Put the ads where people can’t miss them. Photo by Victor

Sure, we’ve had “Special Advertising Sections” and advertorial sections in print magazines forever. And while those same sections are easy to reproduce in digital replicas of magazines, they don’t exactly take advantage of the digital format to provide interactive, intriguing experience of marketers’ messages.

I recently wrote a post for PBS MediaShift on two companies developing intriguing ways of integrating sponsored content into digital magazines. GTxcel, Nativo and Brightcove each offer distinctive services to enable this integration. We’re likely looking toward a future of seamlessly blended editorial and advertising content, in which readers may be more likely to overlook the differences…but also may not care as much that there is a difference, if the sponsored content is truly of value to them for the information and/or entertainment it provides.

An Inspire article by its now-deceased founder, Samir Khan.

I recently published a study on a magazine that is a bit outside the usual purview of magazine journalism research: the digital magazine Inspire, published by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

This project offered a fascinating interdisciplinary opportunity to test assumptions about the community-building, audience-defining functions of mainstream magazines against a magazine with an entirely different purpose: the recruitment of disaffected Westerners to the cause of “independent jihad.”

In my analysis, I discuss how the content and style of this magazine support the self-radicalization process, based on existing terrorism research. It’s been troubling to see how often the magazine has come up in news reports (like this one yesterday).

You can read the full paper in the International Journal of Communication (which is online, peer-reviewed, and open-access, hooray!), and can also check out my Prezi (used in a recent campus talk) below — especially if you want to see a few more images from the magazine. They are…stunning, for lack of a better term.

I’d love to respond to any questions or comments!

Old-school comfort. Photo by Charles Williams

Among my goals for 2013 is to be more active on a daily basis, beyond regular workouts. Every day, there seems to be a new study on the health dangers of pure sitting — and every day, I think to myself, I really need to get up and move around more. Unfortunately, though I stand in the classroom, the remainder of my job as a professor calls for seated work.

I have — after years of struggle — finally developed a real craving for exercise and activity, and enjoy running, cycling, hiking or doing yoga just about every day. But most of my work day ties me to a screen, and my leisure time in the evening, after working out, is often spent with a book, an iPad, knitting or a movie…all sedentary activities. Regular workouts don’t undo the negative effects of all that sitting.

And, as much as I am interested in online and hybrid teaching and learning, I must admit that I have a real fear of the effects of still more seated screen time on my physical and mental health. Most terrifying: this finding that suggests that “Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.” So…what about every single hour of seated online grading or research? With a batch of papers that takes three hours to grade, am I also losing an hour of the rest of my life?

Like many folks, I’ve also been wanting a standing desk or a treadmill desk after seeing lots of discussion of their benefits (balanced, of course, with the knowledge that standing all day also has its risks). I’m hoping that I can soon adopt a repurposed video editing station from a campus lab to use as a standing desk at the office. At home, we have a new-to-us used treadmill bought from a Craigslist seller.

So here are my efforts so far in 2013 to become a less sedentary academic, and their relative success to date. We’ll see if I’m able to continue these efforts once spring 2013 gets fully underway.

The Fitbit’s iPhone app, which syncs via Bluetooth with the device itself.

Monitoring daily activity: the Fitbit. I bought a Fitbit, which clips to my clothing and is essentially a souped-up pedometer and altimeter for data nerds who like digital gadgets (like me). It also has an iPhone app and connects with Lose It!, where I track my food intake.

I’m trying to meet the Fitbit’s default goal of 10,000 steps per day. So far, I’ve had a good string of days where I’ve met that goal — even walking over 17,000 steps one day! But I’ve also had lows in the 2,500 range during an otherwise terrific faculty writing retreat where I sat all day (and worked really productively, I have to admit).

A cool Fitbit feature is a little digital flower on the device’s screen that grows taller based on your recent and current activity level. One good workout doesn’t keep the flower tall for long, however — the Fitbit demands constant, lower-level activity, beyond intense but relatively brief workouts, to reflect healthy levels of movement. (I learned in researching this post that developing this kind of representation of data is called captology. Cool!) Also, you get fun badges as you do more (gamification!); I just got a badge for having walked 50 miles since starting with the Fitbit on Jan. 2. Yes, digital flowers and badges are ephemeral, but I’m the type of person who finds them motivating.

