-related articles and presentations and authored a chapter in two Communication Technology Update textbook editions.

Industry: Steve Fox (editor) and Dr. Carol Dykers (assistant editor)
The editor of this section needed to be someone with an extensive background in the online news industry, and Steve Fox, with his 10 years at Washingtonpost.com, was a perfect candidate. While at the Post, he held several positions, including Senior Producer, National/Political Editor and Senior News Editor (deciding the content of a homepage that received nearly 10 million hits per day). Steve, who worked for several newspapers and the UPI before his time at the WaPo, is now a teacher and the Multimedia Journalism Coordinator at the University of Amherst.
Carol has 20 years of journalism experience, including more than a dozen years as an editor at four different newspapers in the South. For nearly 15 years she has been at Salem College, where she has taught many courses, including visual communication, online journalism, documentary studies and multimedia/web content creation. She’ll soon be launching a blog focusing on technological innovation in journalism.

Technology: Dr. Michael Sheerin
An award-winning teacher and photographer, Michael brings a wide variety of technological skills to the position. He has worked for 20 years in multimedia in such roles as art director, creative director, visual effects producer and new media consultant, working with clients such as ABC Sports, MTV, ESPN and Disney. He teaches at Florida International University, where he served a three-year stint as Assistant Dean of Technology. He has also authored chapters for Augie Grant’s Communication Technology Update.

Scholarship Wiki: Dr. John Cokley
Like many of his editorial counterparts, John spent 20 years in journalism before making the switch to academia. He worked as a reporter and editor for several publications in Australia, including the Australian Associated Press and in multimedia and online content for News Corp. John, who has won numerous research awards and grants, teaches at the University of Queensland. He has authored/co-authored more than 30 refereed publications in the last decade.

Section Editor Applications

2009-02-08T17:02:00.001-08:00

Journalism Innovation
A Journal of Scholarly and Professional Debate

Call for Editors
Journalism Innovation: A Journal of Scholarly and Professional Debate is seeking editors for all sections of the journal. The online journal, which focuses on the impact of internet technologies on industry practices and journalism education, will launch in May 2009 and needs the assistance of section editors to work with contributors to each area of the journal.

Journal Sections
1. Research
Refereed research articles, composed in hypertext format and containing such elements as data sets, video, audio and interactive graphics, will be the heart of the journal. The editor in charge of this section will play a very important role in working with the editorial board members to ensure that articles are reviewed in a timely manner and that feedback is provided to submitters. The Research Editor will receive each contributor’s link to the research hypertext, select three reviewers with experience in that research area, and inform the journal editor if the article is recommended for acceptance, revision/resubmission or rejection.

2. Education
The Education Editor will be responsible for submissions that focus on journalism education, in both professional training and university settings. These submissions may include some original research articles, but most often will be pieces that provide teaching tips, instructional strategies or suggestions for curriculum development. The editor will work with a handful of journalism educators to review the submissions. Other tasks could include arranging audio/video interviews with educators and administrators and creating a “Top Journalism Innovation Educator” award.

3. Industry Examples/Practices
This editor will be a surfaholic, an online news junkie who will be providing the most frequent and timely updates to the journal website. Ideally, this editor will be or will have been in the online news industry. He or she will solicit links to outstanding examples of multimedia and interactive journalism from journal readers and will post those links on the journal website daily or weekly. As time passes, this editor will be responsible for archiving and organizing these links for easy reference. This editor may also conduct audio or video interviews with industry professionals about their packages or processes.

4. Technology
A journal that concentrates on the effect of technology needs to have a section that keeps readers informed about new technologies in journalism and about how old technologies are being used in new ways. The Technology Editor will be expected to produce some content about the latest software and hardware developments, in addition to soliciting and editing material from contributors. This section might include subsections, such as backpack reporting technology, mini-tutorials on some software (utilizing motion screen capture programs like Captivate), purchasing recommendations for those on a tight budget, etc.

5. Reviews/Scholarship Wiki
The Reviews Editor will be responsible for keeping readers up to date on what other academic journals and trade publications/websites are publishing. This editor should have ready access to the academic journals in the field, in addition to more industry-centered publications like CJR, OJR, AJR, Quill, etc. While the journal will encourage readers to submit reviews of books, research pieces and online articles, the Reviews editor will also be working with colleagues and other members of the editorial board to produce short evaluations of the latest scholarship and information in the field. Another job duty will be supervising a scholarship wiki, once it is established. The wiki will make great contributions to the field by providing reader-supplied annotated bibliographies of books and articles on convergent/online journalism published in the last 15 years.

