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. Journal of communication, 34(1), 44-61.
Schiller, D., & Mosco, V. (2001). Introduction: integrating a continent for a transnational world. In V. Mosco & D. Schiller (Eds.), Continental order? Integrating North America for cybercapitalism (pp. 1–34). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Despite having aced my high school AP macroeconomics course, I’ve come late to an appreciation of economics and its worldview. In this week’s readings, I’ve started to see the utility of political economy in looking at media, but I’m personally more impressed with it on the micro level than at the macro. Schiller and Mosco (2001) take a very macro view, examining the longitudinal liberalization of trade regulation that has allowed telecommunication and media corporations to conglomerate and spend their capital on foreign direct investment and become transnational corporations, mostly—as this is the focus of their book—in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. I find the fact that the cultural exceptions were the last restrictions to go quite interesting, and maybe a topic for further study. And I find the general trend toward ever-larger communications conglomerates troubling. But in general, I see this essay mostly as background.
I’m more interested in McChesney (2000), who economically analyzes the claim that the Internet “will set us free” (p. 5). He demonstrates that free markets tend not to result in free competition, but in oligopolies of large corporations (p. 9). Small companies do have influence in the market, spending money on risky research and development programs, but they then tend to be purchased by larger, established companies if they are successful. McChesney writes that large media companies will continue to dominate even on the Web. These large companies have deep pockets and are therefore willing to wait out smaller companies who will determine what applications of the technology will make money. They can also advertise themselves on their existing media networks; transfer their content online with little added cost; and reap the benefits of advertising. I think McChesney is probably right in his overall thesis, that large corporations will continue to dominate online, but I think he might be too gloomy about journalism in particular. A.J. Liebling said that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” which has always previously been true: the barrier to entry was much too high for most independent journalism. But even if media giants do dominate the Web, its now almost-zero barrier seems to allow even one-man operations to be able to exist and for networks like blogs to be able to promote them adequately. I disagree that, as McChesney says dismissively, “journalism is not something that can be undertaken piecemeal by amateurs working in their spare time” (p. 29). Who says? Maybe it’s better done by those with training and institutional support, but for the same reason that there is no licensing for journalists in this country, it is almost impossible to limit who is a journalist, and while corporate monsters may dominate, and small media companies may die out or be bought, non-corporate, non-profit journalists can find an audience for the first time. I think a purely economic analysis leaves these independent voices out.
Norris (1984) takes the most microeconomic approach to media, and to me was the most interesting—and because of his specific topic, the most fun. He analyzes the financial data of Mad magazine to see whether—and why—a magazine with no ads could be profitable, which flies in the face of the magazine world’s received wisdom. Magazines have high fixed costs, such as rent for office space and employee salaries (though they generally have small editorial staffs) and variable costs that mostly come from the cost of printing, meaning that their marginal costs (the price of printing one more issue) are low. Because old magazines hardly sell, the publisher assumes the risk of printing costs, paying for all unsold copies (and explaining why many magazines are post-dated by a month or two). Mad’s publisher prints 1.9 million copies of the magazine, and sells about half of them, though there is no way to know in advance which half will be bought. The cover price and the circulation determine whether or not the magazine makes a profit, since the printing costs are relatively unchanged. Interestingly, adding advertisements may increase the fixed costs of publishing a magazine substantially, since that would require adding a sales staff and their overhead, which might not be outweighed by advertising income. Since magazine demand is generally inelastic, the same qualities that make a magazine appealing to advertisers would also allow the publisher to charge a higher cover price without losing circulation (p. 60). Despite this convincing argument, I can’t imagine that a single magazine has canned its ad department in the 20 years since Norris’s essay was published. Maybe this is because ads lend legitimacy to a magazine, somehow separating them from journals or newsletters. In many cases, I imagine that this is because ads are a large part of the appeal of certain magazines—fashion, car, and technology magazines come to mind. I like the pragmatism of this application of economics, and could see using this approach in my own work, though I also see utility in McChesney, and can at least appreciate Schiller and Mosco.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Carey Me Home
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 to be unnecessarily dense prose, outlines a semiotic model of mass communications in which a message is encoded into a symbolic system of some kind—words, images, words and images—and then decoded again by an audience. Both ends of this process are framed by various cultural influences: “frameworks of knowledge,” “relations of production,” and “technical infrastructure” (p. 130). Hall intends this model to replace the behaviorist model that he (among others) believes has overwhelmed mass communications research. He proposes three positions from which a transmitted, encoded message can be decoded: “dominant-hegemonic,” in which the audience receives exactly the message the encoder intended; “negotiated code,” in which the audience takes the message with qualifications, adaptations and objections; and “oppositional code,” in which the audience rejects the message entirely (pp. 136–138).
