NEW BOOKS AND DIRECTORIES IN PARK LIBRARY Greetings! Two books on the death penalty and wrongful convictions: 1. Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Refelctions on Dealing with the Death Penalty. By Scott Turow 2. The Wrong Man: America's Epidemic of Wrongful Death Row Convictions. By Stanley Cohen Two Directories: 1. Directory of Membership and News Sources: 2003-2004. National Press Club of Washington. (Gift from Phil Meyer) 2. Who's Who in Investor Relations: 2002-2003 National Investor Relations Institute. (Gift from Larry Lamb) These books will be cataloged soon. Until then, if you are interested in looking at them, check at the Park Library reference desk. They will be on the book cataloging prep cart. Best regards,
AJR: BUREAU OF MISSING BUREAUS Greetings! For those faculty and students interested in the state of foreign news desks, please take time to read American Journalism Review's October/November 2003 article about the downsizing of foreign news desks. There are charts listing TV's foreign bureaus with full-time correspondents and locales where bureaus have been closed since the 1980s. There is also a chart of minutes of datelined coverage on international news in the last 14+ years. This issue of AJR is in the serials area of our Park Library. Best regards,
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Media Ownership article Greetings! Jim Goodmon, chief executive of Capitol Broadcasting, is quoted extensively on the front page of Wednesday's October 15 Wall Street Journal. His TV station, WRAL, is one of the most profitable CBS affiliates in the country. WSJ: "Apparently Mr. Goodmon has emerged as one of the most vocal combatants in the fierce battle over media ownership." You can read the full article by going to the UNC Online catalog, selecting "electronic indexes and databases," then clicking on "W" for Wall Stree Journal, and then entering the search terms: "media-ownership fight" and "goodmon." Best regards,
SEMONCHE ON THE ROAD AGAIN Greetings! I will out of the Park Library tomorrow, Friday, Oct. 17. After returning on Monday, October 20, I will again depart, this time for Fall Break. Jack and I will be spending some time in Santa Fe, NM from October 21-26, 2003. A reminder: our Park Library will be closed during Fall Break starting at 5:00 p.m. October 22. Regular hours will resume at 8:00 a.m. Monday, October 27. Best regards,
NORTH CAROLINA ONLINE (Web and Database formats) Greetings! Some important things for everyone to remember when searching for archived news and photos, etc., in North Carolina media: WEB * Media on the web offers text and images (photos, maps, charts, etc.) of many but *not* all North Carolina media (newspapers, magazines, and television). Use a search engine to locate North Carolina media URLs. * Selected North Carolina newspapers on the web may be found at the North Carolina Press web site http://www.ncpress.com. When you get to this site, click on "Online Newspapers." Be aware that not all of these web sites have news archives available to you. * Articles published prior to late 1990s are rare on North Carolina media web sites. * Not all articles in print and broadcast editions are archived on their web pages. * Access to archived material is frequently limited to the current week or month. Older archives are rarely, if ever, available at no cost to searchers. There are exceptions. The Park Library director has special access to a limited number of North Carolina media archives (The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer, plus a few others. Consult with her. DATABASES (Lexis/Nexis, Factiva, NC NewsStand, etc.) * Most databases are text only. That is graphical and tabular material may be noted, but not displayed. * Not all articles published are in the databases. Articles excluded from electronic archives include copyrighted material (as a result of the Tasini v. The New York Times lawsuit), some tabular data, columns, and many wire service reports. In these situations, students and scholars must rely upon microfilm of North Carolina newspapers. * A few North Carolina newspapers may be listed on more than one database. Also, content, time frame, and search protocols may vary among databases. For more details about North Carolina Media Archives, please consult this URL: http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/ncmedia.html Best regards,
PARK LIBRARY CLOSED DURING 2003 FALL BREAK Please alert your students that our Park Library will be closed from 5:00 p.m. Wednesday, October 22, 2003 until 8:00 a.m. Monday, October 27, 2003. Our Library staff will be taking a few well-deserved days off. If there are any special research needs please contact me, Barbara Semonche, before October 21. Other libraries on our campus will be open on reduced hours for Fall Break. Davis Library's Fall Break Schedule will be: Wed. Oct. 22: Closes at 5:00 p.m. Thur. Oct. 23: Open 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Fri. Oct 24: Open 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Sat. Oct. 25: Open 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Sun. Oct. 26: Open 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Best regards,
BY THE NUMBERS: Poverty and the Middle Class Interesting material is crossing my desk recently. Time to share it with you and your students. 1. Remember the Citizens' Guide to the North Carolina Budget that Paul O'Connor gave to our Library? Well, not only do we have a print copy of the data-filled publication, but we now have CD-ROM. Since there is no copyright constraint on the distribution of this publication, I've loaded the CD onto our Park Library's web site. You can read it by going to http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu , clicking on "For Students" or "For Faculty" and on the next screen selecting "North Carolina Citizen's Guide to 2003 State Budget." 2. The Spring/Summer 2003 issue of Popular Government (on our Park Library serials' shelves) has a special section on poverty in North Carolina. You'll discover data from multiple perspectives: historical, political, demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and educational. There are also some powerful photos accompanying the text and charts. [Note: former faculty member Carol Reuss passed on a cite that took the U.S. Census Bureau to task about its data collection on the poor. The full text of that NYT article is at the end of this email.] 