Lesbian, Gay and Family Diversity Interest Group

Como Se Dice HIV? Adapting Human Immunodeficiency Virus Prevention Messages to Reach Homosexual and Bisexual Hispanic Men the Importance of Hispanic Cultural and Health Beliefs • Matthew A. Bowdy, University of Kentucky • HIV/AIDS prevention messages catered to Anglo homosexual/bisexual men are not effective in teaching preventative behaviors to Hispanic homosexual/bisexual men. Hispanic sociocultural traits associated with homosexuality and bisexuality prevent effectiveness. The Hispanic family is also extremely important in influencing behaviors. Successful HIV prevention messages geared towards Hispanic homosexual/bisexual men need to include the following: the importance of the Hispanic family, Hispanic cultural beliefs about homosexuality and bisexuality, and the cultural beliefs.

The Case of POZ Magazine: Putting Uses and Gratifications to the Test • Gary R. Hicks, Texas • The tradition of media inquiry known as uses and gratifications assumes an active audience that looks to the media to solve problems and meet needs. McQuail (1983) lists the key areas of learning and information, self-insight and personal identity, social contact, diversion, entertainment and time-filling. Traditional media seek to provide one, usually more, of these benefits to its users. But what happens when a single media outlet tries to be everything to its readers? My research interest is in examining just how successful POZ, a slick magazine written for the HIV-positive community, is fulfilling its mission to be just that.

Freedom for My Speech, But Not for Yours: The Persistence of Stigma and the Urge to Censor in the 1970s • Elizabeth M. Koehler, Univ. of North Carolina • The First Amendment confers upon the oppressed the means to ensure their rights will no longer by trampled by an uninformed or unaccepting majority. The curious scene of the 1970s involved gay men and lesbians —dissenters who rely on the First Amendment to help them get their message out — attempting to censor mainstream media messages that subverted their cause. This paper examines this paradox to explore the role of censorship in moving the marginalized toward acceptance.

Healy v. James and Campus Gay Organizations: Progress of a Movement, 1967 – 1977 • Elizabeth M. Koehler, Univ. of North Carolina • The freedom of association has become increasingly important in shaping the texture of political discussion in America. In Healy v. James in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court said the associational rights of Students for a Democratic Society were abridged when it was denied official campus recognition. After Healy, gay campus organizations found themselves granted the same associational protections by the courts. This paper explores the apparent connection between Healy v. James and the recognition of gay liberation groups on U.S. campuses.

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Internship and Careers Interest Group

Inside the Advertising and Public Relations Internship • Fred Beard, University of Oklahoma • The importance of internships in the education and future careers of advertising and PR students is well established. Although previous research confirms the benefits and characteristics of internships, this study investigated the proposition that certain patterns of assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors are characteristic of successful internships. To examine this proposition, the author conducted interviews with interns and their supervisors, and analyzed the data qualitatively, seeking descriptive categories. The patterns emerging from the data provide insights into how the participants work together to accomplish a successful internship.

Criteria for Hiring Public Relations Graduates: Employers’ Perspective • Carol Ann Hackley, Quingwen Dong, Clark Robins, University of the Pacific • A longitudinal survey of Public Relations employers shows that there are five categories which should be emphasized for public relations students. These are 1) educational focus, 2) communication skills, 3) analytical ability, 4) professional orientation, and 5) personal. The survey shows that major changes in public relations employers’ hiring criteria over time focus on public relations and organizational emphasis, research capability, person achievements and professional orientation.

Does Money Still Buy Happiness? Effects of Journalism Internships on Job Satisfaction • Edward M. Horowitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Survey data of journalism school graduates was used to examine the impact of media-related college internships on graduatesÕ job satisfaction. By assessing the media industry through internships prior to graduation and the job market, graduates can make career and employment choices that are best suited to their particular career goals. Findings indicate that it is the quality of internship(s) that predicts to job satisfaction, not quantity of internships. Although higher salaries do predict to high job satisfaction, those respondents doing what they want to do are the most satisfied.

Digital Imaging Skills and the Hiring and Training of Photojournalists • John Russial, Wayne Wanta, Oregon • This paper, based on a national survey of newspaper photo editors, details the degree of technological change in newspaper photography. It looks at the importance placed on digital imaging and photography competencies, and it examines the implications for the training and hiring of journalists. It concludes that the shift from chemical to digital processing has led to a relative lack of concern among photo editors about the need for chemical darkroom skills. Many journalism programs, however, continue to focus on those skills. It finds that new technical skills, such as the use of digital cameras and the web, are growing in importance. Skills that reflect convergence of photo jobs with others within the newsroom, such as design and graphics, are growing in importance. But photo editors say the key skill that reflects cross-media convergence • video • is unimportant now and only slightly more important for the near future.