Gitlin (1978) is also quite concerned with picking apart what he has identified as the dominant paradigm of mass communications research, Lazarsfeld’s “personal influence” model and the behavioral studies of media’s effects. Gitlin particularly discusses the “two-step flow of communications” theory that “opinion leaders” influence the general population, instead of the mass media doing so directly. Gitlin argues that this improperly diminishes the influence of the media, and that measuring short-term opinion change is an inadequate way to measure the influence of the media. Gitlin roots his argument in an historical analysis of Lazarsfeld’s “administrative” approach to social science, and his relationships with the sources of his funds—particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, CBS, and a publisher named Mcfadden who sponsored a particular study of Lazarsfeld’s and may have (Gitlin argues this case) influenced the choice of variables and subjects (p. 236). Gitlin does not offer a particular new paradigm to replace this other so much as call for one. Media sociology, Gitlin writes, “could work, in other words, to show a dynamic but determinate media process articulated with the whole of political culture” (p. 239). And in a footnote, he refers to “the alternative approach of cultural studies, influenced by Marxist cultural theory and semiological “readings” of content” which he calls “the most promising angle of analysis” (p. 246). The semiological analysis leads directly back to Hall (1992), and also segues well into Carey (1989).
I took a class with James Carey at Columbia, and as a journalism student, I had a vague idea that he was a bigshot, but his class, “Critical Issues in Journalism,” which he co-taught with a journalist, was not particularly heavy on theory. Still, it was the highlight of my Fall, since it was the one of only a couple of classes I had that dealt with ideas. Now as I make a career shift from journalism to media studies, he’s become a hero to me. I found myself boxing in passages and littering the margins with asterisks—my sign to myself that I am excited by ideas. I particularly enjoy Carey’s insight that “communication is not some pure phenomenon we can discover; there is no such thing as communication to be revealed in nature through some objective method free from the corruption of culture” (p. 31). To Carey, culture is a human construction, and communication is the constant production and reproduction of that culture. This is the “ritual” view of communication, one more closely linked to “community” than to the transmission of messages. In this view, the ritual of reading a newspaper helps to construct or reinforce a view of the world more than it transmits information (though he allows that a newspaper can do that as well). Carey works well with Hall in that both endorse the semiotic view of communication as constructed symbols, though Hall seems to be using the “transmission model” that Carey mostly rejects as stultifying. What excites me so much about Carey is that he acknowledges that acts of communication are rooted in historical time, and that he is willing to mine the disciplines of “biology, theology, anthropology, and literature” for ways of looking at communication (p. 23).
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 to be unnecessarily dense prose, outlines a semiotic model of mass communications in which a message is encoded into a symbolic system of some kind—words, images, words and images—and then decoded again by an audience. Both ends of this process are framed by various cultural influences: “frameworks of knowledge,” “relations of production,” and “technical infrastructure” (p. 130). Hall intends this model to replace the behaviorist model that he (among others) believes has overwhelmed mass communications research. He proposes three positions from which a transmitted, encoded message can be decoded: “dominant-hegemonic,” in which the audience receives exactly the message the encoder intended; “negotiated code,” in which the audience takes the message with qualifications, adaptations and objections; and “oppositional code,” in which the audience rejects the message entirely (pp. 136–138).
Gitlin (1978) is also quite concerned with picking apart what he has identified as the dominant paradigm of mass communications research, Lazarsfeld’s “personal influence” model and the behavioral studies of media’s effects. Gitlin particularly discusses the “two-step flow of communications” theory that “opinion leaders” influence the general population, instead of the mass media doing so directly. Gitlin argues that this improperly diminishes the influence of the media, and that measuring short-term opinion change is an inadequate way to measure the influence of the media. Gitlin roots his argument in an historical analysis of Lazarsfeld’s “administrative” approach to social science, and his relationships with the sources of his funds—particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, CBS, and a publisher named Mcfadden who sponsored a particular study of Lazarsfeld’s and may have (Gitlin argues this case) influenced the choice of variables and subjects (p. 236). Gitlin does not offer a particular new paradigm to replace this other so much as call for one. Media sociology, Gitlin writes, “could work, in other words, to show a dynamic but determinate media process articulated with the whole of political culture” (p. 239). And in a footnote, he refers to “the alternative approach of cultural studies, influenced by Marxist cultural theory and semiological “readings” of content” which he calls “the most promising angle of analysis” (p. 246). The semiological analysis leads directly back to Hall (1992), and also segues well into Carey (1989).
