CommLine Online: Aug. 26, 2009
USC Annenberg Dean Ernest J. Wilson III and the rest of the School's faculty and staff welcome nearly 500 new students and six full-time faculty members for the 2009-2010 academic year. Classes begin Aug. 24.
Among the new additions are 249 graduate students, 168 freshmen and 79 transfers. Journalism professors Robert Hernandez, Andrew Lih and Alan Mittelstaedt, journalism and communication professor Henry Jenkins (also Cinematic Arts), and communication professor Robeson Taj P. Frazier constitute the new faculty. Journalist Mei Fong is scheduled to join the School later in the semester.
"USC Annenberg continues to recruit some of the best and brightest minds in the world to our campus," Dean Ernest J. Wilson III said. "The excitement around the School over these many new additions is palpable, and to think of their future achievements is truly delightful."
New students have the opportunity to meet and mingle with faculty, staff and fellow students at the "Annenberg County Fair" on Aug. 21 from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Typical fair food such as corn dogs and kettle corn will be served, and prizes will be awarded for participating in games such as ring toss, bean bag toss and milk bottle knock-down.
"The Annenberg County Fair is the perfect chance for students to explore all of the ways to get involved in Annenberg outside the classroom, while mingling with other incoming students, faculty and staff," USC Annenberg Director of Events Giovanna Carrera said. "Oh, and the good food and fun speaks for itself!"
Annenberg County Fair
Incoming first-year graduate journalism student reporters spent Wednesday busing, walking and "tweeting" around various sections of Los Angeles — from Skid Row to the La Brea Tar Pits to Watts (Watts Towers pictured above) — as part of an orientation assignment at USC Annenberg.
Eight groups of about 10 students split up to get a feel for the city and become familiar with using the social networking Web site Twitter as a reporting tool. They tweeted about what they saw and how they enjoyed the experience during a six-hour period of time. Their first assignment is to write an online news story due Sunday.
"I hope our students got a sense of the vibrancy and rich diversity of Los Angeles," School of Journalism Director Geneva Overholser said. "Even for long-time Angelenos, this great city offers an unparalleled range of experiences."
Elizabeth Geli (M.A. Specialized Journalism '10, Twitter: @elizgeli), who sent out 12 tweets from the La Brea Tar Pits, said she is a huge believer in the power of Twitter and enjoyed being able to share her experiences with her future classmates.
"When I returned from the tour Geneva Overholser already knew about my experience and discussed with me a specific quote that I had tweeted," Geli said. "That is a kind of amazing communication that would never have happened without Twitter. It connects people in new and positive ways."
Said Overholser: "It was thrilling to see the tweets, full of interesting and engaging observations. All of us in the Journalism School office were exclaiming to one another, laughing and shouting with delight: 'Did you see this video? Did you see that twitpic?' I’m so grateful to our colleagues who put these terrific experiences together."
Students were also able to instantaneously see their peers' updates from Skid Row, downtown, the La Brea Tar Pits, Watts, gang rehabilitation and job training group Homeboy Industries, Little Ethiopia, LA Live, and a tour of the LA transit system's various stops.
"We exposed grad students to some of the top issues and personalities in Los Angeles," said journalism professor Alan Mittelstaedt, who led his group around Los Angeles and Hollywood during a tour of the LA transit system. "Like the rest of us, they came back amazed in most cases and shocked in others."
LeTania Kirkland (M.A. Print Journalism '11 @letaniakirkland) said she always wanted to know more about Homeboy Industries, and this was her opportunity to find out more about it from its director, Father Gregory Boyle.
"It was a great experience," Kirkland said. "Father Boyle had lots of interesting things to say in regards to gang intervention and what works and what helps. He's interested in helping former gang members find jobs and get their lives back on track."
Piya Sinha-Roy (M.A. Print Journalism '11 @PiyaSRoy) said exploring Little Ethiopia was the perfect way to cap her first week in the United States after moving from England.
"The last couple of days have been spent listening to lectures at orientation," Sinha-Roy said. "All of us students are in the same boat. We got to know each other, but also did our own reporting. We all enjoyed ourselves, and got out of our comfort zones. We were initially nervous about exploring an unknown area, but within a half hour we were settled and comfortable."
She also said she was surprised by the easy usability of the buses in Los Angeles.
"It is no different from London's buses," she said. "I was stunned by the preconceptions everyone has about Los Angeles public transportation."
Jason Ma (M.A. Specialized Journalism '10), who was part of Mittelstaedt's group touring public transportation, also was surprised about the aesthetics of the public transportation system.
