“Clickbait!”

BY AARON BARLOW In early 2016, I shared on this blog a statement by a tenured professor recently fired by the University of California at Riverside. One of the comments, by a former colleague of the ex-professor, accused me of posting his statement solely as “clickbait.” I chuckled, but the accusation rankled: the Academe blog…

Winter is Coming

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In a post last week on Bill Moyers’ website New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen outlined a series of troubling (and a few encouraging) developments regarding the survival of a free press in the U.S. Here are some highlights: For a free press as a check on power this is…

University President Has Sex Change–Twice

This kind of headline or link would likely get quite a few clicks as members of academe browse the virtual newsstand. Some purists, or are they Puritans, no doubt frown at the Internet habits of successful professionals, but is it really any better to author or consume articles with colons? Are they more serious, even…

Campaigning Isn’t Governing, Sound Bytes Aren’t Journalism, and MOOCs Aren’t Education

The lead for today’s installment of Meet the Press included the tease: “Is President Obama already a ‘lame duck’?” In 1933, the passage of the 20th Amendment shortened the period between the presidential election and the inauguration of the president so that if a sitting president were a “lame duck”—that is, either lost the election…

Flat Funding? Not in the Reality-Based World

It’s been a little over two weeks since Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett delivered his annual budget address. Corbett’s office signaled in advance that his proposed 2013-2014 budget would not be as draconian as the previous two. I think it would be fair to say that the governor would have to work extraordinarily hard to try…

Journalism and Education: The Road Not Shared

Could education (higher education in particular) be about to follow the path journalism found itself on, starting just under a decade ago? Could digital possibilities be on the verge of ushering in a new paradigm reflective of what happened to the newspaper business as a result of the rise of the blogosphere? I doubt it.…