Profile of Richard K. Popp

Profile of Richard K. Popp
by Ambar Meneses-Hall

Richard K. Popp is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He teaches JAMS 262: Principles of Media Studies
and JAMS 860: Media and Consumer Culture. His research interests include the history of consumer culture, media history, media and cultural space, mobility and social memory. From his curriculum vitae one learns that he previously taught at the Manship School of Mass Communication in Louisiana State University. He obtained his Ph.D. from Temple University
and has an M.B.A. in marketing and B.A. in communications from Virginia Tech. Prior to pursuing his doctorate degree he worked as an “Operations Coordinator” for Discovery Communications Inc. a company which produced the cover art for DVD/ video packaging coordinating the fulfillment of video masters, artwork, scripts, and was responsible for all aspects of editing and publishing international home video/DVD catalogs. He was also at one point a DJ for a radio show.

Popp is not a celebrity intellectual, so there is no information about his personal life on the Internet beyond that which can be found in his CV and which I have detailed above.

He has most recently published a book titled The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising and Mass Tourism in Postwar America (2012) which argues that advertisers are primarily responsible for creating the American tourism industry and the modern American tourist. In her favorable and lightweight book review titled “Did ads make the American tourist?” (2010) from phys.org, Erin Nordloh notes that according to Popp print media advertising “redefined America’s notions of leisure time.” Nordloh notes that according to Popp the print advertising industry in the 1930s saw an opportunity to cash in on the American middle class’ newly gained “vacation time” or “holiday time” from work by redefining “tourist travel as an expectation of American life.”

With increasingly sophisticated photographic and image processing techniques advertisers were able to gouge readers interest in seeing exotic destinations and to make it seem as if everyone was already going everywhere, though nevertheless, for a “once in a lifetime experience”. If there is a limitation to Popp’s research for this book, it is only that he primarily focused on advertising by one print publication titled “The Holiday” a 1940’s travel magazine. There is another review of this book out there, but the oxford press published it and I could not access it. The book appears to be too recent so there are not other reviews of it yet.

Popp is also the author of several published journal articles. Besides authoring the article “Making Advertising Material: Checking Departments, Systematic Reading, and Geographic Order in Nineteenth-Century Advertising” (2011) published in the journal Book History, where he explains that the advertising industry began as a “checking” industry that spurned the collecting of periodicals by libraries, he has also articles such as “Machine-Age Mobility: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States” (2011) published in Technology & Culture, “Domesticating Vacations: Gender, Travel, and Consumption in Postwar Magazines” (2010) published in Journalism History, and “Visual Culture, Public Space, and Piety in Focus on the Family’s Citizen Magazine” (2010) published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, and finally he is the author of “‘X’-ing Out Enemies: Time Magazine, Visual Discourse, and the War in Iraq” (2010) co-authored with Andrew Mendelson and published in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism.

Three of the above-cited articles are really interesting:

In the article “Domesticating Vacations: Gender, Travel and Consumption in Postwar Magazines” Popp:

"examines how post-World War II magazine narratives made tourist travel part of a larger discourse about gender, sex, and consumerism in American society. [Popp’s] study finds that while magazines often depicted travel as a carnivalesque activity disruptive of everyday domestic norms, they also circulated narratives that reconciled those fantasies with dominant conventions of femininity and masculinity. By exploring the meanings attached to vacation travel during this period, scholars can better understand how magazines, as engines of consumer desire, mediated between transgressive and structured aspects of American …" (“Domesticating Vacations” Abstract)

The above cover picture from the June 1933 issue of McCall magazine seems to illustrate Popp's idea of a connection between holiday activities, such as attending the fair, and the classical white femininity embodied by the cover model.   

In the article “‘X’-ing Out Enemies: Time Magazine, Visual Discourse, and the War in Iraq” Popp and Mandelson examine

"Time magazine’s visual discourse in its coverage of Iraq War insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death. Time marked the event by using the same visual trope – a head crossed out by a red ‘X’ – used to mark the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Adolf Hitler in 1945. The study provides a semiotic analysis of the cover, traces the historic development of the ‘X’, and compares it to rival Newsweek’s coverage. Time’s cover points to the way visuals are used to make journalistic statements that would not be acceptable to convey verbally. The study suggests that Time used Hitler imagery to establish authority by invoking its historical coverage. And by drawing such a close association between Hitler, Hussein, and al-Zarqawi, Time personalized group conflicts, presented a Manichean view of the world, attributed a false sense of finality to ambiguous events, and reinforced administration pro-war arguments." (Popp & Mandelson 203; Abstract)