Goal accomplished!

Treadmill laptop desk. I tweeted recently about using my laptop on the treadmill and “accidentally” walking 5 miles while working. (A few folks expressed interest in how this occurred, which spurred me to write this post.) It’s true — my laptop screen blocks the digital screen on my treadmill, and I hadn’t bothered to peek around it to see my progress because I was engrossed in my work. Magically, though, when I exhausted my laptop charge and quit for the night, I’d covered 5 miles and burned over 500 calories, all while walking at 2 mph and accomplishing a variety of tasks online, including writing paper reviews and emails. In fact, I’m writing this post right now on the treadmill.

SurfShelf on treadmill, holding 13″ MacBook Pro steady while I work. The next improvement: a light in this area!

I’m using a low-budget solution to this problem — the SurfShelf ($39), which is a clear plastic platform that attaches to the treadmill console with easily removable straps and buckles. I can put the shelf on in about 2 minutes. The manufacturer suggests it can be taken to the gym for use on equipment away from home, but I think that would be a bit too involved for me. I also wouldn’t recommend it for running — I use my iPad on the treadmill’s built-in ledge for higher-impact, treadmill-shaking activities — but for slow walking during basic computing tasks, the SurfShelf has been pretty awesome.

There are lots of folks experimenting with other, even cheaper options for using a laptop on the treadmill. @CStuartHardwick sent me this tweet with a photo of his setup:

@profsivek @suzisteffen @brizzyc I improvised a desk using wire shelving–gets netbook up where I can type/see. twitter.com/CStuartHardwic…

— C. Stuart Hardwick (@CStuartHardwick) January 13, 2013

Pretty cool, and made with easily available materials!

Treadmill and spin bike grading. Toward the end of last fall, I experimented with grading by hand while walking extremely slowly on the treadmill. I found that at 0.8 mph, I could make legible comments on student work while holding a clipboard. Not especially easy, but on days when I felt like I absolutely had to get up and move, this was a feasible option.

I’ll try grading hard copy work on the SurfShelf as well. The shelf doesn’t have an edge to catch the papers from sliding off onto the treadmill belt below, but I can probably attach the clipboard with the same Velcro strap that holds my laptop in place. I think I can also use the clipboard approach on the spin bike we just bought.

The accidental five miles.

Reading. Well, of course, you can read while on either the treadmill or bike. No fancy technology required. My preference so far is to read printed books while pedaling fairly slowly on the spin bike. I pull a folding wooden TV tray up to the bike to hold a stack of materials. Of all options, my favorite is reading Kindle books on my iPad with the typeface enlarged so that my eyes can more easily focus on each line while I’m walking.

Things that don’t work for me:

• I have tried reminder apps that tell me to get up from the desk at particular intervals. I end up resenting them when they interrupt me at key moments and shut them down after a few days of ignoring their desperate pleas. In combination with the Fitbit’s incentives, I might try this approach again, but having a standing desk at the office will just generally make me more active anyway.
• “Deep” reading or writing while in motion — like reading or writing serious scholarly stuff. I guess my brain is not powerful enough to do both at once! Reading the news or web articles, catching up with social media, writing routine emails, doing basic grading, etc., are perfect tasks for me to do while moving. Because I spend a significant proportion of my seated time on these tasks, moving while doing them will help a lot.
• Using dictation software to help cut down on sitting/typing (because I could move around while talking into a headset) and RSI risk. Dragon Dictate for Mac is not really suited for things like typing comments into Blackboard or GradeMark — an activity I would especially like to make more movement-friendly. I think Dragon could be good for other writing, but I found its interface and slowness pretty frustrating, especially considering its cost.

