Researching Journalists' Safety

Between the story of the sexual assault of Lara Logan while she was covering the Egypt protests and the story that came out of China today about police intimidating ABC reporters in that country, the world seems to be getting tougher and tougher for journalists.

If you want to keep track of how reporters faring around the globe, there are a few organizations that can help you find this information:

• International News Safety Organization (INSI): A coalition of news organizations, journalists, and other support structures that try to provide a "global safety network" for reporters who are abroad. They have a good news feed about the latest dangers facing reporters abroad.

• Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): Independent, non-profit started in 1981 that is devoted to press freedom. This organization keeps statistics on reporters killed or wounded on the job and provides information for journalists on how to be safe while abroad.

• International Federation of Journalists (IFJ): An organization that monitors press freedom and works for a free press around the world.
  

When it Comes to Article Searching ... It's Location, Location, Location!

A couple weeks ago, I taught a library session for a section of Nonverbal Communication. As those of you who have been to one of my sessions know, I usually work through a sample search and this session was no different. The sample search in this class was "the role of gaze in the courtroom setting" and we looked in the PsycINFO database for peer review articles.

So I'm going through the usual brainstorming synonyms exercise (the point in my session where I ask students to think of all of the possible ways to express the sample topic) and a student mentions that a possible search term could be "trial". That's perfectly logical term. It makes good sense. Except...we're searching in a psychology database. So I showed the class what happens when we add trial to our search. Wouldn't you know we doubled our results...but most of those new results had nothing to do with the justice system and had everything to do with animal and human behavior therapy experiments. Not quite what we need.

So when it comes to finding articles in a database, where you are matters as much as what you search :-)

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 Way to Search Online Journalism Outlets

Columbia Journalism Review launched a new database for searching digital news outlets today. The News Frontier Database is a searchable tool that allows users to find digital news outlets that meet certain criteria (such as location, type of coverage, and revenue sources--to name a few). They've started with only 50 sites for the launch (there aren't any in the database from Maryland yet), but they plan to grow. Also the pull down menus make it relatively easy to use. This looks like it has the potential to be a very good resource since it has two of the qualities I like best in a database--free and straightforward to use.

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 :-)