And finally in the article “Machine-Age Communication: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States” Popp examines how

"Many American intellectuals and business figures between the world wars envisioned modernity as an era of heightened spatial connectivity ushered in by a new array of mass-marketed communication technologies. Consistently paired in public discourse, media and transportation products and services were thought to be mechanizing everyday routines and rendering contact with faraway places a habitual part of modern life. Within this context, key events such as Richard Byrd’s polar expeditions and the New York World’s Fair were taken as metaphoric for a coming era of perpetual connectivity. For industry champions, communication devices offered users agency to live beyond their immediate environments. Critics—framing communicative contact in terms of contamination, imperialism, and escapism—saw the same technologies ensnaring leisure time and spaces within the domain of consumer capitalism.…" (Popp: Abstract)

The first image above is of a cover of the December 1940's cover photograph of The Woman's Home Companion and it illustrates a woman attaching a flag to her car radio antenna. The second image is a photograph of passengers viewing an in-flight movie in a 1945 Pan-Am flight. Both images illustrate Popp's idea that media and transportation were increasingly seen as mutually supportive in the interwar period. 

Talking the walk: Children reading urban environmental print

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Arcelia Hernandez

This research project is very different from the norm. Instead of studying suburban children from a typical White, middle-class community, a group of literacy researchers chooses to study urban children in their central Los Angeles community. These children and/or their parents are immigrants from Central America, Mexico and to lesser extent, Korea.  

The researchers and the children went on two community “literacy walks” through their Los Angeles neighborhood. These neighborhoods provide a plethora of resources that can aid teachers who teach in similar urban schools. “Urban environments overflow with print in multiple languages and in many different forms, rich with historical, cultural, and contextual meanings that can be plumbed as literacy lessons for children.”

I think the researchers were being extremely careful. They desperately wanted to see how the children understood their community through words in print. However, the types of who, why and what questions that they asked the children, were not producing a fluid flow of information, rather they just got several “I don’t know” responses to their questions.  These children are smart and they have their own thoughts and ideas about their neighborhood and what is important for them.

Just when the researchers thought that they failed, a shift occurred, as they came to a street that three of students lived on.  They were excited about reading their street name, a family members work place, the local video store, and movie posters. In fact, they got so excited about the movies they had seen that the researchers had to “insist” that they keep walking. Another point of connection for the children in particular was the understanding of graffiti. Most adults dismiss graffiti as ugly useless vandalism. However, the children know that gangs tag their territory, with signs, symbols, and colors. They must be careful in specific areas; it could mean life or death. 

In the end, I believe that reciprocal learning took place between the children and the researchers. Those children focused on the signs, graffiti, cement and chalk writings that meant something to them. “The children’s excitement at encountering these signs renewed our faith in using the urban environment for literacy lessons, but it showed us that we could not do this in a “one sign works for all” manner.”

Discussion Questions

Hey everyone, interesting collection of readings this week. I've posted a series of questions below. See you all Monday.

Both Popp (2011) and Goss (1995) describe technological “advances”—or at least systematizations that are deemed to be advances—in the advertising industry. In Goss, there is a concern about whether geotargeting may be an invasion of privacy as well as whether such tools will even be all that effective (although here, the problem may be more in terms of the unit of analysis than the method itself). Popp doesn’t express much concern about checking departments, although there is an implied skepticism about their role; they were intended, he argues, to signify an edifice of scientific professionalism, perhaps to compensate for the leap-of-faith nature of advertising’s general effectiveness. Digital technology has further improved advertisers’ ability to selectively target and personalize ads as well as track exactly how many readers/viewers were exposed (a considerably trickier problem than just checking that ads were indeed printed). These technological changes have meant a lot in terms of the sales pitch for advertisers to their clients, but is there a saturation point where we reach a creepiness threshold of Minority Report-style customized advertising to which consumers will respond negatively? Are we there yet? Likewise, might an over-segmenting of the consumer population lead to the end of mass culture? Are there consequences for civil society if we have fewer shared cultural (consumption) experiences?