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Graduate Education Interest Group

Leader of the PACK: An Analysis of Music Listeners’ Motivations Using the PACK Taxonomy • John R. Chapin, Rutgers University • The PACK Taxonomy of motives is used through a Uses and Gratifications perspective to test ten related hypotheses concerning adolescents’ motivations for listening to specific forms of popular music. For this pilot study, 63 structured interviews were conducted with students at a rural community college, to assess students’ motivations for listening to specific songs and specific forms of popular music and motivations for their current personal projects. The content of songs identified as favorites is also examined. As expected, adolescents’ personal projects are found to be contingent on age, and themes of favorite songs are found to be contingent on adolescents’ purposes for listening to them. Expected differences in PACK motives between specific popular music forms are not found.

Women and All the News That’s Fit to Print? • Mike Dorsher, University of Maryland • Content analysis is performed on a random sample of 224 New York Times editions, from 1966 to 1994, to see if the increasing number of women in the newsroom correlates with increased coverage of women on Times’ pages. The data show a significant increase (at alpha level of .05) in women’s bylines, pictures and references, but not obituaries, letters to the editor or op-ed pieces. There also is significant evidence that women write about women more than men do, but that men increasingly write about women when more of their newsroom colleagues are women.

Setting the Media Agenda: A Case Study • Kyle Huckins, University of Texas at Austin • Attempting to add to the growing literature on agenda building, the study uses agenda-setting theory as a model for testing the correlation between the agenda of the Christian Coalition and major U.S. newspapers. Highly significant relationships were found in cross-lagged correlations between the agenda of the group’s official newspaper and the media agenda, and statistically significant secondary effects were also noted. Less clear were measures designed to analyze contributing factors helping the Coalition set the media agenda.

From Wise to Foolish: The Changing Portrayal of the Sitcom Father from the 1950s to the 1990s • Erica Scharrer, Syracuse University • This content analysis of 72 episodes of sitcoms categorized by decade in which they were originally aired shows modern television fathers are more likely to be shown foolishly than in the past. The study shows that with the increased presence of women in the American workforce over time, sitcom fathers have gone from knowing best to knowing little. The portrayals are shown to have changed over time and to correlate with these extra media variables.

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Civic Journalism Interest Group

The Treatment of Public Journalism in Three Media Review Journals • Renita Coleman, University of Missouri-Columbia • Between 1993 and 1996, the three major journalism reviews published 45 articles of various types that focused on some aspect of public journalism. Analysis provides comparisons among these journals by examining the role each played in the debate, assessing the quality of criticism, and analyzing the evolution of thinking about the subject. This study provides evidence that the quality in evaluations of the debate has matured even while public journalism itself remains highly controversial.

The Language of Public Journalism: An Analysis of the Movement’s Appropriation of the Terms Public, Civic, Deliberative Dialogue, and Consensus • James Engelhardt, University of Oregon • This essay applies Stephen Lukes’ multidimensional conception of power to the public journalism movement. Particularly, it is concerned with how the language and/or vocabulary of public journalism reveals a particular power dynamic – a dynamic both synonymous and discordant with traditional journalistic practice. This article relies on the work of scholars who have confronted the interrelation between language and power such as V.N. Volosinov, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Roger Fowler, and Trinh Minh-ha. The new journalistic movement’s use of four terms – public, civic, deliberative dialogue, and consensus – will be addressed, exposing the distinctions between public, civic, and traditional journalism and exemplifying that public journalism consists of more than just good journalism.

Civic Journalism: The Practitioner’s Perspective • Peter Gade, Scott Abel, Michael Antecol, Hsiao-Yin Hsueh, Janice Hume, Jack Morris, Ashley Packard, Susan Willey, Nancy Fraser Wilson and Keith Sanders, University of Missouri • The debate about the practice and theory of civic journalism has grown as more media have experimented in the 1990s with civic journalism projects of varying sizes and goals. Critics and theorists have voiced their thoughts on the movement, but very little is known about what journalists think about civic journalism. This paper attempts to address this issue by asking journalists at two similarly sized newspapers, Mobile (Ala.) Register and the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, to react to a series of statements about the role of the media in society and civic journalism. Of the four types emerging from this Q-Methodology study, Neutral Observers and Civic Journalists factor themselves toward the philosophical poles of libertarianism and social responsibility, with Responsible Liberals and Concerned Traditionalists taking more centrist positions.

Newspapers and Citizen-Based Journalism in the 1996 Elections: a Cross-Market Comparison • Philip Meyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Deborah Potter, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies • Efforts to do citizen-based journalism and effects of those efforts were compared in 20 markets through content analysis and before-and-after surveys of media practitioners and citizens. Media intent had a strong effect on certain content categories, but content had weak or no effect on citizen attitudes and behavior. However, media intent did predict citizen knowledge and trust in media. The outcome suggests that previous commitments to citizen-based journalism in certain markets left an ongoing effect.

