Gatewatching (Digital Formations) Review

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(More customer reviews)Bruns analyses the rise of a means of news gathering and dissemination. Where people who are not full time media professionals (or even part time) can contribute comments and other content, like pictures and video, towards a hot topic.
The book is certainly aware of the pitfalls. Like how true or accurate are these observations? Do those commenting have any bias? Actually, perhaps the biggest problem is that much of the spontaneous reporting is simply badly written and thus not that interesting to read.
Even so, the immediacy and breadth of the observations makes this a useful complement to traditional news. The events that occurred after the book was printed - the London subway bombings and Hurrican Katrina, show that a mass audience does exist for this new type of reporting.

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Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production is the first comprehensive study of the latest wave of online news publications. The book investigates the collaborative publishing models of key news Websites, ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the massively successful technology news site Slashdot, and further to the multitude of Weblogs that have emerged in recent years. Building on collaborative approaches borrowed from the open source software development community, this book illustrates how gatewatching provides an alternative to gatekeeping and other traditional journalistic models of reporting, and has enabled millions of users around the world to participate in the online news publishing process.

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Funding Journalism in the Digital Age Review

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(More customer reviews)Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends takes a comprehensive view of the issue - how the news business got into this mess as well as ways to get out of it. It is a must read for journalism professionals, journalism students and anyone else who is concerned about the future of quality journalism.


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The news media play a vital role in keeping the public informed and maintaining democratic processes. But that essential function has come under threat as emerging technologies and changing social trends, sped up by global economic turmoil, have disrupted traditional business models and practices, creating a financial crisis. Quality journalism is expensive to produceso how will it survive as current sources of revenue shrink? Funding Journalism in the Digital Age not only explores the current challenges, but also provides a comprehensive look at business models and strategies that could sustain the news industry as it makes the transition from print and broadcast distribution to primarily digital platforms. The authors bring widespread international journalism experience to provide a global perspective on how news organizations are evolving, investigating innovative commercial projects in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Norway, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere.

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Making Your Point: Communicating Effectively with Audiences of One to One Million Review

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(More customer reviews)As a student majoring in public relations in Washington, I have read an extensive amount of books relating to topics in the field. Making Your Point is by far the best book I have had to read in my classes! The case studies are extremely effective and allowed me to identify how best to reach an audience. If you're looking for great communication advice, this is a must read!

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MAKE EVERY WORD COUNTWe all need to speak, write and communicate more effectively. Dave Bartlett shares his decades of experience as a communications strategist in an accessible, easy-to-apply guide to help anybody—students, business people, public speakers, or politicians—improve their speaking and presenting skills. The tricks are as old as Aristotle and as new as The Daily Show: Know how to appeal to each specific audience through research and thoughtful planning, and then use appropriate content and style to deliver a memorable message. Bartlett's advice iscommon sense backed bydozens of real-world examples.Learn:-How to devise asimple strategic goal for every interview, meeting, or speech-How to deliveryour message in a way that will appeal to your audience-How to makeyour messages positive, concrete, and empathetic-How to useblogs, podcasts, and Web sites like YouTube to promote your message-How to reach even the largest audiences one person at a time

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Mass Communication: Living in a Media World Review

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(More customer reviews)If you want to know all there is to know about how we are living in a media world, this is the book for you. Are you aware of all the ways radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and movies impact our lives - every single day! Written in a clear style, with pictures to help in understanding, this is a book that will open your eyes.

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Mass Communication delivers an engaging and compact introduction to the field of mass comm without the glitz that does little to improve students' ability to be smarter consumers of media or think critically about the media's role in today's society. Ralph E. Hanson combines solid content, incisive analysis, fun and conversational writing in a highly readable and informative text that will save your students as much as $50.

Employing an effective media literacy perspective, Hanson shows students that media are not something to be feared or demonized, but rather are an essential part of our lives that should be thoughtfully consumed. Updated to reflect changes in the media landscape, Mass Communication offers expanded discussion of:

• the role of social media in breaking domestic and international news stories; • video games as a form of interactive media; • the newspaper industry's continuing financial woes; • further consolidation of the media industry with the NBC/Comcast merger and the News Corporation's purchase of the Wall Street Journal; • public relations as a way of creating, developing, and nurturing relationships between an organization and its key publics; and • integrated marketing communication in the advertising chapter.

UNIQUE FEATURES HELP REINFORCE THE BOOK'S APPROACH: • Chapter-opening vignettes feature media professionals from Jon Stewart and Annie Leibovitz to Steve Jobs and Twitter founders Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. • Timelines place important media events in a broader historical context. • Test Your Media Literacy boxes showcase current research, interviews, or noteworthy events with questions that model critical thinking, helping to cultivate critical media consumption. • A marginal glossary helps reinforce learning of key concepts as students read.