The two readings about print-laden urban life—signage and other posted printed materials that aid in the navigation of cities and impart a richness to the urban culture experience—has me thinking a lot about the future of this sort of thing. We seem to be on the cusp of large scale adoption of “augmented reality” technologies—for instance, Google Glass, but also in many ways, internet-enabled mobile devices in conjunction with sites like Yelp and Foursquare are already upending some of the conventional ways businesses attract customers and attention in their local communities. Maintaining and disseminating a virtual presence is often as important (if not more) than a business’s own physical signage, and increasingly the two are converging in some interesting ways. Presumably signs and other printed materials are not going away entirely, but where do we see the future taking us? What potential concerns (marketing discrimination as Turow describes?) may arise as businesses are able to adopt virtual signage that perhaps selectively targets and appeals to customers spotted nearby?  

Finally, the Turow reading and the Wimberley and McClean article on information-seeking consumers in the grocery industry further emphasized the trend toward customized shopping experiences. One question I was left with after reading both articles is where these trends in data-mining and analytics leave small businesses? While large conglomerates like Walmart are able to take advantage of these new technologies, are we going to reach a point where these tools are accessible even to the average family-run restaurant or coffee shop? Also on the consumer side, it’s probably important to note the ease with which customers can now comparison shop, scanning barcodes on their phones, making people that much more aware of the actual price instead of the psychological price. Will this further empower the Walmarts of the world that have advantages when it comes to competing solely on price?

Additionally, I’m curious how people feel about extensive use of marketing discrimination as Turow describes it. Is this different than charging people different prices for the same products—typically wealthier people receiving better deals because they spend more in total? Is this fair? What can be done about it?

Summary: Richard K. Popp's "Making Advertising Material"

"Checking Departments, Systematic Reading, and Geographic Order in Nineteenth-Century Advertising"

 

Popp’s article examines ways that advertisement checkers and advertising agencies in the mid to late nineteenth century collected and organized the entire nation’s print production. 

Starting around the mid nineteenth century, technological advancements such as railroads and the rise of print media such as newspapers created an environment in which it became possible for businesses to advertise to a national audience.  Advertising agencies were started as “middle men” to connect businesses to potential customers who were not in the same city, state, or region of the country. 

 

As a part of this industry and as a way of providing credibility to the advertising business, agencies employed their own checking departments.  The checking departments would receive copies of all of the newspapers from around the country by train (often for free since newspapers knew that advertisers made them money), and their checkers would look through every one in which one of their customers had contracted to put an advertisement (a considerable amount of labor!).  After the checkers had found, marked, and made a record of all the advertisements for the contract (including mistakes), they billed the individual businesses. 

As a result of this practice, checking departments became large-scale collectors of print media from across the country—they literally collected every newspaper.  Popp argues that this state of affairs accomplished two purposes.  First, it lent the advertising agencies a lot of credibility, since advertisers were previously thought of as hucksters and snake-oil-men.  They would ask their customers to come to their reading rooms and survey the print material which they had amassed as a way of proving their credibility. 

 

The second effect of this habit of collecting print material, Popp argues, was that it organized the nation geographically; in some checking departments, a person could literally walk into a kind of cove (like at a library) that represented two or three states of the union.  Popp examines the newspaper pavilion at the 1876 Philadelphia centennial celebration as an example of the way advertising agencies were organizing the nation’s print and the rhetorical power this kind of completeness and collapsing of space had on viewers.  He calls this effect “geographic mastery” (60).

I think Popp’s historical account is quite fascinating, and I agree with his argument about the effect that agencies’ collections had on their customers and the public.  I would be surprised, impressed, and a little proud if a reading room managed to contain my hometown’s local newspaper (though I’m no fan of the paper). 

 

But there’s one thing I couldn’t help but wonder about after reading Popp’s argument.  If, for example, a reader in Kansas learns about a product made in New York City, and he or she wants to purchase one, what happens then?  Does that person send an order or a letter?  Does the company have to ship their product to Kansas?  Does the customer have to pay steep shipping costs?  What if a company’s advertising campaign is a little too successful and they can’t keep up with the orders from their sudden ability to address a nation?  Popp writes, “Businessmen who passed up this opportunity, preferring to keep their markets local, would come to regret their lack of ambition, admen warned” (80).  Obviously, this is the admen talking, but wouldn’t some businesses have been incapable of having  a national market? 

