Welcome to the New Communication Books!

We were able to do some last-minute end-of-the-fiscal-year book ordering and a few new gems have joined our collection. They include:

• Satire and dissent : Interventions in contemporary political debate by Amber Day


• Latina/o discourse in vernacular spaces : Somos de una voz? by Michelle A Holling and Bernadette Marie Calafell

• Alternative and activist new media by Leah A Lievrouw

• Bad news : How America's business press missed the story of the century by Anya Schiffrin

Summer is one of my favorite times of year because it affords me the opportunity to catch up on my reading and explore new ideas and subject areas in communication. I hope you get that chance too!

"One Life to Live" Taken Off Life Support

ABC announced today that it is canceling two of its soap operas, "All My Children" and "One Life to Live," because of declining ratings. Apparently daytime drama isn't the draw that it once was because programming tastes have changed and "many of the women who made up the target audience [are] now in the work force."

The passing of these two former broadcasting heavyweights is somewhat sad for me because it represents the demise of a communication research subject that was once so very rich. A quick search for soap operas in the library catalog yields a plethora of books from the 1970s, 80s, and into the 90s. You also find soap opera articles in our databases such as "Soap opera viewing motivations and the cultivation process" which was in a 1985 issue of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. I guess what I am trying to say is that in their heyday, soap operas like "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" helped us better understand communication so it is somewhat tragic to watch something that was once so vital fade into oblivion.

But time marches on and so does research. So if you want to study soap opera's younger, hipper sibling (reality TV) we have resources for that too :-)

Social Media Changing Super Bowl Ads?

Not only was last Sunday the biggest day of the year for football, it was also the biggest day of the year for advertising. USA Today acknowledges this significance and has been measuring the popularity of ads run during the big game for the last 20 years. To see how the 2011 ads fared, check out this article.

I think one of the more interesting trends, though, was noted in an article by Bruce Horovitz that ran today in USA Today. The author points out how social media is changing how Super Bowl ads are rolled out. Companies no longer wait until the big game to unveil ads--they are pushing them out before kickoff via social media, like Facebook and Twitter. Also the article notes that this pregame unveiling didn't seem to hurt how popular the ads were during the game. Could this be a sea change in advertising?

To learn more about social media and advertising, check out these books at Cook Library:

• Advertising and new media by Christina Spurgeon
• Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we do business by Erik Qualman
  

Researching Egypt and Communication

If you're hungry for more information about what's behind the chaos in Egypt, Cook Library has you covered.

We have a new guide on researching countries and cultures, which you can use to get background information and international news.

These are a few of our books that look at Egypt and communication:

• The Global Public Relations Handbook
• Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt
• Islam, the People and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East

And to find out about the history of and the current state of press censorship in Egypt, look at the Committee to Protect Journalists' website.

New Books!

Cook Library has just gotten in a number of new communication titles in a variety of disciplines. Here are some of the new books:

In Advertising:

• "Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban" by Anne Cronin
• "Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising" edited by Matthew Eastin, Terry Daugherty, and Neal Burns

In Business Communication:

• "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World" by David Kirkpatrick
• "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" by Tim Wu

In Interpersonal Communication:

• "Dark Side of Close Relationships II" by William R. Cupach
• "Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations" by Tom Tyler
• "You Were Always Mom's Favorite: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives" by Deborah Tannen
  

In Journalism:

• "Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law 2010" edited by Darrell Christian
• "News from the BBC, CNN, and Al-Jazeera: How the Three Broadcasters Cover the Middle East" by Leon Barkho
• "Representing Death in the News" by Folker Hanusch

In Media:

• "The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google" by Patchen Barass
• "Popular Media, Democracy, and Development in Africa" by Herman Wasserman
• "Old and New Media after Katrina" by Diane Negra
  

In Political Communication:

• "Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election Uprising in Iran" edited by Yahya Kamalipour
• "The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election" by Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
• "Political Communication and Social Theory" by Stephen Spurr

In Public Relations:

• "Public Relations Cases: International Perspectives" by Daniel Moss, Melanie Powell, Barbara DeSanto
• "The SAGE Handbook of Public Relations, 2nd ed." edited by Robert Heath

New Communications Theory Encyclopedia!

