The Sociology of Online News (375-0-1)

Instructors

Pablo J Boczkowski

Meeting Info

Frances Searle Building 3417: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

The goal of this upper-level undergraduate seminar is to survey the state of online news from a sociological perspective. We will divide the class into two main parts. The first part will be devoted to an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge about the behavior of online news audiences worldwide. The second part will be focused on understanding the internal transformations that news organizations have undertaken over the past couple of decades to address this changing audience landscape and its connections to a series of technological, political, and economic challenges that have marked the evolution of the twenty-first century so far. Cutting across both parts will be the adoption of a global and comparative perspective by examining news audiences and organizations from across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The are two main learning objectives for this class: a) to understand the behavior of online news audiences worldwide; and, b) to understand the transformations of news organizations to address a changing news audience landscape.