REBECCA E SPITZER

I’ve finally closed down my survey of Wellesley students on their news consumption habits, after working on the survey for a month and distributing it for a month. It’s exciting to have results, and, what’s more, they’re fairly in line with my hypothesis. Fun!
I surveyed 203 students, across all class years and majors. The primary [...]

At it’s most basic, we can agree that “news” is defined as what’s important; it is both timely and relevant.
David Zeeck of the Poynter Institute notes that he used to conflate newspapers and news, but that now he realizes that
“News is the ultimate manifestation of a human desire to know what’s going on, to make [...]

I’d like to illustrate what I think it lacking in the news media with a Wellesley conundrum.
I just sat in on a round-table about Social Networking at our annual Tanner Conference, and I left it still thinking about a number of issues, including questions about where people source their news from and whether they [...]

Digital Nation (by Anthony Wilhelm) is far more concerned with broader global trends of technology use in our lives than I am, but he offers points that are still relatable.
First of all, Wilhelm’s focus on access to the media challenges everything I’m mulling over. He writes that low-income communities are victims of technology disenfranchisement, and [...]

So, the Huffington Post added a “social news” feature back in August. Forgive me, I’m a little late to the party. (I have been late to the party on a lot of things these days, but better late than never, right? I’m catching up. There are just too many things to keep track of when [...]

It’s national newspaper week! I was checking out the feed of relevant editorials on google news and ran across this gem of an article from the Mount Airy News in NC: The Internet Will Never Match What a Newspaper Offers.
Here are some of my favorite parts:
Yet perhaps the most important factor that will ensure newspapers’ [...]

A lot of new developments these days seem to be focused on the creation of news aggregators: feed readers, compilers, organizers, etc. (Like the Times’ new CustomFeeds application.) It seems to me, though, that the next big breakthrough in internet journalism isn’t going to be an aggregator. (I agree that the ability to intelligently sort [...]

I flicked past a Nieman Journalsim Lab twitter on my Facebook just now- “Number of Americans identifying themselves as journalists has (surprise!) held steady since 2004.”
My first thought, considering the reading I’ve been doing recently, was that the number of journalists should have risen. With bloggers, the internet, twitter, etc- we’re all turning into journalists. [...]

I’ve just read the introduction to Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, and I was amazed by how spot-on his analysis is. The book was published in 2003, but it describes our world so clearly that it could have been published yesterday.
Rheingold writes about his observation of the growth of “texting” as a new means of communication; [...]

I take back anything I might have said about The Values and Craft of American Journalism not being entirely relevant. Campell’s essay, “Journalism Enlarged: Stuff That Matters,” seems to be speaking directly to the tipping point we’ve reached. As the piece is described, “… In Campbell’s new frame, citizens must be partners with journalists in [...]