I took a class with James Carey at Columbia, and as a journalism student, I had a vague idea that he was a bigshot, but his class, “Critical Issues in Journalism,” which he co-taught with a journalist, was not particularly heavy on theory. Still, it was the highlight of my Fall, since it was the one of only a couple of classes I had that dealt with ideas. Now as I make a career shift from journalism to media studies, he’s become a hero to me. I found myself boxing in passages and littering the margins with asterisks—my sign to myself that I am excited by ideas. I particularly enjoy Carey’s insight that “communication is not some pure phenomenon we can discover; there is no such thing as communication to be revealed in nature through some objective method free from the corruption of culture” (p. 31). To Carey, culture is a human construction, and communication is the constant production and reproduction of that culture. This is the “ritual” view of communication, one more closely linked to “community” than to the transmission of messages. In this view, the ritual of reading a newspaper helps to construct or reinforce a view of the world more than it transmits information (though he allows that a newspaper can do that as well). Carey works well with Hall in that both endorse the semiotic view of communication as constructed symbols, though Hall seems to be using the “transmission model” that Carey mostly rejects as stultifying. What excites me so much about Carey is that he acknowledges that acts of communication are rooted in historical time, and that he is willing to mine the disciplines of “biology, theology, anthropology, and literature” for ways of looking at communication (p. 23).
Future Employees of the A&P
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 journalism graduate A.J. Liebling said it most famously when he wrote that “the program had ‘all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P’” (Remnick, 2004). Because of these perceptions, a methodical study of perceptions of journalism education is needed. Since a study of the quality of a journalism education is outside the realm of this exercise, it is useful to focus instead on perceptions of the value of journalism education. And to study this, this exercise looks at a group of people who have the ability to assign a monetary value to it: prospective employers of journalists. Operationally, this group would be editors who hire and manage journalists at magazines, newspapers, and online publications. This exercise works with the following research question: How does a journalist’s education affect his desirability to prospective employers?
2. To explore the possible answers to this question, I propose the following two hypotheses, and their corresponding null hypotheses:
H1: There is a relationship between having a degree from a journalism school and level of success in a journalism career.
H0: There is no relationship between having a degree from a journalism school and level of success in a journalism career.
H2: Editors show a clear preference for hiring journalists with journalism degrees over those without journalism degrees.
H0: Editors show no clear preference for hiring journalists with journalism degrees over those without journalism degrees.
H1 tests for a simple relationship between the variables of having a journalism school degree and success in a journalism career. This is a weaker, two-tailed hypothesis. H2 looks for a directional relationship between having a journalism degree and likelihood of being hired. Though easier to reject, this is a stronger, one-tailed hypothesis.
3. Since having a journalism degree or not is a simple dichotomous measure, I will operationally define a “level of success in a journalism career,” as referred to in H1. Level of success in a journalism career can be defined as the percentage of change in a participant’s salary over the most recent continuous ten years of the participant’s employment. Since journalism careers are often volatile (and changing jobs can even be a sign of success, not failure), “continuous employment” does not necessarily mean that the participant was employed at the same publication for all ten years. The percentage change in salary represents the assumption that the journalist’s career is advancing. Freelance journalists will not be included, since, in effect, they hire themselves, and their possession of a journalism degree would not have to impress anyone to gain employment. An alternative measure of success, honors and awards received for journalistic work, was rejected because too few awards exist to measure meaningfully. Another alternative, employer satisfaction with the journalist’s work, was rejected under the assumption that higher employer satisfaction would also result in higher salaries for the journalist, which is the measure under consideration.
4. A second variable in this exercise, taken from H2, can be defined in several different ways. That variable is “editors’ preference for hiring journalists with journalism school degrees,” and can be defined as follows:
a. Dichotomous measure: editors can be asked whether or not they have ever hired a journalist who holds a journalism school degree. Answers will fall into two categories: yes, they have; or no, they have not.
b. Nominal measure: applicants for journalism jobs can be classified into (at least) four categories:
1. Journalism school graduates with a bachelor’s degree
2. Journalism school graduates with a master’s degree
3. Liberal arts graduates with a bachelor’s degree
4. Liberal arts graduates with a master’s degree
c. To establish an ordinal measure, editors can be asked to respond to the following prompt: Rank the following attributes of journalism job applicants in order (highest to lowest) of desirability:
• A journalism degree
• A liberal arts degree
• Professional experience as a journalist
• Other professional experience
• Publication history
• A journalism internship
• Writing ability as shown in published stories
• Writing ability as shown on an employer-proctored writing test
d. The ordinal measure proposed in part c. could easily be adapted to serve as a Likert-type scale. The prompt could be rephrased to read: “Rate the importance of each of the following attributes of a prospective employee on a scale of 1–7, with 1 equaling ‘not important at all,’ and 7 equaling ‘extremely important.’” Then, each of the above attributes would be listed with a Likert scale matching the prompt underneath it.