Chapter Summary: Joseph Turow's "The Customized Store"

In the "The Customized Store" chapter of his book Niche Envy, Joseph Turow describes different ways in which businesses use databases of information about their customers to improve their bottom lines. Turow argues: "With new information technologies, new analytical techniques, and a changing commercial environment, stores are thinking about and treating customers in new ways. Like the new media regime, this new regime is built on data mining, segmentation, targeted tracking, interactivity, mass customization, and the cultivation of relationships" (p. 126). In some ways, he says, these attempts to compile information about customers is a high-tech replication of the small-town retail tradition of a shopkeepers knowing--and catering to--the tastes and needs of their customers.

Turow begins by setting up Wal-Mart as a major driver of database-driven retail strategies, even as Wal-Mart itself does little in compiling information about its customers (outside of its Sam's Club wholesale stores). Instead, Wal-Mart's analysis is at the cart level, seeing what people buy together, as well as with aggressively working with the store's suppliers to ensure that their products meet customer demand. The company amasses huge amounts of data of what people are purchasing via the stores' checkout scanners and uses the data to make decisions on what to carry in certain communities and how much of it to stock, as well as what to charge.

Since Wal-Mart has successfully set itself up as the lowest priced option for shoppers, competitors have had to look for more market-segmented options to attract and retain customers. Turow argues: "An important competitive advantage in the Wal-Mart age, then, is to know and reward profitable customers better than Wal-Mart or any other competitors can" (p. 132). And one way to do so is by analyzing purchasing data for patterns that can be exploited. Turow identifies two strategies adopted by businesses in this regard that are "changing the American shopping experience": First, to "develop profiles of 'best' or at least 'good' customers so as to focus on wooing them," and, second, to "encourage purchases through a better understanding of customers' buying habits" (p. 132).

Turow then gives several examples of firms and industries adopting these new customer data-driven strategies. He describes how banks group their customers into several different groups based on wealth and demographics (e.g. urban, retired, etc.) and then target programs not only to attract customers to certain products, but to push some customers away from certain services. For example, since using a teller costs the banks money, one bank he examined put in place disincentives for low-income customers to seek customer service in a branch (mainly by limiting the number of no-fee withdrawals each month). Similarly, Turow describes how 73 percent of Bloomingdale's sales come from 20 percent of the store's customers--about 15,000 of them--and how those elite customers shop on average more than 30 times a year. As such, the retailer uses a customer relationship manager database system called Klondike (since it helps mine for gold) to "create a customized relationship between the customers and sales associates over the phone and inside the store" (p. 139). Like with the banks, whenever a Bloomingdale's employee interacts with a customer, the customer's category is available in the computer system so the experience can be customized.

Next, Turow discusses the supermarket Shop-Rite's program of using loyalty cards to collect the purchasing habits of the company's customers and then divide the customers into niches based on the results. The store is thus able to tailor offers directly to the niches. The system employed by CVS is even more in-depth, he says.

Turow then suggests that the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags used by companies like Wal-Mart to track shipments and inventory could be put to use to track the behavior of customers to amass even more data on their habits. He says that this suggestion is more than just theory: Wal-Mart has already teamed with Procter and Gamble to put RFID tags in Max Factor lipstick containers. Turow says it is not just RFID tags, but "retailers are looking for multiple ways to get good customers into their databases and to think of their store in ways that, analytics suggest, reflect each customer's lifestyle" (p. 144). Often, the goal is to get customers to participate voluntarily, either through a rewards card or a company branded credit card. Based on the data, the company can not only identify "good" customers to whom they can send special offers, but also "bad" customers who they can seek to block through changed store policies. For example, he notes how Best Buy discovered that about 100 million of its 500 million customers cost the chain money, because they only buy loss leader and other discounted items, even finding legal ways to get discounts on discounts. In response, Best Buy changed certain policies to make it more difficult for the "bad" customers to access these discounts. Similarly, Dorothy Lane Markets discontinued its weekly discount flyer that attracted "bad" customers in favor of rewards for "good" customers in the hopes they would increase their spending.

Finally, Turow says the practice of "clienteling"--lavishing extra attention on the best customers--has become standard in department stores, but supermarkets and electronics retailers have a challenge in not knowing when these customers will be coming to their stores. So the challenge is to get customers to identify themselves upon entering. He explains how Albertson's and Stop & Shop try to do that by having customers swipe their frequent-shopper cards through portable terminals that allow them to buy things by scanning them, as well as getting information and marketing offers.

