A bit of an update

I haven't been posting much because school has gotten real tough. So if you don't see updates, that's what that means.

My big looming deadline at the moment is a research paper that I will submit to an academic conference by April 1. But first the paper is due in class tomorrow, Monday. So I'm charging hard to get it turned in on time and reasonably complete.

It's about framing -- the way news media select and arrange facts and images to create a coherent story. That may sound sinister, but it's generally not; reporters can't tell you every fact they find out because it would be too much and would be a senseless jumble. So they and their editors figure out "what's going on here" and produce a story explaining it. If they've done their jobs well, then you, the reader, will be better able to make sense of things.

Where it gets interesting, from a researcher's standpoint (or a media critic's), is when you consider how the reporters and editors decide what to put in, what to leave out, and how to frame the story. A lot of factors enter into these decisions: the reporter's personal experience, the routines of news gathering, the news organization's corporate culture and priorities, outside influences such as PR reps and spinmeisters, and the wider culture itself. Some of these influences are so familiar that we take them for granted and don't question them.

I'm interested in questioning these influences. I did it some when I worked at a newspaper, and now I hope to do research that sheds more light on the frame-building process, in a way that reporters and editors can use. My main interest is cultural influences.

But that's a big project, and my research paper at hand is a bit smaller: A review of other researchers' framing studies. There are few broad themes in framing research, and I'm looking for some, in hopes of helping focus future scholarship.

That's if I manage to finish this paper in the first place. So back to work I go.