Issues and Agendas: The Case of Wichita, Kansas Revisited • Christina Newby • This study examines the agenda-setting function of local and national media on citizens of Sedgewick County, Kansas. The purpose of this research is to examine the agenda-setting effect with regard to citizens’ concerns and look at the way in which agenda-setting is viewed by individuals who have experience with public journalism. The research replicates a study that expands a traditional agenda-setting research content analysis and introduces a correlation with in-depth interviews.

The 1996 Presidential Campaign, Civic Journalism and Local TV News: Does Doing Civic Journalism Make Any Difference? •Amy Reynolds, University of Texas-Austin • This content analysis compares the local television news coverage of the 1996 presidential election by two stations, one that supports the civic journalism philosophy and one that supports traditional journalism. The civic journalism station successfully eliminated opinion polls/horserace from its coverage and focused on voting efforts and issues, but, while the station clearly showed civic journalism leanings and provided some notable differences in coverage, it still didn’t fully achieve the goals of civic journalism.

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Visual Communication Division

The Development of Self Efficacy in Young Women in Relation to the Perception of Attention to Sexuality as Power in Advertising Images • Cecelia Baldwin, San Jose State University • This empirical study examines the hypothesis that attention to sexuality, in advertising, is perceived as self efficacy, or a personal power enabling one to control one’s own life. Semiotic theory provides it’s framework. The subject population consisted of two groups of young women, average high school students and advanced placement high school students. The hypothesis was upheld in independent t-tests. Additionally, ANOVA analysis revealed significant differences that may help young women to refute this perception.

Coverage of Gandhi’s Funeral Brings Competing Philosophies and Camera Technologies into Focus • Claude Cookman, Indiana University • A comparison of the photographic coverage of the funeral of Mohandas Gandhi by Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson reveals why and how their different philosophical and technical approaches produced very different results. It also details Cartier-Bresson’s method- for producing a news reportage, and demonstrates that despite his current denial of photojournalism, he was compelled to witness important events and communicate what he photographed to the audiences of mass-circulation, illustrated magazines.

A Time Out of Mind: When the Chicago Tribune Rescued Trapped Suburban Women • Alan Fried, University of South Carolina • A Chicago Tribune self-promotion advertising campaign from the 1950s was analyzed using ethnographic content analysis and proxemic analysis of photographs. The campaign stands out for the way it depicted its audience, its voice, and for its advertising appeals. Although the appeals hearken back to the Social Ethos described by William H. Whyte, Jr. in The Organization Man and David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, the ad campaign fits within Media System Dependency Theory.

Readability of Body Text in Computer Mediated Communication: Effects of Type Family, Size and Face • Joel Geske, Iowa State University • This experimental design used 78 subjects to test readability of different type sizes and type faces in both a serif and sans serif type family. The study found there are few significant differences for speed of reading between type sizes of fourteen, twelve and ten point type. Twelve point type had the highest rankings for both speed of reading and recall of material. Bold type did not increase readability and hurt recall in most cases. Little difference was found between serif and sans serif type except in ten point type where speed and recall were poorer with the serif type face.

Cameras in Courtrooms: Dimensions of Attitudes of State Supreme Court Justices • Dennis Hale, Bowling Green State University • This study attempted to extrapolate the future development of state supreme court policies concerning cameras and broadcast equipment in courtrooms by interviewing recently retired members of the courts. Support for cameras in courtrooms was contrasted with judicial support for eight other mass media rights. Courtroom cameras received the weakest support of the media rights. The justices predicted a weakening of the right during the next five years.

Learning News Through the Mind’s Eye: The Impact of Supporting Graphics on Television News • Stefan A. Jenzowsky, Thomas Knieper, Klaus B. Reginek, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universtitat Munchen • The purpose of this paper is to investigate how we process supporting graphical inserts in television news and which learning processes are involved in watching everyday news programs. Data is presented from a laboratory experiment in which two independent variables were manipulated: (a) the graphic visualization of news presentations, and (b) the graphic representation in recognition tasks. Results suggest a high acceptance of supporting graphics and a picture superiority effect for any condition of retrieval, while no encoding specificity effect was found for most conditions.

Political Endorsements In Daily Newspapers and Photographic Coverage of Candidates in the 1995 Louisiana Gubernatorial Campaign • John Mark King, Louisiana State University • Daily newspaper endorsements in the 1995 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign and photographs of candidates were examined. Independent variables were endorsement in the primary election and the runoff election. Dependent variables were photo size, color/black and white, fold location, placement and depiction of the candidate. Results from 10 hypotheses showed that endorsed candidates were more likely to have photos published on front pages and more likely to have favorable photos published than candidates not endorsed by newspapers.

