Which Future for Newspapers?

Please join us for the second in the Fall 2008 series of talks sponsored by the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics (RKCSI). The RKCSI speaker series is designed to introduce faculty, students and staff across the university to current research in social informatics conducted at IU and around the world. The complete schedule for the Fall 2008 Speaker Series is posted on the web at:
http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/index.php/2008-fall

Speaker: Leopoldina Fortunati
Professor of Sociology of Communication
Faculty of Education
University of Udine, Italy

Topic: Which Future for Newspapers?
Date: Friday, October 24, 2008
Time: 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: IU Bloomington, Telecommunications Building, Room RTV 226

Graduate students are invited to join Dr. Fortunati for a discussion from 3-4pm in Room LI 001 at the main library.

Refreshments will be available.

ABSTRACT
The decline of newspapers started long before the advent of the Internet. However, the Internet has accelerated this decline. Internet users who read the news online, time spent reading news online, and the number of pages they view have been rapidly increasing. But is the future of newspapers really endangered? Beginning with the assumption that the press should be studied as a socio-technical system, we carried out an 11-nation survey of European journalists who are on the frontlines of the rapidly changing world of journalism to understand how they see the future of the press and how they assess changes in their jobs and in their professional status since the integration of the Internet in newsrooms. We also examined other data from editors and audience associations to contrast visions and perceptions. For more details on the talk, see
http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/article.php/2008-fall/163

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Leopoldina Fortunati is professor of the sociology of communication at the Faculty of Education of the University of Udine, Italy. Her research focuses on cultural processes and ICTs. Her many books have been translated into 11 languages. She has served as editor with J.
Katz and R. Riccini of Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication and Fashion (2003) and with P. Law and S. Yang of New Technologies in Global Societies (2006). She is an associate editor of the journal The Information Society and also co-chairs The Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communication (SSSMC). For more information about Dr. Fortunati, see her home page at:
http://web.uniud.it/dest/docenti/fortunati/curriculum.htm