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The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) leadership charged a 13-member Presidential Task Force on Careers to obtain membership's thoughts on preferences and needs regarding career-assistance programming and activities. This Spring 2019 report details a survey of the interest of educators, of all ranks, in current AEJMC efforts and the need for more targeted and accessible opportunities, both at annual conferences and online modules. Results included members' thoughts on professional development, burnout, tenure and posttenure processes, academic culture, and the importance of being forward thinking regarding news and strategic communications industries outside of academia.

Given the significant investment needed to gather the news, American journalism institutions have historically sought to protect their copyrights. The legal principle of fair use interplays with the ability of users to reshape portions of cultural products to make transformative works. As Large Language Models that empower Artificial Intelligence platforms can be built upon news artifacts, copyright considerations have, to date, evolved faster than legal and regulatory frameworks can respond. Examining public comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office in 2023, this study provides a historical snapshot of how copyright was conceptualized by American journalism institutions in the earliest era of AI adoption within newsrooms. This study finds that this set of journalism institutions largely endorsed licensing arrangements for the legal (re)use of journalistic works. At the same time, as viewed through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, the comments provided another public forum for journalism institutions to publicly debate and define the boundaries of the news profession itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism hackathons are computationally based events in which participants create news product prototypes. In the ideal case, the gatherings are rooted in local community, enabling a wide set of institutional stakeholders (legacy journalists, hacker journalists, civic hackers, and the general public) to gather in conversation around key civic issues. This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public. Surfaced from in-depth interviews with event organizers encompassing nine countries, the findings illustrate that journalism hackathons are most successful when collaboration integrates civic organizations and community leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With profitability for newspapers waning, publications are seeking new investments to bolster their bottom lines. At the same time, newspaper executives are experiencing pressures to generate new value from "first-mover advantages"—the company's uptake of new products, processes, or markets. This research examines 4 years of 10-K filings from a sample of the United States' publicly owned newspapers, finding that corporate newspapers expanded notions of value to encompass the impact of their newsgathering operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newsroom developers often share code produced by their organizations within open source software (OSS) environments. This study details how newsroom developers communicate journalistic labor around code in these spaces. Here, they explain how code operates, as well as illustrate its centrality to newswork. This research finds engagement in OSS environments provides visibility for news organizations to showcase their computational approaches to digital news innovation. This work also advances that OSS engagement helps develop shared practices to digital newswork, further unifying newsroom developers as an interpretive community within journalistic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital transition within American newspapers, newsroom librarians were among the first newsworkers to have their labor automated. In response, these practitioners operating in converged newsrooms shifted their on-the-job routines and roles to align with the increasing centrality of machines in journalistic production. Using an actor-network approach, this research integrates in-depth interviews to explore how American newsroom librarians interface with machines in acting as guardians of institutional knowledge within news organizations. Examining the modern duties of newsroom librarians can provide broader context for the next generation of industry automation in journalistic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similar to prior cycles of newsroom specialization, news organizations must integrate the expertise of data journalists. Based upon 18 in-depth interviews with data journalism leaders within American newspapers, this study examines how newsrooms are restructuring to accommodate data news work. More specifically, the research identifies four “critical junctures” by which newspapers expand data journalism operations. The interviews establish that expanding a paper’s commitment to data journalism requires reorganizing the newsroom with new layers of structural complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities act as shared social structures that shape citizen identity. These bonds are solidified through fields of care, in which residents are tied to the city by both geographic space and emotional attachment. Pre-digital scholarship established that news production acts as a field of care, strengthening relationships to the urban environment. This research revisits news production as a field of care in the digital age. Driven by an ecological approach to news production informed by the historic works of Chicago School sociologists, this study examines how New Orleans operates as a news environment to build news audiences and bond urban residents to the city. Built upon a complement of qualitative methods including 49 in-depth interviews with media practitioners, ethnographic observation, and document analysis, this work advances that the city’s news ecology rests upon notions of publicness and spectacle to connect with audiences. This study finds that even in the digital age, ties to the physical community remain essential to engaging digital news audiences within metropolitan spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the problems that US journalists face in employing the copyright doctrine of fair use under copyright in their work, and heralds a solution. US copyright policy's expansion of monopoly rights since 1976, harshly shrinking the public domain, has forced journalists to understand their fair use rights better. Fair use permits use of copyrighted material without permission or payment, under some circumstances. Without vigorous application of fair use, freedom of the press and its public sphere functions are impaired. Interviews with 81 journalists in a range of media show that journalists receive inadequate and conflicting fair use advice in their education and work environments, and often share misinformation. As a consequence they delay, limit coverage and even choose not to release information. The problem is most acute in emergent digital platforms and in small organizations. Journalists made aware of this problem have taken action to shape a set of principles interpreting their fair use rights. This set of principles offers an opportunity to share journalistic standards for US fair use, following the model of other communities of practice that have been able to do their work more easily and effectively as a result. The US situation is particular to US law, but has international implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]