Applications
Section editor applicants need not be current members of the journal’s editorial board. All applicants should email their vita and a letter indicating what section they are interested in supervising and how their experiences and skills qualify them to be an editor for that section. Applicants are welcome to indicate any second or third choices, with a brief explanation of why they are interested/qualified in those areas.

Send a letter and vita via email to Dr. Robert Bergland, bergland@missouriwestern.edu

Priority deadline: March 15. Editorial selections will be announced in late March.

Welcome Back

2009-02-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

Hello all,
I hope you all are doing well and are having good semesters. Now that your winter (and summer, for those of you Down Under) breaks are over and you’re back into the groove, it’s time to get back started with the journal. Here are some updates:

1. Name: The consensus on the name, while certainly not unanimous, was Journalism Innovation. A significant majority of the editorial board members were also in favor of going with a subtitle, and the subtitle far and away the favorite was “A Journal of Professional and Scholarly Debate.”
Thus, we are
Journalism Innovation: A Journal of Professional and Scholarly Debate
Thank you all for a spirited, but very courteous debate about the name. I’ll likely be including an overview of the name debate in a column when the journal launches in May.
2. The www.journalisminnovation.com domain name has been taken already (let me know if one of you reserved it), so we’ll likely go with www.journalisminnovationjournal.com or www.journalisminnovation.org or .net, all of which are still open.
Unfortunately, the Missouri Western server has some limitations that could present some problems, so we may end up hosting our site at another university or with the Online News Association or with an independent hosting company. I’m open to offers and suggestions (please email me privately, so as not to clog up everyone’s email box)
3. A couple funding opportunities fell through, so we’re still looking for any organization, grant, etc. to provide any sort of partnership or support. My university will continue to provide me with release time and a graduate editorial assistant, but any other support would be helpful.
4. Based on your feedback, we’ll be starting out with the following categories/sections for the journal:
Original Research
Education
Industry examples/practices
Technology
Reviews & Wiki
We’ll be looking for section editors for each one of these categories. In a separate email, I’ll be sending you an application that describes the content of these sections in greater detail and the job duties of the section editors.
6. General Timeline:
• March 1: Selection of section editors
• March 10: promotional materials sent to AEJMC departments and scholars who have given convergence-oriented presentations at journalism-related conferences, announcing the upcoming journal launch and a call for papers
• April/May: Reviews of first round of submissions. Comments to the blog and to me individually indicated that while a three-week turnaround might be doable, a one-month maximum expectation time might be more manageable (reviewers who have commitments that would prevent them from meeting that expectation for an article are welcome to politely decline that time around).
• May 20: Projected journal launch. We hope to have at least a couple original research pieces by that date—several of you have already indicated an interest in submitting—in addition to some reviews, teaching tips, technology overviews, etc. Naturally, we’ll be adding more pieces/packages immediately after they are accepted/revised.
7. Sample articles: By March 10 I hope to have at least one sample hypertext/multimedia article posted to the website, to serve as a model for what could be done. If any of you have unpublished pieces or pieces that have been published that you could get permission to refashion into a new format for our journal, please let me know ASAP.
8. Logo/interface: I know we have some very talented graphic designers and webmasters among us. By all means, if you’re interested in trying your hand with some sample logos or main interfaces for our webpage, let me know and shoot me some drafts.
-----------------
I’m posting this note to our blog:
http://www.journalismconvergence.blogspot.com/
If you want to comment/discuss anything in here with the group, please make your comments on the blog instead of via mass email, since we received a few complaints about clogged up email inboxes. By all means, feel free to email me individually with comments, questions, concerns, etc.
Again, thank you all for your contributions. I look forward to working with you to get the journal into cyberspace this semester.

Best,

Bob

Vote on name, round 2

2008-12-13T11:35:00.000-08:00

We're voting via email and polldaddy on the new name. So, if you haven't already voted, be sure to check your email and send me a note, along with voting at the polldaddy link I included in your email. The early results are leaning toward "Journalism Innovation" with a subtitle. If that option prevails, we'll hold a follow-up survey on people's preferences for the subtitle.

