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!

Searchable State Employee Salary Database

For those of you that know me, you can imagine me as a curious little kid. So when I was about four years old, I was learning about numbers and money so one night at the dinner table I blatantly asked my father how much money he made. The room went silent and my dad said it wasn't polite to ask that question. Well if my dad was a state employee in Maryland now I wouldn't have to go through the impropriety of asking. I can just find the figure online thanks to the Baltimore Sun.

As I was reading an article on the Baltimore Sun's website about how Gov. Martin O'Malley makes less than many University System of Maryland VIPs, I noticed a sidebar that invited me to search a database of all state employees' pay. I clicked on this link and discovered that I can search salaries by name. So now my neighbors, coworkers, and anyone else can find out how much money I make. As a librarian, I generally like information to be freely available, but this creeps me out a bit and seems like a violation of my privacy. If my census record must be kept confidential by law, why not my pay too? I can see the value of aggregate data and that should be available, but pay data on an individual, identifiable level just seems wrong to me.

JTA Jewish News Archive

A fantastic new news repository came online last week -- The JTA Jewish News Archive.

This free searchable database contains 250,000 news reports from JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People (formerly the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) from 1923 to the present. (The JTA organization is a not-for-profit media company similar to the Associated Press.)

One of the most significant parts of this archive is the JTA coverage on the Holocaust from the late 1930s and early 1940s because the bulletins shed light on what was actually known about the Holocaust during that time period. It would be interesting to compare coverage in the JTA news bulletins with coverage in secular news sources from around the world and see what the differences were.

You can obtain more information about the archive on the JTA site as well as through this YouTube video.

New Movie on "Selling Out"

Morgan Spurlock, the man who took us along on his month-long fast food binge via his documentary "Super Size Me," has a new movie coming out this Friday. This time, he is taking aim at the pervasiveness of advertising. According to an interview with CNN, Spurlock has made a documentary about advertising that is completely paid for with advertising. It's called "Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."

As someone who personally contributes to the advertising clutter on Towson's campus and also helps train future advertisers to contribute to the overall general advertising noise, this movie makes me a little bit nervous. Will Spurlock distinguish between socially responsible advertisers like non-profits, or will he condemn us all for trying to get our messages across? I guess I will just have to go to the movie and find out.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of advertising, here are a few books about the topic that you can get at Cook :-)

• Adland: A global history of advertising
• Effective advertising: Understanding when, how, and why advertising works
• The advertising and consumer culture reader
• When ads work: New proof that advertising triggers sales
  

"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 :-)

Cook Library and the NYT's Pay Wall

As you may have heard, the New York Times' pay wall came up on Monday. This means that individuals are limited to 20 free articles per month on the New York Times' website unless they have a home delivery subscription. In that case, full digital access is free. The key words here are "home delivery subscription".

It is unclear what that means for libraries like Towson that get a handful of print copies each day. My fellow librarians and I aren't hopeful that our hard copies will translate into full-access passes and we are trying to get clarification from the paper about what their pay wall means for us.

In the meantime, the best way to get to the New York Times is through the library databases. (Don't forget -- you will need your TU OneCard to log on from off campus).

I'll keep you posted...

Where Does It Count? Census Data and the News

I am a self-described "news addict" so needless to say, I spend a lot time on news websites. In the last few weeks, I've noticed more and more news stories about population shifts on local papers' websites. For example, today in the Baltimore Sun, we have one about "white taggers" -- the people who have moved up I83 to Pennsylvania but haven't changed their license plates yet.

So what is the reason for all these demographic stories? Beginning this month, the US Census Bureau is releasing the data from the 2010 Census. You can see the release schedule here and given the schedule, it looks like we are going to see many more news stories based on Census data in the coming months.

As a researcher, I welcome all these news stories because they give us one more access point for Census data. Anyone who has worked with government information knows that it can be difficult, if not impossible sometimes, to find the data you need because they are often buried in a maze of hyperlinks on government websites. Also, even if you do find the right data, it's not unusual to encounter broken links and this too can make finding old data difficult. Thanks to the hard work of librarians though, news stories usually get stored in a searchable archive.

So 50 or 100 years from now it will probably be a whole lot easier to find out how many people moved from Maryland to York, PA between 2000 and 2010 using the Baltimore Sun news database than it will be to try and search a government website for that same data.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you are looking for Census data, it doesn't hurt to search the Census' website, but you may also want to check out the library's news databases like LexisNexis or the Baltimore Sun Historical too.