Chronicle of Higher Education

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:52pm on Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Journalism schools are attracting hordes of students, Katherine Mangan of The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on September 21, 2009:

"At a time when the newspaper industry is in free fall and thousands of jobs are being cut each year, one would think that the halls of the nation's journalism schools would be awfully quiet. Think again.

Many universities report that journalism enrollments are up this year. Over the past few weeks, a lot of these budding journalists have been blogging, broadcasting, and tweeting their way through introductory courses that have been revamped to embrace the digital age.

Applications to Columbia University's master-of-science program in journalism rose 44 percent, to 1,181, for the class entering this fall, and an investigative-journalism specialty drew more than twice as many applications this year than last year, up from 54 in 2008 to 121 this year.

Elsewhere, applications to master's programs were up 30 percent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 25 percent at the University of Maryland at College Park, and 24 percent at Stanford University.

Enrollment in undergraduate journalism programs nationwide has grown 35 percent over the past 10 years, to 201,477, and was up slightly in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available."

The full story:
http://chronicle.com/article/Stop-the-Presses-Revamped/48497/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 5:29pm on Friday, September 4th, 2009

Google's book search is a disaster for scholars, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education on August 31, 2009:

"Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?

Doing it right depends on what exactly "it" is. Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The company likes to refer to Google's book search as a "library," but it generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

The full story:
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:22pm on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Mireille Grangenois was hired as the publisher of The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 1, 2009. She was managing director at public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, and previously served as vice president for advertising at The Baltimore Sun.