"It was good to get off campus and into the city," Ma said. "The subway trains were comparable to the ones I've seen in Washington D.C. and other places."
Evan Pondel (M.A. Specialized Journalism '10 @epondel), who explored the Watts area, said he had never been to the area even though he grew up in Los Angeles.
"You always hear about Watts as being a dangerous place with lots of gang activity," said Pondel, who is still wary about diving into the world of Twitter. "It was such a pleasant day. It was hard to imagine any gang activity there. It was such a contradiction to the way it's portrayed in movies."
He also said he is inspired to go back and learn more and report on what he sees.
"I now have a sense of the geography and will feel comfortable going there," he said. "The trip showed us as reporters how much interesting material there is. It's an area ripe with stories."
Janine Rayford (M.A. Print Journalism '11 @JanineRayford) shared Pondel's uneasiness about Twitter and excitement for learning more about Watts.
"People from the community were speaking so positively about their neighborhoods," Rayford said. "These people live there and are the real experts on their area. I loved learning from them. The worst part, though, was seeing a massive hospital (Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital) closed down and just taking up space. The area has challenges to deal with that many don't know about."
Heather Hope (M.A. Broadcast Journalism '11 @HOPE4Heather) took a tour of LA Live, which she said she would never have been able to do with friends or family. She got a behind-the-scenes look at places such as the Grammy Museum, Staples Center and Nokia Theatre.
"We took the DASH to downtown," said Hope, explaining that it only cost 25 cents to ride and was a fast trip to the heart of the city. "I didn't even know what that was until today. The whole experience throughout the day was great because it opened up new places for future story ideas."
She also said it helped ease her concerns about using Twitter.
"Before I didn't want to let everyone know what I was doing," she said. "It's great to use when referring to a story. I was apprehensive before, but will update a lot more now."
Skid Row in downtown is a place most people in Los Angeles have never wanted to visit, but Specialized Journalism student Lauren Whaley (@laurenwhaley) said she was thrilled to explore the area.
"I was hoping to visit Watts," said Whaley, who explained that the students learned the area they would visit by random numbering earlier in the day. "Skid Row was my second choice, and I'm very grateful for the chance to go and dispel the myth that this is a scary place. It's not somewhere I would have ever gone to explore on my own, so it was extra gratifying."
Whaley and her group, led by journalism professor Marc Cooper, talked to former journalist and current Lamp Community director of public policy Anat Rubin about issues affecting people who are homeless.
"Her thesis was that if you provide people with housing, other issues can start to be worked on like mental health issues and drug use," Whaley said.
All of the students interviewed, including those such as Hillel Aron — (M.A. Online Journalism '11 @hillelaron) who grew up two blocks away from the Little Ethiopia he visited — said they saw new places and learned new things.
"It was good to see some of the students who lived in LA their whole lives see new parts of the city," Cooper said. "It helps confirm our rationale for doing this. USC students are like everyone else in that most people live in their self-enclosed world. This helped them see new things and think about new stories."
Shotgun Spratling (M.A. Print Journalism '11 @BlueWorkhorse), who toured downtown with journalism professor Sandy Tolan, said one of the most interesting encounters of the day occurred on the 10-minute bus ride downtown.
"I didn't come into the day with any expectations," Spratling said. "It turned out awesome getting points of view and stories from different people. I enjoyed the whole day because each speaker was passionate about the history of Union Station, Chinatown, Koreatown, everywhere."
He is a long-time user of Twitter and other online tools, but he said the School's focus on new media is something he has really enjoyed.
"We are a part of the change that is taking place in journalism," he said. "The School is embracing the change, rather than say, 'This is the way it has always been done.'"
Sample tweets from the tour:
- @JanineRayford: Today I saw a national park made of cement, met the mother of humanity face to face and tripped over chains on a slave ship
- @PiyaSRoy: Just had a great chat with guys from under the skin tattoo parlour on pico.
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@Treblalbert: After going thru a slave ship replica,the question is posed to us:why are so many blacks still enslaved in our penitentiaries today?
- @elizgeli: the backstage tour at La Brea was very cool. SO many bones! Heading back to SC on the bus soon!
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@stephrguzman: Lunch group discusses gentrification and "white flight" occuring throughout LA communities. Think Silverlake, echo park, and DT la
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@olgakhazan: Rice left on one important question re: LA gangs- "What do you do about the ones who arent ready to change?"
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@IanJoulain: Getting the grand tour of Watts. Just told that this area was called Mud Town in the 60's
Read more about the School of Journalism's activities by going to Twitter.com and searching "#ascgj09." Photos from this article were taken during the tour by journalism professor Andrew Lih (Tolan with students in front of bus), Online Journalism M.A. student Kim Nowacki (@knowacki, photo of "Helping Hands" thrift store), and Online Journalism M.A. student Stephanie Guzman (@stephrguzman, men playing a checkers-like game in Chinatown and students interviewing police officers).
