Susan Jacobson

Somebody liked my photos from Germany so much - I am the official Blog of the Day for Wednesday, July 19, 2006. You can view it here: http://blogoftheday.org/page/111683 or click on the image below.

I have a ton of work to do before the first of August or so. I am putting together a survey of college students' news consumption habits that I hope to unleash on my students sometime in the fall semester. The idea is to try to get some hard data on students' use of informal news sources. So far, in reviewing the literature, I have found hard statistics that show people under the age of 35 generally eschew the daily newspaper and TV news, but information about where they get actually get their news is a little sketchy. I have found several articles that describe a laundry list of student news expectations - news has to be free, fast, convenient, short, entertaining, etc. - but no surveys. Some of the articles may be based on studies done by news organizations themselves, which were not made public, but I have only found a couple of articles that reference such studies.



Of course, I expect this survey to feed into my Mobile Journalism agenda. Given the news delivery expectations of the young, what form can news and information services take in mobile media? Is there any way to preserve Kovach and Rosensteil's notion that the Primary Purpose of Journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing? These are some of the questions I am hoping to explore with my students in the fall.



So for now I am holed up in my apartment with elmo_the_cat. To make up for the lack of interesting events in my life (at least until Thursday, when I go to Arbaccio's to play Pinochle - I wonder if I can con persuade them to let us play for cash instead of points?), here are some of the photos from my recent - first - trip to Europe, specifically Germany - for your enjoyment. I discovered the first photo while trying to find Potsdammer Platz in Berlin. It's weird to run into concrete evidence of people and places and events that, until then, you had only read about. The second photo is from Dresden, and the third is the remains of a Socialist Realism murl on a building in Dresden. It's hard to imagine that Dresden was part of East Germany at one time, but artifacts like this one pop up every now and then in the city. ( See more photos here. )

DATELINE: Dresden

At first I thoiught it was just a contemporary take on socialist realism...


But then I realized that something more sinister was at work....


Perhaps something inspired by Art Spiegelman.

( See what Gandalf the Grey Is Doing these days. )