Jack Rosenberry

Users Support Online Anonymity Despite Increasing Negativity

Participants in online comment forums belonging to newspapers blame anonymity for the increasingly negative and rude comments, yet most support keeping these forums anonymous.

Capstone Courses in Mass Communication Programs

Many colleges and universities emphasize helping students make the transition into higher education. But transition to post-graduation life through approaches such as capstone courses has not received much attention. A survey of mass communication programs indicated that capstones are commonly used for both integration of prior learning and for transition to what students may face after graduation, and that mass communication programs appear to be meeting the challenge of blending these somewhat incongruous approaches. Mass communication capstones employ a wide variety of methods and content, but teachers and administrators appear satisfied with how the courses serve their programs. The surveys results are interpreted with suggestions for achieving more consistency in mass media capstones.

The Effect of Content Mix on Circulation Penetration for U.S. Daily Newspapers

For a generation, the U.S. newspaper industry has suffered from stagnant circulation performance and declining penetration, but some papers manage to maintain healthy penetration. This project investigated whether content mix could account for the variance in penetration among papers in a national sample, but found content does not have a significant impact on circulation variance after controlling for the influence of market characteristics.