Now, what can I work on while doing yoga? No, no, I’m totally kidding about that one. A major reason I do yoga is that for me, it’s a time and place in which my mind can focus solely on the activity of the moment — and I need that mental space. So yoga shall remain unsullied by any attempt to combine it with grading or reading! But I am recommitting in 2013 to a weekly in-person yoga class, plus a weekly online class through YogaGlo. I have also started getting up during the day and doing some adapted “office yoga” poses like these.

That’s all I have to report for now. I’ll check in with this post in about 6 months and see if I’ve been able to maintain progress toward my goal of being a less sedentary academic. What else are you doing in 2013 to become less sedentary at work?

(PS: I’m now at 14,398 steps for the day!)

I was a geeky kid. I started playing with our Tandy 1000 computer from RadioShack when I was maybe five years old. I played “Demon Attack,” learned to navigate MS-DOS directories, and even programmed a little in BASIC.

I soon graduated to playing trivia games on CompuServe with people all over the world, and eventually became RDMC05B on Prodigy — an ID I still remember after all these years because it was so important to me during my middle and early high school years. The sound of the modem dialing and connecting was a sound of promise and excitement for me then, knowing I would soon be navigating the early Internet and finding new ways to learn and meet people virtually. I even started a young writers’ group and newsletter based on my early online networking.

I was also a very young reader of Wired magazine. Wired’s early years were incredibly inspiring to me. I remember wondering about this guy “Marshall McLuhan,” the magazine’s “patron saint,” as the staff listing once declared (but no longer does). I remember thinking about the Internet and what it was going to mean for me to be a “netizen,” because it sure seemed like this Net thing was going to take off. The design of the magazine was so different from anything I’d ever seen. As a whole, Wired is probably largely to blame for my presence here on this blog right now, my love of magazines, and, well, many of my career choices.

After that early fascination, I’ve almost always had a Wired subscription. The magazine started in 1993, and it was probably about that time that I started managing my own magazine subscriptions.

I’ve also watched as the magazine has moved away from its heavier considerations of Internet philosophy, responsibility, and potential, and has become rather more fluffy. I distinctly remember telling my mom when I was a kid that an issue of Wired took me longer to read than some books. That’s definitely not the case today, and it’s not just my reading skills that have changed. Though the magazine still often features some really interesting stories, they are generally stories that simply have connections to technology, and are less about the greater social significance of technology itself.

Not too long ago, Wired re-created its first issue as a downloadable edition within its iPad app. (Ironically, as its 722 megabytes downloaded, they slowed down my rural net access so that I felt like I was on that 300-baud modem of the  1980s.) The idea of bringing back premiere editions is fascinating, and I can see a potential scholarly study here someday! (Here’s one of my favorite scholarly magazine studies, which happens to be about Wired.) In the meantime, though, it’s been disheartening to look back at Wired’s early days. The contrast between what it was and what it is now is stark.

Big ideas and big name writers.

Story on newspaper R&D lab. What kinds of seeds did this piece plant in this future journalism Ph.D.’s brain? Weird.

The future of media in an infographic, before infographics were all the rage.

I wish today we had more intellectually intriguing, deeply thought out, provocative and accessible writing about technology, without an overly strong emphasis on either business considerations or the technical details. I wonder what and who will inspire young people today to be thoughtful netizens, not just consumers of media.

I’ve been working hard this semester on modifying my teaching approach in my media courses. I’m trying to incorporate many more active learning opportunities into my classes. While I never just lectured in any of my classes, I am making a concerted effort to do more classroom activities that require students to come to class prepared and to put more energy into mastering and applying course topics together.

This semester’s Intro to Mass Communication course has 28 students in it, and it’s a great class size for all kinds of different activities. An important early topic in this course is media economics — how media companies structure themselves to maximize their success, while also operating within the limits of government regulation.

I had a great time developing and using a new activity to draw students into this topic. I made up 14 fictional media companies of different sizes and with different interests, and assigned each a budget (to spend on mergers/acquisitions with other companies) and a cost (to be acquired). I printed out play money ($10 million bills!) for the companies’ budgets.

