long time

...i hate when i leave off and don't pick up until a couple months later. it was an interesting semester. rest assured if you ever have any doubts about your writing, then an advanced degree might or might not be the place to work those doubts out. given the nature of our work as scholars, well, sometimes under deadline and grading papers, ideas get tangled in your head. or at least in mine.

so i struggled with my writing. i struggled with learning and using a couple of new methodologies. i never thought a couple of years ago that i would be in a newspaper doing ethnography. not that i doubted my ability, per se. but because i never gave it much thought. i used survey research for my thesis, and i figured that i would be confined to statistics for the rest of my life. when i looked into programs, i wanted to find programs that could teach me both quantitative and qualitative methods. thankfully i found one.

when i began the semester, i wasn't sure what i would study at these newspapers. i wish i could divulge the names, but given the nature of the research, i cannot. i wanted to understand how journalists at both papers thought about their jobs, especially given the tremendous changes in American journalism. while i plan to continue the study into the spring, i found some interesting results. i will write about those soon.

i have also managed to finish my first discourse analysis. for both studies, i argue that journalists belong to an interpretive community. Barbie Zelizer first proposed the idea, and borrowed it from literary criticism. it became an interesting perspective to analyze what the journalistic community said about relationships among editors and owners. journalism trade publications, which were set up as a form of criticism, were not necessarily critical. i think it requires more study, but the experience was interesting.

i am currently getting ready for my courses. i finished my coursework last semester, but i have opted to take a journalism history class. i will also continue the ethnography of the two local papers; i hope to apply for a grant to finish the project. i am also learning about political economy. i will take my comps at the end of the semester, and frankly, i can't wait for the exams to be over.

either way, i am working toward understanding journalism in a globalized world. my interest in africa has only grown; while i had hoped to work in the democratic republic of congo, my inability to speak french stiffled that hope. so i have set my focus on kenya. my interest primarily rests on one primary question: what do journalists think about their profession? from there, a number of questions arise, including how well do american values work in a post-colonial, developing country?

i believe that we might share universal principles. but how those principles are set in motion with practice might be completely different. garcia canclini's view of hybrid culture as "decentered and multidetermined" is useful. i struggled with traditional communications theorists who argued that power should be viewed as vertical and hierarchical. i am excited to unpack these ideas. i believe the next semester will be incredible as my research interests continue to become more clear.