THE SEVEN TRUTHS "THEY" DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE MEDIA: 1. The media are essential components of our lives. 2. There are no mainstream media (MSM). 3. Everything from the margin moves to the center. 4. Nothing's new—everything that happened in the past will happen again. 5. New media are always scary. 6. Activism and analysis are not the same thing. 7. There is no "they."

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Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators Review

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(More customer reviews)Curation Nation could use some curation itself. The book contains a lot of information, but it doesn't really say anything. The first 100 pages summary: there is a lot of crap on the Internet and it needs to be curated... I know that already, that's why I bought your book!
It goes on to profile different acts of curation such as the Huffington Post, aggregation through twitter, blogging, etc. Nothing really jaw dropping. Don't expect a unique insight here. Chapter 4 says don't piss of your consumers with crappy customer service because they have a voice now...this book was published in 2011 right? Do people/companies not know this by now? Did we really need a whole chapter on this?
The book's plea is "attention is the new economy." I partly agree with this, but don't expect this book to give any spectacular information on how to turn that attention into a tangible profit making business. While the book's purpose is not solely making money off of curation, it does suggests more of a "build it and they shall come" strategy hoping for your attention to somehow be monetized later through advertisers. If that floats your boat, this book may be for you.
Curation Nation contains thoughts from notable figures such as Clay Shirky, Alan Webber, Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, and others. Unfortunately none of the interviews led you the reader to know where curation is headed...all they know is we need it. Again, I know we need it, that's why I bought this book for some direction and to help make sense of it all. Ughhh
Alan Webber perhaps gives the best quote from the book: "Nobody has figured out a killer model of what exactly is exciting about a wonderfully produced movie, magazine, book, or record. Creating unique, memorable content isn't a formula -it's a happy accident. In the same way publishers struggle to figure out curation, there will be few leaders and lots of followers searching for the future economic model for content."
Curation Nation is for the lowest common denominator who are absolutely clueless that there is too much unfiltered information online and that it needs to be sorted. It will fill you in, provide you with a history of how we got here (unnecessary to the book) and where we currently are with no breathtaking insights. You'll get a bunch of information, but again, the book doesn't say much other than we need curation.
With the text being 259 Pages, it could have been cut AT LEAST in half. The future of curation fascinates me very much and I wanted to like this book. I expected this book to be GREAT judging by all the big name endorsements...but sadly I was let down.
P.S. If you happen to stumble across this book in the bookstore, just skip to the conclusion...you'll get all you need to know about the book saving you time in our limited "attention based economy."

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Business Leaders Are Buzzing About Curation Nation

"An indispensible guide to the brave new media world."—Arianna Huffington, editor in chief, the Huffington Post

"Gives me hope for the future of the Information Age. Rosenbaum argues for the growing importance of people—creative, smart, hip—who can spot trends, find patterns, and make meaning out of the flood of data that threatens to overwhelm us."—Daniel H. Pink, New York Timesbestselling author of Drive

"A testament to the strategic mind of a genius and a road map for developing engaging consumer experiences by curating content around your brand." —Bonin Bough, Global Director, Digital and Social Media, PepsiCo

"Perfectly on-trend—an insightful guide to the future. So entertaining you won't put it down."—Chris Meyer, author of Blur

"Read this book. Embrace curation, and you'll be ready to ‘crush it' with focus and passion in the noisy new world of massive data overload."—Gary Vaynerchuk, New York Timesbestselling author of Crush It

"Provides a wealth of real-world examples of how businesses can use the Web to give their customers a valuable curated experience."—Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com, and New York Timesbestselling author of Delivering Happiness

"Our best hope for sorting the good from the mediocre in our increasingly overwhelming media landscape."—Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplusand Here Comes Everybody

About the Book:

Let's face it, we're drowning in data. Our inboxes are flooded with spam, we have too many "friends" on Facebook, and our Twitter accounts have become downright unmanageable. Creating content is easy; finding what matters is hard.

Fortunately, there is a new magic that makes the Web work. It's called curation, and it enables people to sort through the digital excess and find what's relevant.

In Curation Nation, Steven Rosenbaum reveals why brands, publishers, and content entrepreneurs must embrace aggregation and curation to grow an existing business or launch a new one. In fact, he asserts that curation is the only way to be competitive in the future.