In the next couple weeks I'll be having us vote on a couple other issues and be soliciting applications for editors of the journal's sections. If you haven't already given feedback on the sections of the journal (see later post), please contribute your comments there.

Bob

Vote on name

2008-12-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

We've had some wonderful discussion on the name voting. Thank you for all of your comments.

Here are some early results on name voting, which include responses emailed just to me and responses replied to the entire list. We still have about 4-5 ballots outstanding.

Journalism Modifier:

Interactive=1

Multimedia=2

Convergent/ce=4

Integrated=4

Innovative/Innovation=13

Journal/Review/Research/No accompaniment

Review=1

Research=4

None=5

Journal=15

--------------------------------------

I'll wait another day before sending an email out with final results. Here are my initial thoughts:

--while we have a lot of divergent views, it seems like some form of Innovation/Innovative has bubbled up to the top. And, my sense is that as the discussions have flourished, some of those originally wanting convergence or integrated seemed amenable to some form of Innovation.

Because there is a blog and domain name: http://www.innovationjournalism.org

my first instinct would be to go with "Journalism Innovation" in the title, reversing the name to reduce confusion and allow for the www.journalisminnovation.org domain name. Thoughts?

As for me, you might remember I tentatively gave the beast the title of Journal of Convergent Journalism months ago. While I like Convergent--and Multimedia and Integrated also have strong appeal--Innovation is sounding pretty good.

--The vast majority wanted either Research or Journalism in the title, with most preferring the latter. But, those concerned about including such a title--especially for P&T reasons--might be OK with including the Journal moniker in a subhead.

I'll wait to get some of the final votes in and then we'll probably do a quick runoff, most likely deciding on

--the form of innovation/innovative

--order (innovative/innovation before or after Journalism)

--whether to put Journal in the title or subhead.

Thanks again for such vigorous, and yet awfully polite debate.

Bob

Submission/Review Guidelines/procedures

2008-11-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

There are many details to work out with this journal, not the least of which will be the submission and review guidelines. Two of the many issues to discuss include the following:

1) Turnaround time

One of the greatest advantages of an online journal, and a fitting one for covering a field which prides itself on rapid posting of information, is the ability to publish articles in a timely fashion. Not constrained by a print publication schedule, we can publish an article as soon as it is reviewed, revised and ready to be uploaded to our site. Naturally, that means also having a quick turnaround time for reviewers. Tim B shared with me that an online journal he works with required from its reviewers a three-week response to submissions. I don't want to impose such a requirement unless we have consensus about such a time frame. As for myself, my background in journalism has led me into the bad habit of lacking motivation until deadlines approach--and thus I'm better off with a short response cycle and don't have the guilt accompanying projects hanging over my head for a long time. And, unless it comes at a bad time in the semester, three weeks is usually sufficient time to juggle a review with my other work.

But, what say you? Is three weeks too onerous? Should we go with a month or more? Or cut it down to two weeks?

2) Submission methods

Since we'll be publishing hypertexts on our website, it makes sense to have the authors submit these same hypertexts--but, do we want to require them to submit them via CD-ROM/DVD? Or just give us a hyperlink to their submission that has been placed on the web--which is probably much better, outside of the concern that the hypertext could be altered during the review process. Thoughts?

Feel free to also use this thread to raise other concerns about the submission/review process. I strongly encourage you to visit the submissions guidelines page for the Kairos journal I mentioned earlier (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/submissions.html). There are a lot of technical and other guidelines we may want to borrow/revise/consider, and using their guidelines page as a starting point might prevent us from having to reinvent the wheel.

Editorial Board members

2008-11-13T11:52:00.000-08:00

I'll be making edits to this post as we add a few more members, but I thought it would be good for you all to know who is a part of this group. Frankly, I'm very happy with the composition of the group–we've got a great mix of people with industry experience in print, broadcast and online, we've got representation from several countries and four continents and we've got a mix of scholars with different specialties from small, medium and large schools. That diversity will come in very handy, as I expect that we'll be getting very diverse submissions.

Thanks again, one and all, for agreeing to serve on this board. Please let me know if there are any errors in omissions, names, affiliations, etc. And, let me know via email if there others who you think would be great additions to the board.