By Suzanne Wu
How would a massive multiplayer game respond to an economic collapse?
While prior research has looked at economic behavior on the individual level in virtual worlds, a new study is the first to calculate big-picture economic markers such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and inflation in an online setting.
“Our concern was whether the economic behaviors within a virtual world function in the same way that they would in the real world — where, it should be noted, currency is also largely representational,” communication professor Dmitri Williams (pictured) said.
Williams, co-author Edward Castronova (Indiana University) and a team including three other USC researchers were given unprecedented access to 314 million actual transactions from Sony Online Entertainment’s large-scale online role-playing game “EverQuest II.”
In the August 2009 issue of the journal New Media & Society, the researchers showed that while economic behavior in “EverQuest II” on the societal level follows what one would expect to see in the real world, the fluctuations are much more dramatic than normal.
For example, due to population changes and an influx of money, inflation rose more than 50 percent in five months on one of the servers analyzed by the researchers.
“The rapid changes in GDP may not be a function of the fact that the economy is virtual, but that it has volatile elements,” Williams said. “After all, we have seen that kind of volatility during times of war and in developing nations in the real world."
Williams continued: “On the one hand, virtual economies may be very precise analogs for other kinds of real-world economies, such as frontier, developing or black market economies. On the other hand, our own economy has turned out to be less stable than we’d all assumed.”
By looking at the going prices for virtual currency on such markets as eBay, the researchers also were able to determine an “exchange rate” between real and virtual currency during the study period.
That, in turn, let them calculate that the real GDP of one of the servers was between $11 and $14 per registered user per month ($130-$164 per year). In the real world, that puts the average “EverQuest II” player on par with citizens in developing nations such as Liberia, Congo and Burundi.
Real-world GDP is measured as the value of the final goods sold in an economy, and the goods in “EverQuest II” correspond to actual goods, such as food (e.g., bread and alcohol), clothing (armor and shields) and materials (leather and herbs).
However, “in modern, advanced economies, it is true that almost everything produced is also sold,” Williams said. “In virtual worlds, by contrast, firsthand reports suggest that a great part of valuable production is consumed directly by the producer."
The researchers noted that massive, multiplayer virtual worlds such as “EverQuest II” are a unique tool for economists seeking to better understand economic theories. Not only is data recorded automatically and invisibly for the entire economy (something the government only estimates in the real world), but virtual economies also could be manipulated as a kind of large-scale experiment to test policy ideas.
The information Sony Online Entertainment provided for the research project was scrubbed of all personally identifiable information prior to being provided to the researchers. None of the information was connected to, or linked with, the real names or other personal information of any players.
USC Annenberg School for Communication doctoral students Cuihua Shen, Rabindra Ratan and Li Xiong contributed to this paper.
The LA Residency Program of USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center's Popular Music Project (PMP) announced that Courtney Holt (pictured), President of MySpace Music, will be its 2009-2010 Distinguished Resident.
Holt has long been at the forefront of music industry innovation and is now leading the way in shaping music's digital future. From his early days playing in bands and producing music videos and commercials to his current post with MySpace Music, Holt has merged his intense love of music with his determined commitment to using new technologies to increase the power and potential of music's scope.
During the Fall semester, Holt will work closely with an undergraduate student working group, exploring the changing face of the music industry and the rapidly changing demands of music consumption, branding, marketing, distribution, and cultural identity in the digital age. In the Spring semester, he will participate in a large USC public event that examines the challenges and promises of music's digital horizon.
About Courtney Holt:
The President of MySpace Music (a landmark joint venture among MySpace, The EMI Group, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony ATV), Holt oversees the growth and development of the MySpace Music brand. Prior to joining MySpace Music, Holt served as Executive Vice President of Digital Music for the MTV Networks Music and Logo Group where he oversaw all digital initiatives for the company’s MTV, VH1 and CMT music brands, as well as for Logo. In this role, Holt also helped broker the creation of Rhapsody America, a joint venture between MTV Networks and RealNetworks and worked to develop the partnership between Rhapsody America
and Verizon. Previously, Holt was Senior Vice President of New Media, Creative and Strategic Marketing at Interscope Geffen A&M.
Read more about Holt and MySpace Music in this CNet article.
