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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]

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]

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]