McChesney, R. (2000). So much for the magic of technology and the free market: the World Wide Web and the corporate media system. In A. Herman & T. Swiss (Eds.), The World Wide Web and contemporary cultural theory (pp. 5–35). New York: Routledge. Norris, V. P. (1984). Mad economics: an analysis of an adless magazine. […]

Carey, J. W. (1989). A cultural approach to communication. In Communication as culture: Essays on media and society (pp. 13–36). New York: Routledge. Gitlin, T. (1978). Media sociology: The dominant paradigm. Theory and society, 6. 205–253. Hall, S. (1992). Encoding/decoding. In Culture, media, language (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson. Hall (1992), in what seems to me […]

1. Journalism education gets a bad rap from both sides. Universities find journalism schools anti-intellectual, more akin to business schools than to law schools, but without the rich alumni to justify promoting them on campus. And the profession doesn’t have much use for formal education in journalism either. The New Yorker writer and Columbia University […]

Bateson, G. (1996). Communication. In H. B. Mokros (Ed.), Interaction and identity: Information and Behavior (Vol. 5, pp. 45–70). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication theory, 9(2), 119–161. Deetz, S. A. (1994). Future of the discipline: The challenges, the research, and the social contribution. In S. A. […]

I apologize if posting nothing but weekly reading responses to academic articles in the communication field gets boring, but it’s a direct result of my not really having much time to do other things. This week, we move on to the history of the field of communication, which developed as its own field mostly after […]

D’Andrade, R. (1986). Three scientific world views and the covering law model. In D.W. Fiske & R.A. Shweder (Eds.), Metatheory in social science: Pluralisms and subjectivities (pp. 19–41). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rayward, W. B. (1996). The history and historiography of information science: Some reflections. Information Processing & Management, 32(1), 3–17. Said, E. (1993). […]

I would imagine that the following will be of limited interest, but I want to post my weekly reading summaries from my introductory class. If you feel like reading such things then please do, by all means. Mostly I’m putting them up to give myself easy reference to them in the future. Like all else […]

I make my students read the New York Times, and many of them think it’s boring. My knee-jerk reaction, as a journalism professor, is to defend it. And while I still do think the Times is probably the best newspaper in the country, I’ve also come to agree with my students. The Times is boring. […]

One of the many hats I wear is a professor of journalism at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, New York. I have created a blog that will link to my students’ blogs. You can find it by going to JournalScope.

First, an epigraph: “As long as we’re knocking down myths, let’s take a swing at the myth of the reporter who, if his mother says she loves him, checks it out by 1) getting an affidavit from the old lady attesting to the fact; 2) finding an independent source to verify the alleged love bond; […]