Overwhelmed by too much content, people are hungry for an experience that both takes advantage of the Web's breadth and depth and provides a measure of human sorting and filtering that search engines simply can't achieve. In these shifting sands lies an extraordinary business opportunity: you can become a trusted source of value in an otherwise meaningless chaos of digital noise.

In Curation Nation, Rosenbaum "curates the curators" by gathering togetherpriceless insight and advice from the top thinkers in media, advertising, publishing, commerce, and Web technologies. This groundbreaking book levels the playing field, giving your business equal access to the content abundance presently driving consumer adoption of the Web.

As the sheer volume of digital information in the world increases, the demand for quality and context becomes more urgent. Curation will soon be a part of your business and your digital world.Understand it now, join in early, and reap the many benefits Curation Nation has to offer.

Learn more at CurationNation.org.

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Social Networking Spaces (Beginning) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a must for the majority of us who want to be involved in social media, but didn't grow up with peer groups to help us out. The book is written in an engaging, informal style that allows learning without needing to memorize each and every word. Each chapter has a brief intro that tells you specifically what you can hope to gain by going through that chapter. Each ends with a summary Q&A related to the chapter and author's conclusion (brief, usually only 2-4 paragraphs)
For the most part, the chapters/topics are self contained; you can read them in any order or you can go sequentially. Personally, I chose the one topic at a time route, using my learning interests in the field as a guide. At this point, I have read and reread a few of the chapters, and browsed the remaining ones that I have not yet "grown into".
Prior to starting the book, I had signed up for a Twitter account, but not done much of anything with it. However, since I was intrigued by the way some people/organizations were using this service, I decided to start in the Twitter chapters (6 and 7). This book was a major help in getting me started: through it, I learned how to post a profile picture and the basics of Twitter etiquette and how to link to other services I might want to work with, including my existing blog. I also learned about short URLs, a piece of knowledge that in and of itself may be worth the price of this book.
After reading the Twitter chapters, I went back and read through the forwards and Chapter 1. The actionable possibilities put forth in the first chapter are truly mind opening, but you almost need to dabble with some of the media in the rest of the book before it really strikes you. Suggestion: skim through Chapter 1, and come back to it after any time you have done some toe dipping in one of the later sections.
The two chapters on Blogging would be very helpful to the novice, particularly one who had little experience with any type of page set up experience. They take you through step by step how to set up a working blog on Google. At the time I read these chapters, I had started a blog on Wordpress and had already worked through some of the kinks of blog set up. However, some of the suggestions for further development in the Q&A and conclusions helped me to improve my blog.
The LinkedIn chapters were the next I gravitated to, and although I had had a LinkedIn account for several years (which I had perpetuated half heartedly), I learned several things about using LinkedIn and available features that have since helped me make my page more robust and join additional groups.
The Meetup Chapter was also a good refresher for this social media program that also has a real face to face component. Again, I had been a member of Meetup for 4-5 years, had actually been a member of several Meetup groups, yet still found that there were a few tricks about the site I had not previously taken advantage of.
The big test was Facebook. I had contemplated setting up my own Facebook page for awhile, but for a number of reasons, had put this action on hold. While undertaking an Emerging media class, the time now seemed right. Chapter 3 is a great examination of the "nuts and bolts" of Facebook for one who has never attempted this media before. I recommend it thoroughly for all newbies. (In fact, I just went back and viewed it again a few minutes ago, and found another option for messaging that I had not known existed.)
To take a slight detour here, I think that the above hits on one of the highly useful aspects of "Social Networking Spaces", namely that you won't absorb everything you read before you try, but you can always go back and check.
But back to Facebook....there are 3 other chapters on Facebook, and they are particularly useful to those who want to use this resource as more than a place to interact with your friends. If you want to tell your story (or someone else's) or find out if your business can benefit by using Facebook, these chapters are a must view.

I'm not yet ready for Flickr or Youtube (except as a viewer) or Ning or Virtual Worlds or some of the other topics covered by the author, but I'm sure that when I am ready, this book will be a great starting point.


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Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular tools for both personal communications and business use, and LinkedIn is fast becoming a requirement for business networking. This book not only explains how to use each of these tools, it also shows you how to integrate them and stay safe and secure while using them. It also addresses how to use these tools to communicate internationally, and it covers additional types of social networking via blogs and games.

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Grassroots Journalism: A Practical Manual, 2nd edition Review

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(More customer reviews)by Univ. of Denver journalism professor Lynn Clark:
"I have assigned Grassroots Journalism in a number of undergraduate courses, and have even recommended it for graduate students who are new to journalism. The content is excellent and the low price makes it a great addition for any class."
by Univ. of Massachusetts journalism professor Nicholas McBride:
"Grassroots Journalism is the Torah, the Gospels, and Koran for true believers who view authentic journalism practice as the foundation for real democracy. This is THE text."

