The Reconstruction of American Journalism

Explores the history and changing landscape of American journalism as well as the need to preserve independent, original, and credible print news reporting. Considers the roles of the Internet, collaborations among newspapers, and foundation support

Credibility of Health Information and Digital Media: New Perspectives and Implications for Youth

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. This chapter considers the role of Web technologies on the availability and consumption of health information. It argues that young people are largely unfamiliar with trusted health sources online, making credibility particularly germane when considering this type of information. The author suggests that networked digital media allow for humans and technologies act as "apomediaries" that can be used to steer consumers to high quality health information, thereby empowering health information seekers of all ages

Native Advertising and Disclosure

This paper reviews the growing combination of advertising and editorial content in the converged paid media form of native advertisements. Because native advertisements have the potential to negatively impact the credibility of traditional news organizations by misleading consumers through hidden persuasion attempts, this text reviews native advertisements in five prominent online newspapers for disclosure and source credibility. Through a content analysis of 130 online newspaper native ads, this paper reviews disclosure according to FTC guidelines for native advertising proximity and placement, prominence, reputation, and language. In addition, this text reviews source credibility by attribution and source status: executives, professionals, public relations personnel, workers, celebrities, organizations, and students. This paper adds to research by its application of Agenda-Setting Theory in its sorting of native ads by their newspaper category and subject matter to determine which newspaper sections are utilizing native ads most frequently and ultimately driving the editorial agenda

Prevention is a solution: building the HIVe

This Special Issue of Digital Culture and Education (DCE), Building the HIVe, offers relevant and applicable examples of digital technologies being leveraged, positioned and practiced towards community-based and led HIV prevention as a solution in a digital era. The contributors to this Special Issue, frontline workers, activists, researchers and educators alike, have taken risks as they have explored innovative prevention approaches with and through digital technologies, and documented and analysed their pedagogical innovations in different cultural contexts. Importantly this Special Issue also includes the critical voices and leadership of individuals living with HIV as designers of prevention as a solution. Their timely insights, advice and understandings of HIV prevention as a solution merit close scrutiny as evidence of resourceful, imaginative and critical endeavour; they are offered to share successful interventions and stimulate further discussion

Green Grass, High Cotton: Reflections on the Evolution of the Journal of Advertising

This article reflects on my time as the fifth editor of the Journal of Advertising, makes observations about the evolution of scholarship in the Journal over the past decades, offers suggestions for how JA might advance in the coming years, and provides some “words of wisdom” to advertising researchers. Because it is the first in an invited article series of editor reflections, a bit of historical context is provided

Editorial: A conversation about performative social science

Conversing by e-mail and mediated by an imaginary cyber-moderator, two of the co-editors of this Special Issue on Performative Social Science (PSS) Mary GERGEN and Kip JONES, themselves pioneers of PSS, engage in conversation around such topics as creativity, skill and craft, outputs and outcomes, aesthetics, audience, evaluation, interpretation, scholarship, ambiguity, talking and doing, and inter-disciplinary collaborations. While GERGEN concludes that action is meaningful and rich in symbolic significance, JONES, like Norma DESMOND, speculates that PSS "is big; it's the pictures that got smaller"

Conventions and mutual expectations — understanding sources for web genres

Genres can be understood in many different ways. They are often perceived as a primarily sociological construction, or, alternatively, as a stylostatistically observable objective characteristic of texts. The latter view is more common in the research field of information and language technology. These two views can be quite compatible and can inform each other; this present investigation discusses knowledge sources for studying genre variation and change by observing reader and author behaviour rather than performing analyses on the information objects themselves

VCU Media Lab

We propose the establishment of a VCU Media Lab – a professional creative media technology unit whose mission is to support the development, design, production and delivery of innovative media, multimedia, computer-based instruction, publications and tools in support of VCU education, research and marketing initiatives. This centrally administered, budgeted and resourced facility will acknowledge, refine, focus and expand media services that are currently being provided at VCU in a decentralized manner