Happy new year! I've been searching for what to write about for the last few days and then I realized that in the hustle and bustle of finals week that I forgot to formally introduce the latest member of our communication resource family!

We now have an online Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. To access it, just click on the yellow "Find It" button at the top (you may need to log on if you are off campus) and click on the "Read Full Text at Sage Reference Online" link.

This is a great reference source if you need to look up an unfamiliar theory that you come across in a journal article and it has "Further Readings" links at the end of each entry so you can continue to explore.

I'm very excited about this new resource :-)

It's the World Series and No One Seems to Care

Yet again last night, "Sunday Night Football" beat Major League Baseball (MLB) playoff games in the ratings according to an AP story on ABC.com.

So what's the big deal? I believe we are witnessing a shift here. Baseball used to be king. In fact, this is the first time that NBC aired a "Sunday Night Football" game in direct competition with the World Series because they were afraid of losing in the ratings. Now it seems they have nothing to fear because these ratings suggest that football has replaced baseball as America's pastime.

So from a communications perspective, I can't help but wonder where baseball lost its way. Is it that they need to sell the game in a new way and reintroduce the game to younger viewers? Maybe it is a fundamental problem with the product of baseball itself, meaning that the game just moves too slowly for our hyper-driven world? Whatever it is, MLB better figure it out fast or else they risk being about as popular as competitive basket weaving.

For more information about sports, media, and economics, check out the following resources:

• Center field shot: A history of baseball on television by James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy
• National pastime: How America plays baseball and the rest of the world plays soccer by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist
  

Red Brand/Blue Brand

There's a fascinating piece in Ad Age this week about what brands are top with Republicans and Democrats.

No surprises for the number one slot for either party with Google topping the Democratic list and Fox News Channel leading the GOP list. There are some brands that are on both lists such as the History Channel.

The article talks a bit about what impact such partisanship can have on the brand, but in this political season I think the far more interesting thing is how campaigns utilize consumer data. Back in 2004, I was fortunate enough to coordinate an election debriefing with the top political operatives for both the Kerry and the Bush campaigns. One of the things that stuck out in my mind was how the Bush camp was able to successfully target their get-out-the-vote efforts using consumer data. They knew for example that if a person drove a Volvo, that person probably wouldn't be voting for Bush so they didn't bother trying to get that person to vote. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first election to use such consumer data in this way and it probably made a difference in the 2004 race.

How Does God Communicate?

I saw a USA Today story last week about a new book, America's Four Gods: What We Say about God and What That Says about Us by Paul Froese and Christopher Bader.

The book lays out the four different ways that people think about God:

• The Authoritative God (engaged in people's lives and is judgmental)
  
• The Benevolent God (engaged in people's lives, but is loving)
  
• The Critical God (keeps track of our sins, but doesn't intervene in the world)
  
• The Distant God (created the world, but doesn't intervene in the world)

What struck me about these descriptions is that an integral part of a person's portrait of God is how that person thinks God communicates with humanity. So even when it comes to something very abstract, like God, we find that communication is the heart of how people make sense of things. Communication is such a great field!

Cook Library doesn't have this new book, but you can request it through interlibrary loan.

Welcome to the New Books!

As this academic year winds down, I want to highlight some of the new communication books that we've added to the Cook Library collection. While some books were ordered because they were requested by faculty members, I also requested other books to help beef up our collection in some key areas, namely global communication and Web 2.0. I also wanted to expand the number of books with graduate level scholarship.

So without further ado, here are some of the newbies:

1. International media communication in a global age (Call Number: PN4784.F6 I583 2010)
   
2. International communications strategy: developments in cross-cultural communications, PR and social media (Call Number: HM1211 .C36 2009)
3. Advertising 2.0: Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 (Call Number: HF6146.I58 T88 2008)

Enjoy :-)