Students then worked in pairs to evaluate their assigned company and determine which other companies would be logical buyers or acquisitions, given the concepts from their reading that we’d discussed in a mini-lecture at the beginning of class (e.g., convergence, consolidation, vertical/horizontal integration, synergy, cross-media promotion).

As they discussed, I posted signs with the companies’ names around the room. Students took their positions by their signs. I then opened a buy/sell period. As the companies were bought/sold, students moved around and taped their signs under the parent companies’ signs. During a fun, hectic flurry of sales, we watched as 14 smaller media companies rapidly became 4 major multinational conglomerates. Just like reality!

I then asked the student pair representing each of the remaining major companies to explain why their company had made the decisions it did. To wrap things up, I asked students to write briefly on an index card what they’d learned about media companies’ structure and ownership from this activity. Their responses were dead on and even more insightful than I’d hoped. A few also spontaneously commented that they had fun doing this, which was nice for me to see.

I allowed about 30 minutes for this activity, but would definitely suggest taking a bit more time with it. Next time, I’ll aim for about 45 minutes. You can print out play money by searching Google Images for a million-dollar bill. Here are the other documents I created for this activity, including the directions, company descriptions, and signs for the room.

If you give this a try, let me know how it goes! I’m sure there are lots of ways to improve upon this, and I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Photo by Aaron Muszalski

At the start of this new academic year, I thought I’d share some of the digital tools I wish students would use. These aren’t apps requiring particular hardware, but just online tools that are free (or very cheap) and that could make the life of the contemporary student so much easier.

So, dear students: here’s a quick rundown of some familiar and less well-known tools that I recommend.

• Readability. Though it has a lot of other features, the best thing about Readability is that with one click of a bookmarklet, you can immediately convert just about any cluttered, hard-to-read web page into a clean, nicely formatted chunk of text. The distractions of ads and poor layout are removed. More professors are assigning online readings in class, and I think you’d much prefer the Readability experience to the otherwise messy websites that we often encounter.
• Pinboard (or a similar social bookmarking service), which is not the same thing as Pinterest! As you go through your college career – and especially as you start into your major – you’ll come across lots of websites either as assigned readings or during research for projects that you’d like to save. The old bookmarking-in-your-browser model kind of sucks when you know you’ll probably have to use many different computers in the next few years. Instead, try out a service like Pinboard that saves your bookmarks in the cloud, and which makes them accessible, taggable, and searchable. You’ll build a repository of web-based knowledge around the topics you study that can be a resource for years to come…and that you can share with others if you choose. Check out my public Pinboard links. I’ve saved almost 5,000 bookmarks using Pinboard, on a huge range of topics, and refer to them frequently.
• Google Drive/Documents and Calendar. Yes, these are well-known, but every time I see a student struggling with a USB drive or navigating through 20 files named “paper 1,” I just wish they’d try out Google Documents (now known as Google Drive). All your files. Searchable. Anywhere. Automatically saved as you work. And Google Calendar is just a handy way to keep your days and weeks organized, plus it generally plays nicely with your smartphone and other apps you might want to use. 
• TweetDeck. I and other faculty are also encouraging students to start to use Twitter to build their personal learning networks and to make online connections to people in their planned future professions. Personally, I prefer to use TweetDeck (almost never the Twitter website) for Twitter activities. You can maintain a search for a class hashtag (like my classes’ hashtags: #mscm150, #mscm175, #mscm345) or other key terms you’re interested in, as well as follow your professors and classmates who use Twitter.
• Evernote. Take all your notes in Evernote and then access them across all your devices and search them efficiently. It also lets you attach photos and audio to your notes at key moments!
• The Amazing Grade Calculator. If you have a professor who’s using percentages for their grading system, or who doesn’t post grades on Blackboard or a similar course management website, try out this calculator to see how your grade is progressing.
• SlideShare, Figshare, and Prezi. I wish more students would choose to post their class work publicly. It’s one way of demonstrating  learning to the world, which — if the work is good — can be a great asset for scholarship, internship and job applications. Putting well-designed, thoughtful, carefully proofread class presentations on one of these sites creates another positive online association with your name and demonstrates your skill set.

