Blog on: Librarian for Journalism

The Library Journal reports that The Los Angeles Times has folded its book review section into an opinion section. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has dropped its book review position. The Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, and the Village Voice have all experienced reduced book review space.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviews. Tthe NBCC is asking anyone interested in book reviews to make their voices heard. See http://www.petitiononline.com/atl2007/petition.html and http://www.bookcritics.org/ for more information.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Article: The Long Tail
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief, Wired, 2004
Intro: "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream."
Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html or in print in Wilson Library periodicals or in the Journalism Library.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A book that supposedly help explain the phenomenon of Web 2.0 or the social web.

Details:
Author Surowiecki, James, 1967-
Title The wisdom of crowds : why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations / James Surowiecki.
Published New York : Doubleday : 2004.
TC Wilson Library JC328.2 .S87 2004 Regular Loan

Posted by Karl Oberg at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A 1997 book that apparently coined the phrase "disruptive technology". Supposedly, a disruptive technology is "a lower performance or less expensive product or process that gains a foothold in the low end, less demanding part of an existing market, and then successively moves up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents. Disruptive technologies are usually introduced to the market by small startup enterprises." (from Wikipedia)

Available in the U Wilson Library. Details:

Author Christensen, Clayton M.
Title The innovator’s dilemma : when new technologies cause great firms to fail / Clayton M. Christensen.
Published Boston, Mass. : Harvard Business School Press, c1997.
Series ( The management of innovation and change series)
TC Wilson Library HD53 .C49 1997 Regular Loan

On a related note: Iowa professor Gerry McKiernan's post on Disruptive Scholarship is an interesting read.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"According to new and revised data from the World Association of Newspapers, newspaper circulation is growing and new newspapers are being launched at a remarkable rate. " Read more at Center for Media Research.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California has launched a new open access peer-reviewed journal: International Journal of Communication (IJOC). It's available at http://ijoc.org/.

Continue reading "New open access peer-reviewed journal: IJOC" »

Posted by Karl Oberg at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A book on social implications of computer networking, form 1989. Looks interesting - I am adding it to my reading list.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the About-section: "Flow is a project of the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow is coordinated and edited by graduate students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film." More...

Posted by Karl Oberg at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to a recent NY Times article ("Times Are Tough for News Media, but Journalism Schools Are Still Booming", by Katharine Q. Seelye, May 15, 2006), journalism schools are still enjoying a boom amidst industry woes. The article can be found in Factiva (UMN login required).

Posted by Karl Oberg at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco has announced it has added a collection of multimedia materials related to the tobacco industry. Many tapes are available online either via the LTDL's website (check the box for Multimedia Collection on the site's search tool), or via the Internet Archive.

The collection include:

[...] recordings of focus groups, internal corporate meetings, depositions of tobacco industry employees, government hearings, corporate communications, both internal and external, and some commercials. In addition to these types of tapes, the Minnesota Depository has numerous recordings of television news coverage of tobacco issues and more cigarette commercials.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Lewinsky scandal, September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and TV commercials. Thanks to the recently acquired access to the TV News Archives available from Vanderbilt U, online access to CNN news from 1995 to the present is now available to the U. community. The TV News Archive is also an index to TV news and commercials from the major networks back to 1968.

Posted by Karl Oberg at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)