First Session: Lecture 10:00-12:30 "The News Gap"

Lecturer: Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski (Northwestern University)

Abstract

The sites of major media organizations──CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others──provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this talk, I will draw on joint work with Eugenia Mitchelstein that examines this gap and consider the implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age.

About the Lecturer

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Professor and Director of the Program in Leadership for Creative Enterprises at Northwestern University. His research program looks at the transition from print to digital media, with a focus on the organizational and occupational dynamics of contemporary journalism and increasingly examined by adopting a comparative lens. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (MIT Press, 2004); News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge (MIT Press, November 2013; co-authored with Eugenia Mitchelstein); Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society (MIT Press, 2014; co-edited with Tarleton Gillespie and Kirsten Foot). His current major project is an ethnographic study of the demise of print newspapers in Chicago, Paris, and Buenos Aires, as a window into larger dynamics of institutional decay.

Organized by the Media Research Lab of Professor Hayashi Kaori, in cooperation with the "Information and Media" Unit of the IHS Program

Second Session: Workshop (14:00-16:30) Research Presentation

Commentator: Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski (Northwestern University)

Organized by the "Information and Media" Unit of the IHS Program

*N.B.

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