Following
#ica23
, I plan to delete my Twitter account. I am proud of how I grew a little following and have enjoyed meeting so many new people (and shouting into a void)… I can’t this
Looking back at the choices made by
@guardian
and
@Snowden
you gotta think about the cajones required ... certainly it was a consensual reveal but they guy can’t even come home
Big news y'all - I learned yesterday that I was promoted to full professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (
@UofIllinois
)! This is huge. But the bigger news is that I'm leaving in August to head to
@uofsandiego
to be an associate professor in Communication Studies!
I am increasingly convinced that the large text and data analysis of incivility, misinfo, and partisanship online is deeply obscuring the real problems experienced on the ground by real people. There is just a massive gap that big data cannot fix.
What a bonkers day. I was so blessed to have my family on hand for this- My kid stood with me as I received TWO book awards, the Journalism Studies Division award and got to have a second mini-IJPP ceremony
@Journalism_ICA
#ica22
They call me Dr News
I’m not a real MD, but I do study the news
The actual real, not fake news
They call me Dr News
I like to write papers
I think I’m getting better, but I can handle criticism, so let me show you what I know
My new plates,
#AcademicTwitter
Hi- anyone else a sobbing mess this morning? I lost it just now as my kid Zooms with his preschool class. It’s so fucking sad.
Also, my department doesn’t have people with kids 5 and under- how to explain to them what is happening right now to my work life balance?
Delighted to announce I'll be an academic fellow at the Open Markets Institute
@openmarkets
for the following year, with much of my focus working this summer on platform politics, journalism, and anti-monopoly policy
Excited to try my hand at ACTUAL media and tech policy
Now's probably the time where I can say, please, please read about more of this in my forthcoming (June 21) book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. We're listing at $30 because its 320 pp, but I hope to offer author discounts
Our new study... in
@voxdotcom
...male political reporters retweet other dudes 3 times more than their female colleagues .. written up masterfully by
@lkmcgann
If I had one wish right now, it would be that all the tech and the political journalists stop freaking about the fake news panic and platform-blaming and focus on avoiding spreading misinformation even further, including that which arises from their own reporting
When a news outlet drops a paywall during a crisis, it's just further confirmation that some people get better news than others because they can pay for it, even though we all know the news is really important
I shared this with my students from
@TrevorProject
- it's geared toward LGBTQIA youth, but the takeaways are important for all young people struggling right now.
Book’s title is official - coming to shelves around June 2021
News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism
Thanks for all the brainstorming help!
Spoke with a PhD student whose self-expectations for what she must publish before going on the job market reflects something akin to four-five journal articles and a book-quality dissertation - this is insane, and this will not be good for the field if this continues
In case anyone wants to see my Journalism Ethics and Diversity syllabus, I'm sharing here. I'm welcome to your suggestions. Journos, if you would like to come zoom chat, we'd love to have you - working to develop compensation, but unlikely
#famouslastwords
Learning from my students that one of the worst j-school micro-aggressions is to tell a student from a marginalized group that he/she/they cannot report on this group because of "bias" - don't do this, it changes students' very relationship with journalism's potential for change
Pay for a bad paper? - you’d never say pay for bad food- at the same time you’d never expect that bad restaurant to make 20 percent profit returns. News is a market failure
This is legit the best picture ever taken of me. It is also one of the proudest announcements I've had in years. Please consider ordering the book for you or your library.
A new book by
#ILLINOIS
journalism professor
@nikkiusher
contends that the news media, and local newspapers in particular, are becoming increasingly focused on serving wealthy, white and politically liberal news consumers. ➡️
This is the reason I will always love
@Slate
...The proposal to include the beaver emoji comes thanks to a cadre of Canadians, lesbians, semi-aquatic mammal enthusiasts, and emoji specialists who wrote an extremely convincing and rather hilarious...
🧨🔔📢I have two new publications out, perfectly cycnical enough for the 4th.
#1
, with
@ng007007
, confirms what we already know in more detail: DC political journalism is a big bubble, but adds more detail - it’s potentially more concerning microbubbles
My one request as we go into fall- can Apple’s autocorrect for “fuck” not be “duck” - just presume that we are all saying fuck multiple times in text, throughout the day... I don’t have much interest in ducks.