What other digital tools should students start to use right away in college to make life easier and enhance their online profiles? Add your suggestions in the comments!

Edited 8/30 3:29 p.m.: Just thought of one more: Dropbox!

Also, @profsivek, your E-News article is the second-most read in the journal this year. Congrats!

— Leah Fargotstein (@LFargotstein) August 13, 2012

The article to which Leah, who is an editor at Sage, refers is this one: “Social Media Under Social Control: Regulating Social Media and the Future of Socialization,” published in the journal Electronic News in September 2010. (A pre-publication PDF is here for those without journal access.)

I am thrilled that this article has been useful to others, and look forward to continuing to participate in our inquiry into the new forms of journalism developing every day. I welcome your thoughts on the article and on where our research in this area should be directed.

I have two new stories up at PBS MediaShift in the last week:

Gingras to AEJMC: Journalism Educators Must Embrace Change, Look Forward

How National Geographic Used Cowbird Storytelling Tool to Tell a Reservation’s Whole Story

The common thread between these two posts, I think, is that both exemplify the need and potential for new models of storytelling. Gingras asked the AEJMC audience to teach students to tell new kinds of stories that take advantage of the new technologies available to us today and that better suit the contemporary audience’s information preferences. The National Geographic/Cowbird project shows the ways multimedia and novel story structures can actually tell more of a story than can traditional print narratives — contrary to fears that we lose depth when we move away from standard storytelling forms.

The challenge for me now at the start of this new semester is to find ways to integrate these new models into my teaching. How can I help students prepare for a future in which neither I nor they can know the forms stories will take? It’s a difficult dilemma — and one that can give our teaching new energy. I am looking forward to exploring these ideas with my colleagues as we take on the challenge.

I haven’t blogged much this summer because I’ve been hard at work on a research project, funded through a Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Grant at Linfield. The grant has given me the chance to purchase magazines for analysis and — best of all — hire a terrific student research assistant, Jaimie L. McDonald, for the summer. Jaimie is a Mass Communication and Music double major at Linfield and is a talented singer and writer.

The project is focused on a topic I’ve been interested in for some time — the role of city magazines in their local areas. I have long been curious about how these magazines define their communities, unite their readers around a common local identity, and inform them (or not) about local issues and events. This summer, we’ve been working on content analysis of both the magazines themselves and their Twitter efforts.

Two components of this large, multi-method project are going to debut next week. One aspect of this research looked just at the coverage of local environmental topics in these city magazines, which — unfortunately — turned out to be rather scarce. However, I was pleased to also find some examples of environmental stories that both match city magazines’ typical style and do a good job of informing readers. Jaimie and I will present this component of the research in a poster session at the Ecological Society of America conference in Portland next week. I’m very excited about sharing this interdisciplinary work, and particularly about being able to offer some recommendations for scientists for outreach to city magazines.

I am also presenting next week at the AEJMC conference in Chicago (it’s going to be a hectic week!) on a panel focused on Social Media and Magazines. There I’ll discuss my analysis of city magazines’ Twitter outreach, and examine ways that their uses of social media may actually reflect a significant shift in their local functions.

I’ll share more of the products of this research here as I get them wrapped up. In the meantime, I would love to hear questions or comments on these topics!

Newsstand presents unexpected dilemmas for indie publishers.

I have a new story up at PBS MediaShift about the successes and travails faced by independent iPad magazine publishers. I had a great time learning about what these indie publishers are doing, and the ways they are trying to innovate to find success in this new medium.

I am especially interested in the ways that the Apple Newsstand is somewhat of a barrier to maintaining magazines’ top-of-mind presence for readers. I know I have magazines in my Newsstand that I easily forget to read, as John Gruber also recently observed. I found it interesting that a couple of the publishers I interviewed for MediaShift mentioned that their publication’s residence in Newsstand made it harder for readers to remember to return for monthly content, and so they were considering pushing out new content more frequently to build readers’ habits. Clearly, there are a range of advantages and disadvantages of being in Newsstand.