Reality.

Graduate school has just started for a month and I have been brought to face the cruel reality.

Journal paper is the only criterion for our scholarship, promotion and achievement. The number of getting your research being cited by others is more important than your teaching performance. A professor has NO LIFE until he/she gets the tenure. Reviewers could be really mean to your research. On average, only four people read your research paper. Half of the researches never get cited. Sound pessimistic, right? Academia is no longer a friendly and encouraging environment as I thought a month ago. Part of my fantasy of being a scholar has vanished, honestly.

Dr. Jensen pointed out “There is a lot of irrelevant research being done by a lot of self-indulgent professors.” and “researchers can easily advance careers not by asking important questions about how systems of power work, but by constructing complex models and methodologies.” I think it is the result of too much emphasis on publications. This is a structural, internal problem of the field, I guess. What can we do to change this? It all depends on our willingness to work for the society or ... just for getting our name out there.

I have heard many of my friends who are studying their doctoral degrees in engineering or mathematics are still deciding whether to work in the industry or stay in the academia after they graduate. For doctoral students in journalism and communication, however, we don't have this struggle. It seems like from the moment you get into a doctoral degree program in journalism or communication, you are “technically” detached from the practical journalistic world. I asked several mentors for advice on pursuing a Ph.D. and they all said, “If you want to do reporting, you should stay in the field and don't get a Ph.D.” Newsrooms do not care about what degrees you have. What makes things worse is that, a doctoral degree could sometimes give you a difficult time to go back to the profession field. It is because your skills may not be up-to-dated or your employers would doubt about what your passion really is. Therefore, I am not surprised by the research gap between professionals and scholars mentioned in the Knight Blog.

For The New York Times’ article, I agree that the relationship between theory and empirical data is not unbreakable. Human behavior is more complicated and dynamic than what the numbers and figures can show. Social sciences need to overcome their inferiority complex and take proud of our ways to prove things true.





My preliminary research topic

My preliminary research topic is to study the lifespan of tweets post by newsrooms. Popular tweets (or healthy tweets) are usually retweeted by many users and live active online longer. A popular tweet has a higher chance to reach out to followers and get them engaged with the news.

For different tweets, their lifespans (i.e., how long they will stay popular) vary. Only 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. But some tweets can stay active for as long as 48 hours. 

Questions I want to ask include: what kind of news content usually generate a healthy tweet and a sick tweet? What characteristics does a healthy tweet have (eg. numbers of followers, time of day you’re tweeting, etc.)? These are worthy questions to ask as they unravel how certain messages can go viral and engage readers better across social media.