I make this argument hard in my book. With lots of data. Who gets left out are those already left out but worse. What’s even worse is that this is being done consciously by high quality newsrooms (see book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue)
"There has been a massive change in how we access information that has taken place over the last few months. Our ability to find out what's happening, much less analyze it, has been greatly marred by changes in media and technology." --
@gaslitnation
HEY! Check out my op-ed in
@washingtonpost
on "playing the ref" from the right - and how the GOP will get platforms to bend over backwards to make concessions to their views, just as with mainstream media
The cutest kid living on campus
@GWtweets
(IMHO) is signing off today and headed to
@Illinois_Alma
to continue his path as sweetest academic brat ever ... see you on the flip side, DC (and
#ALLCAPS
thanks for the championship to see us out!)
Worked very hard on this important study w/
@JesseHolcomb
and
@justin_littman
to make sure people know, as
@lkmcgann
puts in her write up “anyone who follows beltway Twitter knows it’s a deeply insular and self-involved world dominated by men”
So excited!
@StephEdgerly
has been promoted to full professor at
@NorthwesternU
!! Send congrats her way!! I feel so lucky to be in Steph’s orbit- she’s brilliant, kind, and has been beyond encouraging as I mess around with new methods, even if it means she has to explain them…
I have to keep showing my journalism students this stuff because they still believe that pols and the press operate in separate orbits, the news media incorruptible -- and I don't know where they get it from. Spotlight? The Post? All the Presidents Men?
I’m not crying I swear- at an empty movie theater with three small boys watching light year… and my son just says “oh two moms, nice” and … representation. First time he has ever seen his family on Disney ever. Maybe in cartoon ever …
I just turned my revised book manuscript into
@ColumbiaUP
for
@PhilipLeventhal
, editor par excellence - here's to moving toward production. Also, I'm exhausted!!!
Why do we need bylines to be clear? Because it helps us know who has skin in the game and who is responsible for the reporting. The idea that the NYT speaks as one single voice will ultimately be its downfall, calling it now.
Hi, today is the actual, real launch/pub date of News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism.
I'm happy to chat with you about what the book argues and more.
Best thing I've read in weeks is the
@ggreenwald
profile in
@NewYorker
-> the most dangerous critique right now is a liberal who challenges orthodoxies of power, for ex,
@ggreenwald
's critique is establishment hates Trump because he breaks rules of who wins in elite America
It is critical that we understand that GOP deep partisans are not coming back to MSM, and that for much of highly-involved partisans, GOP media is a better accounting of reality. Please share, if I'm going to write for free, would rather be read :
Let the world be introduced to the newly minted
@illinoiscomm
PhD, DR. MARISA A. SMITH
@smithmarisaa
--> we are so proud of you and can't wait to see you continue crushing it as a professor at
@michiganstateu
Waiting for the massive coverage of this non-preprint non-Stanford/NYU/Harvard/monkeycage affiliate peer-reviewed specialty journal article with massive implications. Please email or DM for a PDF if needed.
For those headed it
#ica22
, some advice from the pandemic conference experiences I have had this far: 1) don’t presume just because someone is attending they have your COVID risk tolerance 2) some people have had massive life shake-ups & have come to escape them
As an aspirational adult age-group athlete and as an American who believes in open markets, I'm disappointed to see Google's monopoly power grow as it takes over Fitbit
Sometimes (often, always?) the best resources on the student experience in journalism are other students. I had
@omarsrashad
zoom in today to share his tips and frustrations about elitism in internships and newsroom hiring and what to do
18 hours into 2nd Moderna. Waves of nausea and my skin feels like it’s achy/super sensitive- eg it hurts to lie down. Chills, slight nausea. Beyond thankful to
@illinois_alma
for the worst night of sleep in a while & for this shot-I teach in person and can do so without fear.
Would you still refer to the US president as the most powerful man in the world? Or would you put Bezos (or another business leader) up there? Or a different world leader? (first lecture sentence, doing well tonight)
Just taught my last class as a full-time tenured professor at
@gwtweets
. The seminar read a book chapter draft of the new book. Got great feedback from great students. But it’s over 🎙 drop -30-
Ok folks, some tips for those of you using very small n samples for qualitative work
1) find a way to make sure that the people you interviewed have some internal consistency that allows for meaningful comparison. Being a journalist is not that.
