Reading books can be fun

Reading books can be fun--by deb wallevand

This blog title reminds me of something from my Saturday morning cartoon days with an owl saying "Hey kids books are fun!" That statement and well this whole blog will just confirm how much of a nerd I am.

I would not say that reading is my most favorite thing to do in school, much less in my free time. I have always liked school though, but I prefer television and other visual forms of entertainment. I tend to laugh when people talk about reading for fun (sorry mom!). It just seemed like an oxymoron. However, these last two weeks I found a couple of centerpieces for my research. And yes, reading these two books was fun.

Media, Sports & Society, edited by Lawrence Wenner, provides a foundation for research on the communication of sports. Contributors of this book examined the theoretical, cultural and historical issues, as well as the production of media sports programming, its content and its audience. Individual chapters focus on the Super Bowl, sports violence and sex typing. I really enjoyed reading about how the symbiotic relationship between sports and the mass media in American society. One author wrote, "Media attention fans the flames of interest in sport and increased interest in sport warrants further media attention." This is the chicken or the egg argument that I'm sure I will face in my professional career.


Women, Media and Sport: Challenging Gender Values, edited by Pamela Creedon, adds to the breadth of my research both from a cultural and media perspective. I found this volume of work
incredibly interesting because I'm interested in the history of women's sports and particularly in gender issues as related to varying media will find this volume informative. My favorite chapter from this book provided a complete historical account of women in American sports journalism. I loved reading about women sportswriters during WWII and about the struggles and sexism these pioneers faced in locker rooms. I learned about the impressive careers of Mary Bostwick, Nellie Bly, Margaret Goss, Betty Cuniberti, and Melissa Ludtke. I loved reading about it, but it totally pissed me off too.

While reading these two books I thought a lot about how I could improve my own research about television coverage and women's sports. I think my biggest discovery was that I need to include a few different theories. More specifically I'm going to start combining, media effects, gatekeeping, and feminism. In past research papers I've talked about gatekeeping (framing theory) or some feminist theory, but I totally ignored media effects. In hindsight, I'm a bit of an idiot to completely leave out media effects. Often times I think I probably implied that the sports audience was passive.

This semester I learned not to shy away from books because they were books. In fact, by actually reading a couple books I found two essential centerpieces for my master's work. Furthermore, I think I'll actually purchase these books and read them more thoroughly this summer. Yeah, I'm a nerd and I guess I like to read.

Contributing to the Body of Knowledge

Contributing to the Body of Knowledge

When conducting research during undergraduate course work, there is no need to really think about the field as a whole, you pick a topic, conduct minor research and put together a paper of 5-7 pages. Starting out in graduate school, I was quite surprised on day one to hear that my first paper would be between 20-25 pages. The research was so different, and I realized quickly that my undergraduate studies had done little to help me think on a theoretical level.

Soon after starting graduate school, I began hearing this term “body of knowledge” being thrown around. I realize now that the body of knowledge is the world around us, what the past and present researchers have studied and that this body has natural holes within it where new researchers (or graduate students) can find their niche within it.

Journalism and mass communications is in a unique situation compared to other fields. The field is still young (in comparison to other fields) and there is much spill over from other bodies of knowledge that relates to out field. For example, for my professional project I must look into areas such as human resources, job recruitment and gender roles in order to develop a sufficient literature review to work from.

The body of knowledge is important because of the starting place it provides the future researchers. It also points towards new areas of study, giving even more potential areas for those unsure of what they wish to study. The body of knowledge is by no means complete, and never will be as journalism and mass communication is an ever evolving field.

I plan to conduct my professional project on the subject of recruiting more women into the field of sports information directing within higher education institutes. I feel this will connect me to a very large gap in the current body of knowledge, seeing as there is little existing research in the field of sports information directing. I find it interesting that so many female public relations students express interest in working in the sports information directing industry, but the current research shows that very few women are within the field.

Finding these sorts of holes is key when conducting research which you wish to use as a contribution to the body of knowledge for any subject. Our field is lucky because the body of knowledge is continuously growing into new areas, continuously adding new gaps that require study and rapidly changing with the technology. It is unfortunate that this idea of contributing to the greater good of the journalism and mass communication field is not introduced to undergraduate students more often. I believe that all higher education students should be introduced to this idea much sooner, and should begin understanding that what they choose to research can be a contribution to the greater body of knowledge for the entire field.