e. In order to measure the concept of editors’ perceptions of journalism degrees as valuable when hiring journalists as a ratio measure, a researcher could simply ask how many employees the editor has who hold journalism degrees. Since having four employees with journalism degrees means that an organization has twice as many such employees as an organization with only two, this is a natural ratio measure. In order to facilitate comparison of news organizations of different sizes, the researcher could express the number as a percentage of the total number of employees.
In researching H2, these five operational definitions have varying degrees of utility. The dichotomous measure, for instance, would not be of much value in finding results. If anything, it could be used to disqualify one category of editors from participation in the study if that were desired. However, the “no” category might be interesting to include in the study, and it is also covered in definition e., the ratio measure. Similarly, the nominal measure could be used to sort respondents into categories for study with one of the other measures, but is not very useful on its own. The ordinal measure in definition c. and the Likert scale in definition d. are quite similar in that they ask about the importance of various attributes to editors when they are hiring. The Likert scale would be preferable though, since the ordinal data collected in c. would also appear in d., and Likert scales have the advantage of being able to be analyzed as ratio data as argued by Labovitz (Labovitz, 1971).
5. One potential threat to the validity of H2 would result from a sampling bias. For example, if the study were to survey only editors who were themselves graduates of journalism schools, the generalizability of the results to the entire universe of editors would be reduced. While the internal validity of the study would be increased by such a limitation, there are threats to the external validity (Krathwohl, 1998). If journalism school graduate editors disproportionately favor journalism school graduates (which certainly has face validity) in comparison to other editors, the relationship of the variables would be shown to hold, even if it did were not true across the entire population of editors in the real world. This would be a Type I error. Random assignments of respondents from a sampling frame—in this case a list of editors—would reduce the effects of this sampling bias (Sudman, 1983).
These hypotheses could also be affected by a local history threat to validity. For example, if a chain of newspapers employing a number of respondents in the study were to suffer systemic financial problems and institute a wage freeze for several years, the percentage change in journalists’ salaries for those years would be zero, thus invalidating the operational definition of “success” for those journalists. The hypothesis would appear to be rejected, even though the real-world principle might still hold. This would be a Type II error. To preserve validity, those cases could be eliminated, but that might significantly reduce the sample size, thus threatening validity in other ways (Krathwohl, 1998, pp. 515, 527).
References
Krathwohl, D. R. (1998). Methods of educational and social science research: an integrated approach (Second ed.). Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Labovitz, S. (1971). The assignment of numbers to rank order categories. American Sociological Review, 35, 515–525.
Remnick, D. (2004). Introduction: reporting it all. In Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (pp. ix–xxvi). New York: North Point Press.
Sudman, S. (1983). Chapter 5: Applied sampling. In P. H. Rossi, J. D. Wright & A. B. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of survey research. Orlando: Academic Press, Inc.
2. To explore the possible answers to this question, I propose the following two hypotheses, and their corresponding null hypotheses:
H1: There is a relationship between having a degree from a journalism school and level of success in a journalism career.
H0: There is no relationship between having a degree from a journalism school and level of success in a journalism career.
H2: Editors show a clear preference for hiring journalists with journalism degrees over those without journalism degrees.
H0: Editors show no clear preference for hiring journalists with journalism degrees over those without journalism degrees.
H1 tests for a simple relationship between the variables of having a journalism school degree and success in a journalism career. This is a weaker, two-tailed hypothesis. H2 looks for a directional relationship between having a journalism degree and likelihood of being hired. Though easier to reject, this is a stronger, one-tailed hypothesis.
3. Since having a journalism degree or not is a simple dichotomous measure, I will operationally define a “level of success in a journalism career,” as referred to in H1. Level of success in a journalism career can be defined as the percentage of change in a participant’s salary over the most recent continuous ten years of the participant’s employment. Since journalism careers are often volatile (and changing jobs can even be a sign of success, not failure), “continuous employment” does not necessarily mean that the participant was employed at the same publication for all ten years. The percentage change in salary represents the assumption that the journalist’s career is advancing. Freelance journalists will not be included, since, in effect, they hire themselves, and their possession of a journalism degree would not have to impress anyone to gain employment. An alternative measure of success, honors and awards received for journalistic work, was rejected because too few awards exist to measure meaningfully. Another alternative, employer satisfaction with the journalist’s work, was rejected under the assumption that higher employer satisfaction would also result in higher salaries for the journalist, which is the measure under consideration.
