Early morning at the gym where I did as little as possible to justify the trip. Some days you don’t have it for the weights. And those are the days that are hard to push through. So I only did four short groups.

Spent the late morning talking to newspaper executives. One gentleman was from North Carolina and we chatted about Appalachia State football at great length. App State recently put a beating on Samford, so there was that. There’s talk that the Mountaineers are once again considering moving up to DI ball — the newspaper guy thought not. I told him a story about a Samford-App State game a few years back, it was a nice chat.

Later I called another newspaper company. The person that answered told me the person I wanted no longer worked for the company. That’s never awkward. Played phone tag with the new person I wanted for much of the day before we finally caught up with one another.

Swapped out some computers. Talked a little football with the IT guys.

Critiqued the Crimson. Nice paper this week, with only a few real layout problems to fix. They had a little coverage of the gambling indictments from earlier this week. There have been a few bike thefts. And there’s an advance on the Marine Corps band playing on campus this weekend.

You can see more here.

I ran into one of my students who is working on a video assignment for another class. “These cameras are amazing,” he said. We shoot in high-def. We love telling that to high school recruits, too.

Spent the evening studying. Reading for researching media effects, where I have now filled an entire three-ring binder with assignments. Much of it is on the limited capacity model, so I wonder, ironically, how much of it I’ve retained.

I also have to review and critique an article for class tomorrow. The article I have was co-authored by one of the founding members of our department. No pressure there. The article was about Applachian ticks. Well, it just used the ticks and a new fictional disease to prove a point about visual story telling toward exemplification theory, which is one of Dolf Zillman’s main areas of research. I actually wrote part of the Wikipedia entry for it last year.

And that accounts for most of my day.

Journalism and Internet links: Oh Leonard. Spread it around a bit more:

I remain convinced that, with exceptions, citizen journalism is to journalism as pornography is to a Martin Scorsese film; while they may employ similar tools — i.e., camera, lighting — they aspire to different results.

Leonard Pitts, who I’ve admired for a long time, picked James O’Keefe and tried to paint everyone with that brush — a traditional journalism technique, generalize everything through one anecdote. He helpfully forgets every problem traditional journalists have ever been caught in and actually gets a few of the details wrong in his own column. Several people helpfully point that out in the (incredibly binary) comments.

The problem here, then, is one of identifying credibility. Traditional journalists proudly carry the mantle of the masthead they broadcast for, or the mic flag from which they broadcast. In most cases that’s something an audience can expect to rally around. The real uphill battle, and the real danger in an online context, is establishing, maintaining and spreading a similar credibility in an environment where developing an official looking platform isn’t especially difficult. That’s something I’d like to study in the near future, actually.

For example, which one has more credibility at this point? The Daily Beast or Newsweek? What about if they combined? The sites are looking a lot alike these days … But what about someone who produces a similar looking page, puts out some slick content, satire or outright libel? How will we discern between online offerings? Media literacy is a critical function and an important area to study.

Hey, did you see CBS’ Les Moonves: “(T)hey have to come to us for our content.” I read that on Mark Coddington’s, not CBS.com site, which helpfully proves the point that we’ll be able to find content elsewhere.

In online news, I’m making it a regular habit to visit bamafactcheck.com for the latest dose of truthiness. In case you were wondering, that’s a site run by traditional-style journalists, like our friends at The Anniston Star and other media across the state.

Have you tried examining your Tweet Reach lately? I like it (because it gives me healthy numbers). Though I’ve no idea the methodology they use, over the course of my last 50 tweets I’ve apparently reached more than 40,000 people and made something like 52,000 impressions. Even if you divide that by some number of skepticism the returns aren’t bad. Since it is apparently basing this on the most recent tweets your numbers will fluctuate, but still. If it is correct it goes a fair way to answering the question of the power of that tool’s reach. Check it out.

And be sure to check out the 1939 World’s Fair post, below. That’s ready for your perusal. And now I must return to studying, because that is what I do.