Don't Kill the Conference Interview
January 20, 2015
Image: Tommy Kirk as Travis Coates in Old Yeller (1957), directed by Robert Stevenson
Rebecca Schuman recently called for the death of the conference interview for faculty jobs. A key reason she listed was the expense, citing the Modern Language Association’s recent convention in Vancouver as a case in point. In fact, she went to considerable length to prove that anyone traveling to Vancouver for the meeting would need to spend more than $1,000.
Case closed -- on Vancouver and MLA. But a data point is not a universal. Many faculty members with full-time jobs and many graduate students seeking employment still think the conference interview is a useful enterprise.
First, academia is not a monolith. A Ph.D. holder in German (Schuman’s field) might view the job market as a Kesselschlacht (a confused cauldron battle). But my own area of communications is in the fifth year of a boom in tenure-track hiring. We get only 20 to 40 applicants for...
December 1, 2014
Don't Fear Fund Raising, Part 4
Why it’s important to be pedantic about donor intent
Money Hedge / Creative Commons
By David D. Perlmutter
Agift to your department can seem so straightforward, like the first time a donor told me, "I want to endow a scholarship for a student." Easy enough, I thought. Then a development officer explained that in accepting this seemingly simple gift, we had to satisfy tax laws, foundation rules, departmental mission and priority, and "donor intent."
That last criterion was the one that needed the most painstaking definition. What did the donor mean by "student"? An undergraduate, a graduate student, or either? A student already in good standing in our major or a first-year recruit? Could the student be a double major or just minoring in our field? Would requirements include a certain GPA in high school or college? Was there a geographic condition on the gift—that the recipient come from a particular high school or the donor’s home...
Policybyblog is the blog of the webzine PolicyByBlog.com.
It addresses possibly the most significant phenomenon in modern politics, public affairs, political communication, and campaigns and elections: The adoption of the weblog, or blog, by institutions, advocacy groups, government agencies, political parties, commercial corporations, lobbying and public relations firms, and especially political leaders and candidates for elected office. (more…)...
The Editor of PolicyByBlog and Emily Metzgar, a political columnist, just published (November 03, 2005) in the Christian Science Monitor an essay that deals with the prospect of the blogosphere becoming a "space" for running for President: COULD BLOGS TRUMP STUMPING IN IOWA?
Like all newspaper pieces, we needed to be short and we were edited. To expand the context, for over a generation political scientists have noted that there was a campaign for president before the ostensible running season began with the Iowa Caucuses. The journalist Arthur Hadley called this period the "invisible primary." Would-be presidents underwent a series of "tests." (Think Labors of Hercules!) As articulated by political scientist Rhodes Cook, these trails included: (more…)...
Blogs were officially born in December 1997, when Jorn Barger created the term "weblog" on his site, Robot Wisdom. Then in the spring of 1999, Peter Merholz, host of peterme and an internet analyst announced: "For What It's Worth I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'- blog. Or "blog" for short."
But in the book I'm working on for Oxford University Press, I'll argue that blog-like political communication ventures have a long history.
Here is my favorite candidate for (Proto)political Blogger Zero. (more…)...
According to a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor: "Blogs still rank well behind traditional television, radio, and newspaper outlets as a source of news, but they are gaining ground rapidly. The liberal blog Daily Kos attracted nearly 4.8 million visitors this July, compared with 3.4 million in January, according to Nielsen//NetRatings…"
The population of Iowa is 2,926,324.
The population of New Hampshire is 1,235,786.
Their total population is, thus: 4,162,110.
That means Daily Kos had more "residents" in July than the two "first in the nation" states for the presidential nomination race. Of course, it is apples and ipods to compares a state with a website, but the numbers do point out the increasing locii of geopolitical power and attention that are blogs. One big difference: to meet everyone in Iowa, you have to travel all over Iowa. To get seen by everyone in Daily Kos land a single headlining post is enough.
Originally posted November 7, 2005 at PolicyByBlog
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Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, in one of a series of dismissals of bloggers, summed up his opinion of their contribution to the information society by the following: "Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."
I disagree. Many bloggers are creating new content, hunting and gathering news and information, not just digesting it. The presidential race--or pre-race creates many examples. The invisible primary is a time of severely reduced press attention to presidential hopefuls. Even bigfoot frontrunners like, say, Hillary Clinton, do not get much national media attention speaking to the Women's Democratic Caucus in a rural county in Iowa. As Richard di Benedetto of USA Today once commented to me: "When I started in this business, I was taught that the job of a journalist was to go someplace that the public couldn't get to and report what he saw and heard." (more…)...
One of my students, Ben Boudreaux, edits the blog, Horserace08, which tracks the contenders for the 2008 presidential contest. He recently posted that:
[John] Edwards could find himself to be at a considerable disadvantage in the 2008 election because he is the only potential candidate to date that is not currently holding an elected office—though Mark Warner will be joining him in that category soon.
That is possible. On the other hand, NOT holding office does allow Edwards not to be blamed for votes, policies, and any upcoming disasters. Also, if there is a big anti-incumbent backlash in 2006/2008 he can avoid it. Now he can play "populist outsider" too--a role he plainly relishes.
Of course, one of the main benefits of office-holding is being in the public eye. But his speaking tours and blog outreach may make up for that publicity deficit, at least among activists who are paying attention. Indeed, Edwards' nascent campaign seems to be a good test case in what blogs...
Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, in one of a series of dismissals of bloggers, summed up their contribution to the information society by the following: "Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."
If, indeed, that it was all bloggers were doing or could do, it would not be enough, but blogging today is much more than media criticism. In fact, there are bloggers who are doing everything that journalists ever did. Indeed that's the point about the world of "PolicyByBlog": blogging is a genre, a medium and a technology that can be used by professionals.
I don't think Keller was making a movie allusion. But to historians of political communication who are also interested in politicians using blogs to reach the people it is worth recalling the implications of the word "chew." I think of a potent icon of individual populist autocracy gone mad.
There were no blogs in 1956 when director Elia Kazan...
A few years ago I wrote a book on the history of the visualization of war. Today, writing a book on blogging, I see a striking differences between two "blogs of war," that is, first person accounts of a battle in the Middle East.
Then: In c. 1300 BCE, the pharaoh Rameses II and his army fought a battle against a Hittite army at Kadesh, in what is now Syria. The battle was a draw; in fact, the Egyptians ended up retreating. But Rameses' memorial temple--an instance of massive communication--shows on its 100-foot walls pictures and hieroglyphics of the great ruler as victorious. As originally painted, Rameses is bronze skinned, broad shouldered, long armed, resolute of face, wearing the twin crowns of upper and lower Egypt, and many times larger than the Hittites and his own men--a superman in the anthropological as well as comic book sense. (Rameses became the "Ozymandias" who, in Shelley's poem, demanded that all "look upon my works, ye mighty,...