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.

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