The Flapper in the Art of John Held, Jr.: Modernity, Post-Feminism, and the Meaning of Women’s Bodies in 1920s Magazine Cover Illustration • Carolyn L. Kitch, Temple University • In the 1920s, the flapper • a symbol, then and now, of the Jazz Age • was closely associated with the magazine illustration of John Held, Jr. An examination of this imagery considers women’s representation as a primary site for the intersection of early-twentieth-century feminism, modernism, and consumerism. It suggests that, during a pivotal decade in both women’s history and mass-media history, the progressive cultural construct of the New Woman became commodified and contained in the flapper.

Motivating Incentives, Self-Efficacy and Their Consequences for Web Authoring • Ghee-Young Noh, Michigan State University • This study was undertaken to identify relationship between determinants derived from social cognitive theory and Web authoring. Web authoring behavior was considerably explained by motivating incentives, self-efficacy, programming competence, and accessibility. However, motivating incentives and the perceived self-efficacy were more important factors than accessibility and computer programming to predict the degree of Web authoring. This study suggests that social cognitive theory could provide additional explanatory power for the mechanism of implementation of Web authoring.

Teaching the Use of Color: A Survey of Visual Communication Division Members • Lyle D. Olson, Roxanne Lucchesi, South Dakota State University • This paper presents the results of a survey to determine the extent to which journalism and mass communication educators are teaching the use of color and how they are doing it. It includes lists of the most used and top ranked resources for teaching the use of color. The respondents also indicated that students in their programs do not receive enough training in the use of color and that computer hardware and software resources at their schools to teach color are lacking.

Staged, Faked and Mostly Naked: Photographic Innovation at the Evening Graphic (1924-1932) • Bob Stepno, University of North Carolina • The New York Evening Graphic is remembered for its sensational fake composite photos, not for its other photo-illustration innovations. This paper describes a variety of techniques the Graphic used, including composographs and studio re-enactment of news events, and the media reaction at the time, particularly through Editor and Publisher. The paper finds there was little debate of the ethics of altering images, but the technique became linked to controversies over particular sex stories and images.

Moles and Clowns: How Editorial Cartoons Portrayed Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson and the CIA • John W. Williams, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale • No Abstract available.

Visual Communication • CREATIVE PROJECTS

Protest 96: Revolution in Cyberspace, a Paradigm Shift in Global Communication • Rita Csapo-Sweet, University of Missouri-St. Louis • This presentation documents an interactive exhibition in St. Louis that monitored and participated with the massive pro-democracy protest demonstrations that took place in Belgrade, Serbia, from mid-December 1996 to mid-February 1997. When the Milosevic government tried to silence the election results that the independent media were broadcasting, university students in Belgrade created a website and began disseminating their messages over the Internet. Suddenly their struggle became global and communication history was made.

If the Genie is Out of the Bottle: How Do We Teach the Ethical Decision-Making of Digital Imaging Manipulation in the Post-OJ Era of Photojournalism (Without Sounding Like a Luddite?) • Jock Lauterer, Penn State University • When photojournalists or picture editors use digital imaging manipulation to fundamentally alter the content of photos for whatever reason, they strike a death blow at the heart of what makes authentic photojournalism so valuable. This slide lecture is designed to introduce visual communications students to the historical abuses of photography, to alert them to the seductive and yet wonderful powers of the digital age, and to provide them with a journalist’s moral compass.

Structuring Text for On-line Delivery, or Life Beyond Repurposing • Stephen Masiclat, Syracuse University • The rush to publish online newspapers has made the World Wide Web the premiere venue for online journalism. But the vast majority of online newspapers are simply print articles re-purposed for the web. Articles constructed for printed pages are placed in an environment with new capabilities and severe limitations. This presentation is a demonstration of a different way to present information that is mindful of the online environment’s characteristics and its users.

Gone West: The American West in the ‘90s, a Photographic Essay by Alan Berner • David Rees, University of Missouri • ‘Gone West’ is a CD-ROM presentation of a photo essay by Alan Berner. It includes comments by the photographer about his own work and visual reference to Arthur Rothstein’s pictures which inspired Berner. This is a prototype of new technology applied to journalistic presentation and has educational benefits for students because they can view a complete body of work and hear the photographer’s own perspective about that work in a classroom or individual setting.

Creativity Workbook and Self-Promotion Web Site for Advertising Art Direction • Jean Trumbo, Cornell University • A creativity resource workbook was developed for students enrolled in an Advertising Art Direction course. The workbook includes idea generation exercises designed by the instructor to prompt innovation in the creation of student portfolios. The final objective of the course was to develop a professional quality portfolio and to augment that through a self-promotional web site. Work from each student was included on the web site. The materials in this workbook include creativity exercises and page templates that were used to build the student portfolio web site.

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