3. The October 2003 issue of American Demographics offers a statistical portrait of "America's Money in the Middle." An analysis of Census 2000 data reveals the importance of the rising black middle class. "Nearly 30 percent of America's black households have achieved middle- and upper-income status." Data displayed in lists, maps, and charts. SECTION: Section A; Page 25; Column 1; Editorial Desk HEADLINE: Who's Poor? Don't Ask the Census Bureau BYLINE: By Jared Bernstein; Jared Bernstein is a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. DATELINE: WASHINGTON Today the Census Bureau will release the official poverty rate for 2002. While that figure is likely to indicate that the ranks of the poor have increased, it unfortunately won't really tell us much of anything about the true extent of poverty in America. The problem is that the official definition of poverty no longer provides an accurate picture of material deprivation. The current measure was created 40 years ago by a government statistician, Mollie Orshansky, and hasn't much changed since. "Anyone who thinks we ought to change it is perfectly right," Ms. Orshansky told an interviewer in 2001. The current procedure takes the 1963 poverty thresholds for each given family size devised by Ms. Orshansky and updates them for inflation. For example, if the income of a family of four with two adults and two children fell below $18,244 last year, they were counted as poor by the bureau. Simple, yes, but there are two basic problems. First, it fails to capture important changes in consumption patterns since the early 1960's. The research underlying the original thresholds was based on food expenditures by low-income families in 1955. Since her calculations showed that families then spent about a third of their income on food, Ms. Orshansky multiplied a low-income food budget by three to come up with her poverty line. But even she suspected this method underestimated what it took to meet basic needs, and was thus low-balling the poverty rate. And that mismeasurement has worsened over time, as food has become less expensive in relation to other needs like housing, health care and transportation, meaning the share of income spent on food by low-income families has fallen further. The National Academy of Sciences has estimated what the Orshansky measure would look like today if it were updated for changes in consumption patterns, and found the threshold could be as much as 45 percent higher, implying higher poverty rates. Second, the current measure leaves out some sources of income and some expenditures that weren't relevant when it was devised. The Census Bureau counts the value of cash transfers, like welfare payments, but it ignores the value of food stamps and health benefits, as well as newer tax credits that can significantly add to the income of low-end working families. Not only would taking these additions into consideration bring down the poverty rate figure, it would also provide a real measure of the effects of these antipoverty programs. On the other side of the ledger, the current method also ignores important costs to low-income families. For example, these days many more women with young children participate in the labor force, yet the money they spend on child care is not factored into the poverty calculation. If the Census Bureau's poverty findings were simply an accounting tool, these failures might not be important to anyone but economists and demographers. But the official figure plays an important role in determining eligibility for the federal and state safety nets: if we're not getting the measurement right, we're not providing services to the right people. There is a better way, but of course it's a political hot potato. Census Bureau analysts have been working on alternative measures that take into account the changes in family life over the past four decades. The one I consider most reliable, because it factors in child-care costs for working parents, has shown poverty rates that average about 3 percent above the official figure, implying that there may be 9 million more Americans whose incomes are inadequate for their basic needs. Of course, no administration would want to adopt such a measure on its watch. The Census Bureau, to its credit, says it will release a few of its alternatives to the official measure today (although not one that adequately considers child-care costs), which may help poverty analysts get a more accurate picture. Still, the public and the news media will focus on the outdated official measure. While this may provide a vague sense that our poverty problem has worsened, it won't tell people as much as we could or should know about poverty in America. http://www.nytimes.com
JOURNALISM HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL From a 1966 JoMC alum (Bill McAllister), working now with the Newseum, comes this request for research help: "What I'm hoping for is about 20 major items we could display, telling the history of journalism, print, radio, TV in a nutshell. My inclination is to have big events only, such as 1791 - freedom of press added to Constitution, NY Times founded, CNN established. "We will have more detailed US histories elsewhere in the Newseum and I don't want to duplicate those. What I'm trying to find are the big trend-setting events that have shaped journalism as we know it today. "It's going to be part of an exhibit in our International Gallery. With 2 interns, I'm doing brief histories of all the countries in the world and their brief press histories. "You'll be able at the gallery to get those brief histories from a display in the new building. So I need one for the USA and was hoping I could find one I could edit. Thanks to you, I've got a good start and a wonderful UNC contribution to the gallery." Now, I have already sent Bill links to several journalism/mass comm history web sites (see URLs below), but he seems to be seeking an academic consensus from his alma mater. So, I'm reaching out to you all requesting your nominations for "The Top 20 Major Events in Journalism History in the United States." Please send your nominations to me and I'll forward them to Bill.