2) please date your interviews
Tomorrow is the first time I'll be lecturing on the white supremacy inherent in American mainstream news media. I'll let you know how it goes. It's to the point of how journalism serves democracy, and whose democracy. And yes,
@themaxburns
we're talking about hegemony
Ok, I've never done this before, but here we go. I'm sharing a preprints like all the big kids super confident in their findings and convinced that there is something actually immediately useful for the world (w/
@SKimLeffingwell
)
Going to bed a bit terrified but super super excited and well-fed
@BoqueriaTapas
for tomorrow’s Badass Ladies of CommunicAtion
#commladiesknowstuff
#ica19
missing 2/8. Most seated didn’t know each other and hadn’t met in any real way until tonight. Just you wait til tomorrow
Today was the first of two life-changing days. I feel so blessed to be in a rural college town to ride out a pandemic
@illinois_alma
has had its ups and downs like all state schools, but it is being run efficiently as is our county.
#getvaccinated
#provax
Actually minus the last phrase many liberal policy wonks would agree platforms should be treated as utilities. We could stand to be a little less reactionary. Also, the playing the ref op-ed I wrote seems prescient and I only wrote it a month ago. Internet time.
Today in conservatism Laura Ingraham suggests it may be time for the government to take over Facebook and Twitter and run them as public utilities to eliminate bias against conservatives.
Really smart study about “gaming the system” - I teach a social media class and there is a fine line between trying to promote and trying to divine algorithms that just change anyway vi
@brookeerinduffy
@cbpetre
et al
I'm teaching a really cool class next semester, but it's under-enrolled. I was told to make a poster, and I'm please for the 10 minutes I had to do it.
I've been thinking a lot about hostile media bias (ok, as I course prep)-but, there's a good point: distrust the media long enough, leads to distrust of the democratic process - in other words, we should not be surprise that GOP partisans have moved to distrust democracy
60+ journalism/polcomm scholars have put forward a policy briefing for journalists about how to cover elections responsibly- for an election unlike any other - how to prevent confusion and mitigate distrust
#media4democracy
@ecademocracy
cc
@brianstelter
Massively super cool. In the new Data Journalism Handbook, the editors have done an experiment in open-access publishing. I'd love to share my critique of data journalism with you - it's below
Just going to say that for the quants who malign ethnographic work as "descriptive," all your "how do people share on Twitter/FB" projects are also fundamentally descriptive (and, ultimately, in a hybrid media system & w/ a blackbox algorithm) have limited explanatory value
So
@emilybell
said it so well "Salaries and healthcare is innovation in local media" - maybe philanthropy can start with helping people in journalism earn a living wage that can keep them in an under-resourced community. Great
@TowCenter
panel with
@VWPickard
@damianradcliffe
"as a young, nonwhite doctor in a society predicated on racial prejudice, I received a salary that was 50%..my peers...where my first white patient refused to let me touch him." - diversity in media ownership matters via
@latimes
So profoundly upset to read the findings from this study by fellow
@USCAnnenbergPhD
grad
@cuihua
. Screenshot of the simple language version below. Media reporters, feel free to ping me if you'd like a copy and can't access.
You know what would really help journalism? Just have the links I click on while on social media platforms autoload my already paid-for subscriptions - this is something Twitter and Facebook should easily be able to do given how everything else is tracked
#illinisocialJ
Feat
@wphillips49
@alicetiara
and
@beccalew
with the awful costs of researching online extremism- this is one case where I wish gendered effects had been directly tackled- but this shit is real and thanks
@wired
Someone was asking (
@rasmus_kleis
?) about the most important texts to share with journalists. I am late to the
@roudakova
fan club - but I can’t think of a more important book to read in populist, authoritarian-crescendo, “fake news” times
I'm reading James Carey, who argues journalism research missed the chance to be a "science of the complex relations among humans struggling to create a common life within conflict and division, a science deeply democratic, pluralistic, humanistic, and imaginative in its impulses"
Hey all, I'm here and queer. Not a radical nor revolutionary, but living my life openly, lucky enough to have a beautiful, loving family of my own and great friends. I promise,
#itgetsbetter
, and we *have* all been there, but take pride! Happy
#NationalComingOutDay
#LGBT
I think today’s big media news was totally missed: the NYT is scoring articles by emotional valence and then using for retargeting - it’s called a “feels score”
I've outdone myself with my new course poster. The times kept shifting along with the enrollment, but I hope we can all settle on Ron Burgundy's role in journalism history. (In DC we went to the Newseum (RIP) exhibit!)
Just finished
@LewisPants
book “View from Somewhere” - I was planning to put it on the syllabus next sem but obviously had to read it 1st! It is a responsible, academically-rigorous approach to the dramatic rethinking around neutrality, objectivity, and power. Consider assigning