My graduate studies enabled me to examine several of journalism's more pressing issues in-depth through academic research papers. I completed research on newsroom organization, agenda building, sourcing stories on social media, the Web's effect on news values and monetization of online content.
This paper from my Theory and Audience Analysis coursework summarizes and analyzes best practices identified by researchers and practitioners for organizing a modern newsroom and anticipates what might lie ahead. Best practices are organized into four areas: organizational structure, physical newsroom layout, workflow and corporate culture.
This literature review from my Public Opinion Through New Media coursework explores ways new media such as Web sites, blogs and social networks might be affecting the process by which issues become news and consequently are placed on the public agenda. It focuses on agenda building and touches on agenda setting to the extent new media may enable agenda builders to become agenda setters themselves.
For my Citizen and Participatory News coursework, I consulted trade, journal and online articles to inform a paper about using Twitter to source news stories. The paper considers how Twitter has affected journalists' relationships with both traditional and non-traditional sources.
For my Contemporary Media Issues coursework, I drew upon trade and popular press and scholarly journals for a paper examining how techniques for gathering and presenting online news are affecting traditional journalistic principles.
For my Media Management and Economics coursework, I outlined a business model for a regional news marketplace where institutional journalists, freelancers, citizen journalists, quasi-journalistic nonprofits and consumers buy, sell and trade news content such as completed articles and videos and news gathering products and services such as databases, source lists, reporting, editing and aggregation.
This would help news organizations monetize digital content, accomplish economies of scale by pooling their resources and leverage the power of part-time journalists like freelancers, citizen journalists and institutions by creating a convenient marketplace for their work. The market itself would make money through commissions, premium features and CPC advertising targeted to users' browsing and trading behavior.