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Grassroots Journalism is the essential handbook for a new kind of community journalism that shows people how actively engaging in public issues can make a difference in the quality of their own lives--and the world. The book is full of real-world examples of where grassroots journalism worked--and resulted in positive change. Chapters cover the nuts-and-bolts of writing grassroots news articles, how to make sure your articles are read, and how the mainstream media suppress stories that challenge the status quo. This book is an indispensable guide for journalists, journalism students, and citizen activists.The thoroughly revised and updated second edition, with expanded sections on electronic media, labor writing, and getting your articles published, contains everything you'll need to be an effective, published journalist, and make a positive impact in your community.

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Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a book for someone who is unfamiliar with the internet. There are terrific tips scattered throughout, some of which I could really use. My problem with it is that a huge chunk of space is devoted to convincing the reader how important the internet is, how useful it can be in creating a successful business model in this new and exciting digital world. I already know I want to create a presence. I think anyone who picks up this book already knows s/he wants to create a presence. The question is how, but this is not a howto book.
Mitch Joel throws out a bunch of examples of things we can consider doing for our business: pod casts, widgets, blogs, etc. There's not much information about how to get started doing a pod cast, just that we should consider doing it and why it could help. There seems to be an assumption that the audience would be familiar with the technology enough to know how to get started, but such a reader would not need this book.


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Is it important to be connected? Well, consider this: If Facebook were a country, it would have the sixth largest population in the world. The truth is, we no longer live in a world of six degrees of separation. In fact, we're now down to only six pixels of separation, which changes everything we know about doing business.This is the first book to integrate digital marketing, social media, personal branding, and entrepreneurship in a clear, entertaining, and instructive manner that everyone can understand and apply. Through the use of timely case studies and fascinating stories, SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION offers a complete set of the latest tactics, insights, and tools that will empower you to reach a global audience and consumer base-and, best yet, you can do this pretty much for free. Digital marketing expert Mitch Joel unravels this fascinating world of new media-but does so with a brand-new perspective that is driven by compelling results. The smarter entrepreneurs and top executives are leveraging these digital channels to get their voice "out there"-connecting with others, becoming better community citizens, and, ultimately, making strategic business moves that are increasing revenue, awareness, and overall success in the marketplace-without the support of traditional mass media. Everyone is connected. Isn't it time for you and your company to connect to everyone? SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION will show you how.

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Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication Review

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(More customer reviews)I teach a course in Mass Media and this is the text we use. Regarding the other review left here for the book.. it is really not meant to be casual or 'easy' reading -- it is meant to be an in depth exploration of (often) complicated issues.
Things I like about the text:
- important vocabulary is pulled out to the margins for easy identification
- the importance of media literacy and cultural implications are explored
- various types of media are addressed *as well as* important tangental issues like conglomerates, advertising, etc.
- modern examples that are easily recognizable to students are used
Things I'd like to see done differently:
- The questions at the end of each chapter/unit could be better. Many of them are purely reading comprehension.. which is fine.. but I'd also like to see questions that require more synthesis or depth of understanding.
- It would be great if there could be some sort cross-reference done within the text.
Overall, I give this book high marks for solid information well presented.

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Media Today puts mass communication students at the center of the profound changes in the twenty-first century media world - from digital convergence to media ownership - and gives them the skills to think critically about what these changes mean for the role of media in their lives. Comprehensive and engaging, Media Today features:an interactive companion website featuring a full range of instructor and student materials including study podcasts at www.routledge.com/textbooks/mediatodaya three-pronged media systems approach focused on media literacy, convergence, and emerging trends in today's media cultureup-to-date coverage of the latest political, economic, technological, and cultural issues affecting media industriesexciting new resources including an enclosed free DVD with media examples. Completely revised with updated examples, case studies, and media resources, the third edition of this innovative mass communication textbook is built upon a media systems approach that gives students an insider's perspective on how mass media industries operate. By making students more knowledgeable about the influences that guide media organizations, Media Today builds media literacy skills to make students sensitive to ways of seeing media content as a means of learning about culture. Joseph Turow emphasizes throughout the many ways in which media convergence has blurred distinctions between and among various media. Each chapter of Media Today will:guide students through the essential history of media industriesexamines the current forces shaping their creation, distribution and exhibitionexplores the impact of emerging trends in media and society from globalization to social networking to video games. Media Today is designed to be used independently, but can also be used with the supplemental textbook edited by Brooke Erin Duffy and Joseph Turow, Key Readings in Media Today.

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