About the Popular Music Project:
The PMP is a one-stop home for the interdisciplinary study and analysis of popular music. Bringing together faculty and students from across the USC campus with musicians, critics, and industry innovators, the PMP takes pop music seriously as an object of sustained critical inquiry through a mix of public events, research projects, and Los Angeles campus residencies. The project's goal is to treat the making of pop music as a key site for education and pedagogy and for re-thinking questions of society, culture, history, and communication. For more information on the Popular Music Project, please visit www.usc.edu/PMP.
About The Norman Lear Center:
The Norman Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research and public policy center studying and shaping the impact of entertainment and media on society. From its base in the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Lear Center builds bridges between faculty who study aspects of entertainment, media and culture. Beyond campus, it bridges the gap between entertainment industry and academia, and between them and the public. For more information, visit www.learcenter.org.
By Jonathan Arkin
Student Writer
Introducing a “remarkable and capable journalist” to a discussion on ethics in new media, USC Annenberg’s director of the School of Journalism, Geneva Overholser (pictured), welcomed a new crop of faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students to the first of several weekly Director’s Forums on Aug. 25.
Overholser led a discussion with guest Alicia Shepard from NPR Ombudsman on New media journalism and old school ethics: Deciding what’s right and wrong on the digital frontier.
“We have used these (Director’s forums) as a way to bring a series of people who are concerned with new ways to tell stories, but also for a variety of other reasons,” Overholser said, promising a flurry of new series involving scholars new to Annenberg. “We have also used them to explore students’ work, which is cool.”
Shepard, who in her capacity as ombudsman responds to queries and comments from listeners, writes a blog, appears on NPR programs to discuss listener concerns and provides guidance on journalism practices to NPR Member stations, said that she sees her job as “explaining NPR to listeners, and listeners to NPR.” She also “serves as the public's representative, and is responsible for bringing transparency to journalism decision-making processes,” according to the NPR website.
“We are in the midst of a revolution, and…it has such a prescribed beginning, 1993, when the first newspaper went online,” said Shepard, who added that 1998 was another line of demarcation as it signaled the start of Internet broadband. “You have all grown up with it. It’s really fascinating that you are able to witness this revolution. Internet has turned the newspaper business upside down and I think it’s really important to maintain high ethical standards. Credibility is really the only asset you have as a journalist. It doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, or how good a reporter you are…I think the practice of ‘publish first, correct later’ is a bad idea.”
Online, Shepard noted, journalists often act as their own editors, which potentially creates another series of ethical problems. She also said that there exists an occasional conflict between the pressure to practice good journalism and the competing pressure to attract ad revenue – a major problem at cash-strapped NPR. And, she added, the core principles of fairness and accuracy sometimes compete with the need to “be protecting the brand.”
Shepard also proposed a new online model of ethics based on the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) code of ethical standards – which include truth, accuracy, disclosure, and minimizing harm.
“I think that ethics codes can be useful to any of you doing any kind of journalism,” Shepard said.
The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, co-run by communication professor Josh Kun (pictured), re-issued the 1961 album Mazel Tov Mis Amigos.
The album and the August 23rd re-creation of it at New York's esteemed Lincoln Center has been featured in various media, including an Aug. 22 morning story on NPR’s Weekend Edition.
“Weekend Edition really captures the history and culture of the Latin-Jewish music world we set out to document,” Kun said.
He describes the album as “Yiddish theater tunes gone Latin Jazz in the hands of greats like Clark Terry and Ray Barretto.”
Other media featuring Mazel Tov includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, WNYC's Soundcheck, and Tablet Magazine.
The International Journal of Communication , which is edited by University Professor Manuel Castells (pictured left) and School of Communication Director Larry Gross, has recently published a forum of articles representing the diversity and distinctiveness of communication research being conducted in the U.S. and Brazil.
The four papers in this forum address the impact of globalization of communication in Brazil and include both exemplary meditations on contemporary social problems in Brazilian society and artful mediations of the unique communication traditions in each specific field. 
Vicki Mayer of Tulane University helped assemble the papers and also translated. Arlene Luck served as managing editor.
The International Journal of Communication is an online, multi-media, academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The International Journal of Communication is an interdisciplinary journal that, while centered in communication, is open and welcoming to contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that meet at the crossroads that is communication study.
The International Journal of Communication is a forum for scholars when they address the wider audiences of our many sub-fields and specialties, rather than the location for the narrower conversations more appropriately conducted within more specialized journals.
IJOC
Kevin Patra, a second year graduate journalism student at Annenberg, had an op-ed, "Scholarship Green", published in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, August 15. Patra spent the summer working as an intern for the op-ed section of the LA Times, a section edited by Sue Horton, who holds a journalism M.A. from USC and who served as a journalism faculty
member for several years.
