| University of Texas gets $50 million to boost what’s now the Moody College of Communication Posted: 21 Oct 2013 09:12 AM PDT In Austin, The Moody Foundation announced a gift of $50 million to the University of Texas at Austin for the foundation of the Moody College of Communication, a donation which the university calls “transformative.” Here’s how the funds will break down: Innovation Fund ($10 million) — To establish an “idea fund” that will invest in new curricula, courses, online education, research and student activities. Department Endowments ($5 million) — To provide a $1 million endowment for each of the college’s five departments to support departmental leaders and course and curricular development. Graduate Student Recruitment ($13 million) — To provide additional teaching and research fellowships for master’s and doctoral students, more than doubling the amount of funding available for graduate students. Undergraduate Curricular and Cocurricular Work ($7 million) — To support learning opportunities inside and outside the classroom, including student media projects, undergraduate research and student leadership organizations, and to create the Moody Scholars Program, an honors program for first- and second-year students. Research and Outreach Centers ($10 million) — To create 10 $1 million endowments for the Moody College’s research and community outreach centers: the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life; the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy; a new Health Communication Center; the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas; the Office of Survey Research; Reporting Texas; the Speech and Hearing Center; the Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute; the Texas Program in Sports and Media; and the UT Film Institute. Classroom Space and Facilities ($5 million) — To refurbish portions of the Jesse H. Jones Communication Complex, create three new lecture halls in the Communication B (CMB) Building, conference space and a new pedestrian bridge between the Belo Center for New Media and the Jesse H. Jones Complex. The university will provide an additional $5 million for this project.
In a tweet, Rosental Alves highlights the $1 million to begin the endowment of the Knight Center, which puts on the great International Symposium on Online Journalism every spring. And our own Mark Coddington is an editor on Reporting Texas.  |
| This year’s winners at the Online Journalism Awards Posted: 21 Oct 2013 07:19 AM PDT  On Saturday, a few hundred journalists, technologists, business-side types, and academics gathered in Atlanta to give out this year’s Online Journalism Awards.
The Guardian won two awards for its Snowden-driven series on surveillance, and both The Boston Globe and the Boston University News Service took home two prizes for their marathon bombing coverage. The New York Times won three prizes, with one of them going to D3.js, the data visualization SVG engine that’s increasingly taking over the web. (D3 is an open source project built by the brilliant Mike Bostock, whose day job is at the Times. I haven’t checked the archives, but I have to imagine it’s the first JavaScript library to take home a major journalism prize.) Black Gold Boom, which we wrote about in January, won an award, which Zeega shared in. “Snow Fall” won for large feature, surprising few, and other news orgs we’ve written a lot about — The Texas Tribune, Honolulu Civil Beat, WNYC, ProPublica — were winners. (Also, Nieman Lab won in the topical reporting category, for which we are very grateful.) Go check out the winners list, which includes links to all their work, and be inspired about what you can pull off online these days.  |
| We’re spending more and more time online. So what are we doing less of? Posted: 21 Oct 2013 06:53 AM PDT There are, as they say, only so many minutes in a day. So if we’re spending more and more time online — breaking news alert! we are — that time has to come from somewhere. This new paper from Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute (PDF here) looks at what online media seems to be replacing in our daily lives. The biggest losers: work, sleep, and TV. I find that, on the margin, each minute of online leisure time is correlated with 0.29 fewer minutes on all other types of leisure, with about half of that coming from time spent watching TV and video, 0.05 minutes from (offline) socializing, 0.04 minutes from relaxing and thinking, and the balance from time spent at parties, attending cultural events, and listening to the radio. Each minute of online leisure is also correlated with 0.27 fewer minutes working, 0.12 fewer minutes sleeping, 0.10 fewer minutes in travel time, 0.07 fewer minutes in household activities, and 0.06 fewer minutes in educational activities.
Wallsten has a bit in there on the impact on the news business: To be sure, the online version of the newspaper must generate additional consumer surplus relative to the offline version or the newspaper industry would not be losing so many print readers, but not all of time spent reading the paper online reflects the incremental value of the Internet. Additionally, at a price of zero the activity might attract more consumers than when the activity was paid, or consumers might read more electronic books than paper books because they prefer the format or because e-books are so much easier to obtain. But even if lower prices increase consumption of a particular activity, the cost of that additional consumption is time no longer spent on another activity. Activities that once required payment but became free, such as reading the news online, represent a transfer of surplus from producers to consumers, but not new total surplus. Of course, these transfers may have large economic effects as they can lead to radical transformations of entire industries, especially given that consumers spend about $340 billion annually on leisure activities.
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