Welcome to Soundbyte University | From the Bell Tower
Academic librarians can contribute to more robust media about higher ed Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Oct 7, 2010In a previous column I wrote about how higher education, and mostly education at all levels, is largely invisible to the national media. There are occasional articles about binge drinking, outrageous tuition costs, or an individual shocking or tragic campus event such as the recent unfortunate suicide at Rutgers University. There may be a bit of attention over the latest national outrage, such as when for-profit higher education institutions allow unprepared students to run up sky-high debt while giving them big hopes and little to show for it all. Overall, however, higher education is largely ignored by the media, especially serious challenges such as dropout rates or the student loan crisis.
A new study adds some insight to the relationship between the media and higher education, and what it suggests is that the news media has less to say about higher education but tends to depend on higher education as a source of information. This story should capture our attention because it is as much about the amazing ability of contemporary academic researchers to compile the necessary research data as it is about the findings, and in turn the support the academic library provides to faculty doing research with massive amounts of data previously unavailable or impossible to mine.
From newsmaker to news commentator
What's happening is fairly simple. Instead of offering coverage about higher education institutions, news outlets are obtaining expert opinions from our faculty members. That means there are still mentions of colleges and universities in the media, but what you find is mostly in the context of quotes from faculty. That's good for the faculty—recognition as an expert is wonderful—and it certainly reflects well on the institution.
It also means that it's less likely that important issues of the day in higher education are going to get the necessary media coverage. The media are busy chasing after faculty for quotes about non-education stories. Consider, for example, that Robert J. Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University, has been quoted in 150 different stories by 78 different reporters in the last two decades, according to a post on the blog The Nytpicker. What did the Times ask Thompson to comment on most recently? Students' use of technology? The budget crisis in higher education funding? Scholarly communication? If you guessed any of those you'd be wrong.
Most recently Thompson, whose specific area of expertise is television, weighed in on a new "spaghetti taco" craze inspired by a character on "iCarly," a children's television show. Thompson has also commented on the mnemonic properties of cicadas, the branding genius of a casino that weighs its waitresses, and whether John Kerry's hair looks goofy when he windsurfs. It appears that nothing Thompson has discussed with Times reporters has ever led to or had a connection with a substantive article about a serious higher education issue.
So how do we know all this? We can thank some patient and persistent researchers, along with massive amounts of data found in library databases-like those that provide full-text historical newspapers.
Crunching the data
On of the authors, Kalev Leetaru (a Bell Tower reader), emailed me about the release of the research findings in a report titled "Soundbyte University." Leetaru is the coordinator of information technology and research at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
How many articles did the researchers analyze? Try 18 million documents comprising the entire run of the New York Times from 1945 to 2005. How exactly did Leetaru and his research partners analyze the content of 18 million documents? According to an article about the study in Insider Higher Ed, a computer program was created to do all the grunt work of looking for occurrences of university names. It worked well. The researchers manually analyzed approximately 500 articles to confirm that the software algorithm was doing its job correctly. The results are indeed of interest.
Big decline
Just how much have things changed? According to the study, in 1946 53 percent of articles mentioning a research university were about that university, focusing on its research or activities. Today, just 15 percent of articles mentioning a university are about that university: the remaining 85 percent simply cite high-stature faculty for soundbyte commentary on current events.
While the decline in coverage of higher education is significant, those articles that cite a higher education expert have increased to 13 percent of all articles and 21 percent of all front page articles today.
One of the reasons this research is even possible is because of the resources provided to faculty by the academic library. Leetaru told me that "the advent of large digital historic news archives, which news librarians have promoted on their campuses for faculty research, can also be used to understand the broader patterns of coverage of that research and how the portrayal of higher education in the news has changed over the past half-century." Go ahead academic librarians, give yourselves a pat on the back.
A shift to regional flavor
Does all this mean that our colleges and universities are being largely ignored in the media? Not entirely. Local metropolitan and regional newspapers continue to produce a healthy stream of articles in which institutions and their faculty are profiled. At Kept-Up Academic Librarian, where I offer daily reports about higher education from the news world, the vast majority of the articles that I scan that mention specific institutions are regional.
The opportunities to get mentioned in an article are still good—even for academic librarians. Academic library-focused articles like this one are more common than you think at the regional level. For instance, an article my local paper did about textbooks mentioned multiple local institutions, and even quoted an academic librarian on the issues.
It helps to connect with the staff or individual at your institution responsible for media contacts. He or she keeps up a list of faculty and staff who have expertise on different subjects for when journalists call asking to speak with an expert. Academic librarians need to take the first step in promoting their expertise. While we can anticipate seeing ever lower numbers of higher education related articles in the national mainstream media, the coverage at the regional local levels is still healthy-good enough for an academic librarian to get quoted on occasion.
Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website.