Here are the URLs for journalism history timelines/chronologies as well as a book that I suggested to Bill:
http://www.naa.org/presstime/9910/2019main.html
http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/time/1910s.html
http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/journ.html
Also recommended Mitchell Stephens' "A History of News."
Looking forward to your responses. Best regards,
PARK LIBRARY'S NEWEST MATERIALS Greetings! 1. From Paul O'Connor comes a publication hot of the press. The title is: "Our State, Our Money: A Citizens' Guide to the North Carolina Budget." It's dated September 2003 and is prepared by the N.C. Progress Board as a public service. This 30 page oversize, colorful publication is rich with data, factoids, and charts. Even more important is the context and analysis accompanying this report. For the moment I'm keeping this publication in my office until it is cataloged. Faculty, staff, and students are welcome to drop by to view it. 2. From Bob Lauterborn comes a gem of marketing research. It is the CD-ROM version ("Choices III") of Simmons Marketing Research. Fred Thomsen and I are figuring out how to get it on a server. Eric Gautschi and I will be developing a student user guide for Choices III. 3. From Peter Bajomi-Lazar (via Bob Stevenson) comes thiese books: "Reinventing Media: Media Policy Reform in East-Central Europe," and "Media and Politics." 4. From Marvin Kalb comes two copies of his book (with Stephen Hess): "The Media and The War on Terorism." Books purchased by our Park Library include: [Note: they are not yet cataloged but will be soon.] * "Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods, Approaches." 2nd ed. by John W. Creswell. * "How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market." By Gerald Zaltman, Harvard Business School Press, 2003 * "Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators." By Kathleen A. Hansen and Nora Paul. Published by Allyn & Bacon, 2004 * "Pen and Sword: A Journalist's Guide to Covering the Military." By Ed Offley. Published by Marion Street Press, Inc., 2001. [Note: this book offers appendices covering reading lists on military issues, military-media relations, military history, and defense department reports as well as a glossary of common military accronyms, plus an index.] * "Math Tools for Journalists." By Kathleen Woodruff Wikham. 2003 * "The Concise Guide to Copy Editing." By Paul LaRocque, 2003 * "Heads You Win: An Easy Guide to Better Headline and Caption Writing." By Paul LaRocque, 2003.
FACULTY ONLINE TEXTBOOK REQUESTS Greetings! Just to alert you that you can request textbooks online through student stores *even* if you are launching a new course. Here is the link: http://www.store.unc.edu/textbooks/forms/req.html Of course, you may simply obtain a print form to complete for your textbooks requests. Just let me know and I'll put some in your mail box.
COMMUNICATION ABSTRACTS ONLINE COMING! Greetings! Ahhhh, there is good news today. Just received word from Davis Library's reference department staff that a database with Communication Abstracts is scheduled to be added to Davis Library's online collection. I don't have details about exactly when this online service will be added or how far back the database will reach, but as soon as I have confirmation, I'll get back to you. I suspect that it will be fairly soon. As many of our faculty and students know, Communication Abstracts is a journal our Park Library subscribes to and has back issues to 1978, volume 1.
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