Turow's chapter doesn't really make an strong argument in the academic sense. Instead, he provides a series of mini case studies on how retailers are using customer data accumulation techniques to better target and serve their customers (and, on occasion, to identify and dissuade customers who are not contributing to the company's bottom line). The stories of the individual companies are useful in understanding how 21st century technology is changing how stores market their wares to their customers in a more focused way.

Author Profile: Joseph Turow

Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. in English at University of Pennsylvania in 1971, and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degree in Communication at the same university in 1973 and 1976. After his graduation, he first taught in Purdue University, where he earned his tenure later in 1981. Turow moved back to University of Pennsylvania in 1986, and became a full professor in 1990. He also received the Distinguished Scholar Award, National Communication Association, in 2010. 

As an academia, Turow’s research interests focus on digital cultural industries, especially on the intersection of the Internet, marketing, and society. Turow has a long-list of publications, including both books and journal articles. The book titled “Niche envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age” (Amazon book, Library catalog) where our reading comes from was published in 2006 by the MIT Press, and it has been cited by 104, according to Google Scholar’s results. In this book, Turow studies the development of database marketing and examines its impact on civic life. Turow’s most-cited book (cited by 389) “Breaking up America: Advertisers and the new media world” (published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press) (Amazon book, Library catalog) investigated the changes of marketing strategies since the mid-1970s. Another book on the advertising industry is “The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth” (Amazon book, Library catalog), published in 2012, where Turow examines the online advertising industry, explains how they collect users’ data for marketing, and then raises the questions about users’ rights to control the individual data.  

Besides the books on advertising industry, Turow also published some other books on new media in general, including an introductory book for students majored in mass communication “Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication” (Amazon book). This book was first published in 1999, and its 5^th edition will be published in the winter of 2013. The companion website for this book can be found at here.  It provides abundant resources for both instructors and students that use this book for their class, including some video clips on a certain topic and quizzes.     

Furthermore, Turow frequently appears in mass media. There is a 40-minute NPR interview in 2012, where Turow, based on his book “The Daily You”, talked about how the advertisers used social media tools, such as YouTube and Facebook, to track users’ online behaviors and send ads to them.  

You can find more information about Turow’s publications in his CV.

Readings for April 8

Here are the readings for our theme on "Local business or community service marketing to a target public through print or online means."  This was a tricky one for me to find readings on in short order, but I think the following texts will provide a productive mix:

• Jon Goss, "'We know who you are and we know where you live': The instrumental rationality of geodemographic systems," Economic Geography (1995).
• Richard K. Popp. "Making advertisements material: Checking departments, systematic reading, and geographic order in nineteenth-century advertising," Book History (2011).

(Those two should work well together ... Goss talks about practices in tracking demographic groups for advertising using new geographic tools that grew up with digital computing, and Popp tells the story about pre-digital practices for tracking print advertising's effectiveness across the nation.)

• David M. Henkin, "City streets and the urban world of print," in Scott E. Casper et al., eds., A history of the book in America, vol. 3 (2007).
• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Arcelia Hernández, "Talking the walk: Children reading urban environmental print," The Reading Teacher (1999).

(These should also work well together, with Henkin outlining a historical view of print-laden urban space, and Orellana and Hernández using such an environment today to understand children's literacy practices.)

• Joseph Turow, "The customized store," in Niche Envy: Marketing discrimination in the digital age (2006).
• Sara L. Wimberley and Jessica L. McClean, "Supermarket savvy: The everyday information-seeking behavior of grocery shoppers," Information & Culture: A journal of history (2012).

(Finally, these should work together as well, one focused on behind-the-scenes data analytics and one focused on actual print advertising products.)

Here are the assignments for these six readings:

• Pratesi and Ineichen: Goss article summary and author info, respectively
• Marshall and Meneses-Hall: Popp article summary and author info, respectively
• Bottomley and Roeder: Henkin article summary and author info, respectively
• Pegues and Bond: Orellana and Hernández article summary and author info, respectively
• Bard and Zhang: Turow article summary and author info, respectively
• Stalker and Boehm: Wimberley and McClean article summary and author info, respectively
• Toff: Discussion questions!