In the article, Patra describes the job he held as a caddy for several years in high school, and how it funded his college education.
"It was a good job for a 15-year-old -- despite the mosquitoes and humidity. On a good day, I could have $50 in my pocket by 11:30 a.m. But it wasn't the wages that allowed me to attend the University of Michigan for four years without accruing significant debt. My good fortune came from the generosity of the golfers whose bags I carried and their fellow country club members," Patra wrote.
Patra went to college on a Chick Evans Caddie Scholarship, which is made possible by many small donations from country club members throughout the country. In the piece, he argues that everyone should donate a little of what he/she can to different funds, so more kids, like him, will receive financial assistance.
"I can tell you that those of us whose lives were altered by having the doors to unaffordable universities opened are forever grateful. But more than a few thousand caddies deserve that chance."
Daniela Gerson (Specialized Journalism '09) turned her MA project into the cover piece for the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. The piece, titled "Postcards from Martha's Vineyard — How the holiday retreat of America's rich and famous became a magnet for illegal immigrants," describes how the famous presidential vacation location became home to a population of Brazilians.
"A migration network, legal or illegal, typically grows by word of mouth, starting with a small group of pioneers. When Lyndon Johnson Pereira’s time on Martha’s Vineyard was nearing its end, he told his childhood friends Manuel and Edilson, immigrants living in Boston, that a restaurant on the island was hiring. Word travelled fast: that tip resulted in more than 20 Brazilians, almost all young men from Pereira’s home state, showing up to work the following summer. Most arrived with Pereira’s same twist on the American dream: to make enough money to build a better life in Brazil," Gerson wrote.
"Communities across the U.S. are facing similar challenges as they contend with the unintended consequences of illegal immigration. Unintended and unexpected. This was not supposed to happen."
Gerson is now the manager for the Alhambra Project, a joint undertaking of USC Annenberg's Journalism and Communication schools.
Journalism professor Marc Cooper conducted a full-length, 30-minute interview with Rep. Henry Waxman on health care, government accountability and the inner workings of congress on Aug. 25 for "The Politics of Culture," a show on KCRW 89.9 FM.
They discussed Waxman's latest book, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works.
The Huffington Post ran an op-ed by director of the Norman Lear Center Martin Kaplan on the media's coverage of the 
health care battle. In the piece titled "Kumbaya, Not Kevorkian, Will Kill Grandma," Kaplan wrote that after Jon Stewart caught a Republican politician in lies about Obama "death panels," The New York Times covered the exchange in a neutral "he said, she said" fashion.
"What requires the Times to castrate itself?" Kaplan asked. "How did excellence in journalism come to mean impotence in the face of untruth?"
Kaplan discusses his disappointment with both journalism and the current administration. "If journalism had the courage to tell the truth, and if liberalism had the stomach to confront evil, maybe good leaders would be as willing to wield power as bad ones," he wrote.
Castells on computer invention (The News)
Cowan's book cited as No. 1 book about trial lawyers
The Wall Street Journal
cited The People v. Clarence Darrow by university professor and director of USC Annenberg's Center on Communication Leadership and Policy Geoffrey Cowan as the No. 1 book about trial lawyers. While defending labor activists accused of a 1910 bombing, Darrow was implicated in jury-tampering; the noted lawyer defended himself and was acquitted. The article noted that Cowan weighs the evidence in his book, and concludes that Darrow was probably guilty.
Durbin on sports stars on reality TV, on the health care debate (LA Times, NPR, CBS Evening News)
Gross on Wal-Mart advertisement pulled from Fox News and on LA TV station rejecting commercial luring companies to Las Vegas (La Opinión)
La Opinión quoted Larry Gross of the USC Annenberg School about Wal-Mart pulling commercials from Fox News after controversial comments by one of its commentators. Wal-Mart's action doesn't constitute censorship, Gross said. He noted that a similar backlash against the Dixie Chicks several years ago actually brought the singers favorable publicity.
La Opinión also quoted Gross about a Los Angeles TV station rejecting a commercial that sought to lure local companies away to Las Vegas. This wasn't an instance of censorship, as it might be if the government did it, Gross said.
Saltzman on depictions of journalists in films over the years (WNYC)
Taplin on subsidies given to states to attract Hollywood production (The Tennessean)
Winston on religious branding (Fox News)
"Special Report" interviewed journalism professor Diane Winston about a recent study which showed that the only growing segment among religious Americans consists of those who are not affiliated with any denomination. "People are opting out because they feel like they're giving more than they are getting in a lot of mainstream churches," Winston said.