Tim Bajkiewicz, Virginia Commonwealth University

Jody Brannon, Arizona State University/Carnegie-Knight News 21 Project

Ralph Braseth, University of Mississippi

Tim Brown, University of Central Florida

Steven Chappell, Middle Tennessee State University

John Cokley, University of Queensland (Australia)

George Daniels, University of Alabama

Tony DeMars, Texas A&M-Commerce

Bill Densmore, University of Missouri/Reynolds Journalism Institute/Media Giraffe Project

Mark Deuze, Indiana University/Leiden University (Netherlands)

David Domingo, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Catalonia, Spain)

Vince Filak, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, VP, College Media Advisers

Steve Fox, University of Massachusetts

Augie Grant, University of South Carolina

Alfred Hermida, University of British Columbia

Edgar Huang, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Tom Johnson, Texas Tech University

Ken Killebrew, University of South Florida

Janet Kolodzy, Emerson College

Robert Mercer, Cypress College

Mindy McAdams, University of Florida

Bryan Murley, Eastern Illinois University/Innovation in College Media

Jennifer Palilonis, Ball State University

Chris Paterson, University of Leeds

Stephen Quinn, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)

Kenneth Rosenauer, Missouri Western State University, President, College Media Advisers

Andrew Schrock, University of Southern California/Annenberg

Norman Sims, University of Massachusetts/Media Giraffe Project

Dave Stanton, University of Florida

David Thompson, Kennesaw State

Leslie-Jean Thornton, Arizona State University

Deb Wenger, University of Mississippi

Jeff Wilkinson, United International College (China)

Journal sections

2008-10-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

One of the other critical first decisions we'll need to make is how to break the journal down into manageable organizational sections. There are many ways to break it down into sections:

--Conventional (peer reviewed articles, book/scholarship reviews, perhaps teaching tips, etc).

--Based on types of convergence: ownership, technological, organizational, etc.

--Based on digital journalism features: multimedia, interactivity, distribution

--Perhaps by geography: US/North American, International, college media

--Based on focus: theory, industry research, education/training

--Other?

My first inclination is to go with a more safe, traditional format. But, this is a different type of journal, and if ever there were a time and type of journal to try something new, this would be it.

Naturally, the organization will affect both the navigation and visual design of this online journal as well as the organization of the staff/board. At some point we'll want to set up editors for these sections, as well as perhaps positions such as webmaster, interactive editor (in charge of reader polls, letters to the editor, moderating forums and comment sections at the ends of articles), etc.

In the meantime, PLEASE share your ideas or reactions to some of these possibilities.

Bob

Open Thread

2008-10-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

In the next couple weeks, I'll be posting discussion threads on a variety of topics--submission guidelines, review policies, journal sections (teaching research? industry research? international? book/article reviews? etc). And, I'd be happy to start any threads you think we should start (or even email my account/password information for you to post your own threads on this blog).

But, in the meantime, I also wanted to create an open thread where you all can post any comments or suggestions without being confined to the more formal threads. So, type what is on your mind here, respond to others' comments, etc.

Bob

Welcome, naming of journal

2008-10-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

Thank you, everyone, for your supportive comments during the Convergence and Society conference. I am glad many people agree that a journal dedicated to this field--and one that is converged itself--is long overdue. As I mentioned, I have only recently secured funding for a graduate assistant, some promotional expenses and a bit of release time, but I wanted to put out an announcement and some preliminary materials at the conference since it was the perfect outlet.

At this early stage nothing has been finalized, which is why I am happy to have such a strong advisory/editorial board to help shape the direction of the journal.

I thought this blog might be the easiest vehicle for group discussions and interaction about that direction. Over the next few months I'll be asking all of you to put in your two cents about various aspects of the journal in hopes of getting some consensus before moving forward. You're welcome to also make comments to me off-list or suggest other threads or concerns you would like to have us debate.

One of the first things to discuss is the name for the journal, since even that is up for debate. Naturally, we'll want to finalize the name before securing a domain name and proceeding with some web site mockups. In the preliminary documents I put forward the name Journal of Convergent Journalism. Some earlier iterations were Convergent Journalism Quarterly and Journal of Convergent Media. I leaned away from the former title because it implied a print-based publication cycle, and leaned away from the latter title because the inclusion of "media" implied a more broad scope (like the journals Convergence and New Media and Society). One advisory board member has already raised a concern about the repetition in Journal of Convergent Journalism, suggesting cutting it down to Convergent Journalism.

Your thoughts on these possible names? Other suggestions for a name?

Bob