Talk by Lisa Gitelman on amateur publishing on April 9 4pm in SLIS Commons

And another one coming up next week:

The Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture
School of Library and Information Studies
2013 Annual Lecture
http://www.slis.wisc.edu/chpccollq.htm 

Tuesday, April 9, 4 p.m.
SLIS Commons, 4207 Helen C White Hall 

Lisa Gitelman
New York University 

Amateurs and Their Discontents, 1870-2000
"Amateurs and Their Discontents" is based on the epilogue to a longer project entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. It offers a selective history of amateur self-publishing in order to render a long history of zines at the same time that it challenges both analysts and enthusiasts of DIY publishing to think beyond the opposition of the subculture and the mainstream.

Talk by Bob Glushko on e-textbooks this Friday April 5, 10am, SLIS Commons

This is a great opportunity for our course:

"The Discipline of Organizing: A Collaborative E- Textbook Project for the Information Fields"

Friday April 5 10:00-11:00 AM SLIS Commons, 4th floor HC White Hall

Bob Glushko will present his project to cooperatively develop a multidisciplinary e-textbook, titled "The Discipline of Organizing"  to serve the information organization text needs of a variety of information intensive disciplines such as LIS, Business MIS and informatics.  The Discipline of Organizing will be published by MIT Press.  Glushko hopes it will also made available free to students online. 

The project "The Discipline of Organizing" required multidisciplinary collaboration to create. It faces the challenge of satisfying the need for breadth, to represent all the disciplines that contribute to it, without compromising the need for depth, to treat each contributing discipline in a substantive way. 

Glushko describes:  "Our design solution was to enlist many co-authors for a book with a core text and nearly six hundred supplemental endnotes tagged by discipline. This book architecture lends itself to implementation in ebook formats with hypertext links to or transclusion of the endnotes.  It also implies a clear path for evolving the book and ebooks over time because annotations and content suggestions by readers and instructors can be incorporated as additional endnotes without jeopardizing the overall integrity of the text."

Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Information.  Before coming to Berkeley in 2002, he spent a decade in Silicon Valley, where he founded or co-founded four companies in the areas of electronic publishing and e-business. He previously spent worked in corporate R&D and consulting, mostly at Bell Laboratories.  He has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of California, San Diego and an MS in Software Engineering from the Wang Institute.

Missions

The mission statement of the UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies ...

The School of Library and Information Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison exists to educate professionals to bring together information in all its cultural forms and the people who need or want it, thereby contributing to individual and collective knowledge, productivity, and well-being; to create and disseminate knowledge about recordable information, its users and uses, the services, processes, and technologies that facilitate its management and use, and the economies and policies that impact access to it; to provide for the continuation and enhancement of the faculties of schools of library and information studies through a doctoral program built on interdisciplinary research and teaching excellence; and to help shape the future of the library and information professions.

The mission statement of the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication ...

The UW–Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication contributes to the health of society, democracy and the economy by advancing understanding of the mass media central to all three, and by producing graduates equipped to study and understand those media, using them constructively to inform and persuade.

Our Professional Graduates will convey information and express ideas effectively in contemporary media, will understand the responsible and ethical use of mass media, will appreciate the media’s relationship with social, political, legal and economic systems, and will be prepared to think strategically, creatively and critically, to solve problems in a professional context and cope with change in the professional world.

Our research graduates will be rigorously educated in theoretical concepts and research methods, will engage in critical analysis of media content, performance and audiences, will add to basic and applied knowledge in the field, will bring critical and normative perspectives to their analysis, will perform with distinction in the academic and professional worlds, and will provide leadership nationally and internationally.

NYT article on web-based newspaper revenue models

This short article in the NYT today is relevant to our discussions from a few weeks ago ...

Newspapers, once reluctant to try to charge readers for access to their Web sites, have begun doing so in droves.

Across many of the developed economies of America, Europe and Asia, so-called pay walls are proliferating as publishers struggle to make up for dwindling revenue on their print products. Online advertising, once seen as the great hope for the future, has begun leveling off, which is accelerating the push for new Internet business models.

“Why now?” said Douglas McCabe, an analyst at Enders Analysis in London. “The outlook for digital advertising for all but the very largest sites looks increasingly challenging. Therefore, it is critical that news services experiment with subscription models.”

The trend has taken in some longtime holdouts, like The Washington Post, which said in March that it would start charging online readers this summer. Elsewhere in the United States, The San Francisco Chronicle also recently announced plans to start digital subscriptions, and the total number of American newspapers with pay walls has climbed to more than 300.

Read more at the original article by Eric Pfanner.