4. A second variable in this exercise, taken from H2, can be defined in several different ways. That variable is “editors’ preference for hiring journalists with journalism school degrees,” and can be defined as follows:
a. Dichotomous measure: editors can be asked whether or not they have ever hired a journalist who holds a journalism school degree. Answers will fall into two categories: yes, they have; or no, they have not.
b. Nominal measure: applicants for journalism jobs can be classified into (at least) four categories:
1. Journalism school graduates with a bachelor’s degree
2. Journalism school graduates with a master’s degree
3. Liberal arts graduates with a bachelor’s degree
4. Liberal arts graduates with a master’s degree
c. To establish an ordinal measure, editors can be asked to respond to the following prompt: Rank the following attributes of journalism job applicants in order (highest to lowest) of desirability:
• A journalism degree
• A liberal arts degree
• Professional experience as a journalist
• Other professional experience
• Publication history
• A journalism internship
• Writing ability as shown in published stories
• Writing ability as shown on an employer-proctored writing test
d. The ordinal measure proposed in part c. could easily be adapted to serve as a Likert-type scale. The prompt could be rephrased to read: “Rate the importance of each of the following attributes of a prospective employee on a scale of 1–7, with 1 equaling ‘not important at all,’ and 7 equaling ‘extremely important.’” Then, each of the above attributes would be listed with a Likert scale matching the prompt underneath it.
e. In order to measure the concept of editors’ perceptions of journalism degrees as valuable when hiring journalists as a ratio measure, a researcher could simply ask how many employees the editor has who hold journalism degrees. Since having four employees with journalism degrees means that an organization has twice as many such employees as an organization with only two, this is a natural ratio measure. In order to facilitate comparison of news organizations of different sizes, the researcher could express the number as a percentage of the total number of employees.
In researching H2, these five operational definitions have varying degrees of utility. The dichotomous measure, for instance, would not be of much value in finding results. If anything, it could be used to disqualify one category of editors from participation in the study if that were desired. However, the “no” category might be interesting to include in the study, and it is also covered in definition e., the ratio measure. Similarly, the nominal measure could be used to sort respondents into categories for study with one of the other measures, but is not very useful on its own. The ordinal measure in definition c. and the Likert scale in definition d. are quite similar in that they ask about the importance of various attributes to editors when they are hiring. The Likert scale would be preferable though, since the ordinal data collected in c. would also appear in d., and Likert scales have the advantage of being able to be analyzed as ratio data as argued by Labovitz (Labovitz, 1971).
5. One potential threat to the validity of H2 would result from a sampling bias. For example, if the study were to survey only editors who were themselves graduates of journalism schools, the generalizability of the results to the entire universe of editors would be reduced. While the internal validity of the study would be increased by such a limitation, there are threats to the external validity (Krathwohl, 1998). If journalism school graduate editors disproportionately favor journalism school graduates (which certainly has face validity) in comparison to other editors, the relationship of the variables would be shown to hold, even if it did were not true across the entire population of editors in the real world. This would be a Type I error. Random assignments of respondents from a sampling frame—in this case a list of editors—would reduce the effects of this sampling bias (Sudman, 1983).
These hypotheses could also be affected by a local history threat to validity. For example, if a chain of newspapers employing a number of respondents in the study were to suffer systemic financial problems and institute a wage freeze for several years, the percentage change in journalists’ salaries for those years would be zero, thus invalidating the operational definition of “success” for those journalists. The hypothesis would appear to be rejected, even though the real-world principle might still hold. This would be a Type II error. To preserve validity, those cases could be eliminated, but that might significantly reduce the sample size, thus threatening validity in other ways (Krathwohl, 1998, pp. 515, 527).
References
Krathwohl, D. R. (1998). Methods of educational and social science research: an integrated approach (Second ed.). Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Labovitz, S. (1971). The assignment of numbers to rank order categories. American Sociological Review, 35, 515–525.
Remnick, D. (2004). Introduction: reporting it all. In Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (pp. ix–xxvi). New York: North Point Press.
Sudman, S. (1983). Chapter 5: Applied sampling. In P. H. Rossi, J. D. Wright & A. B. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of survey research. Orlando: Academic Press, Inc.
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