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March 22, 2008
Anthropology Journalism?
One of my latests interests is "Anthropology Journalism". This term does not hold much cogency in either field, aside from discussions about their methodological similarities. With the intense focus many anthropologists expend on matters of "authorship" and "authority", I assume there is much more discussion about these matters that I am simply not aware of. [Please educate me with a comment.]
Why is it that we do not have any control over our news? For example, a big announcement was made today about the origins of hominid bipedalism dating to 6 rather than 3.5 million years ago. The research, conducted by Brian Richmond and William Jungers came out in the March 21 issue of Science. I wrote a light piece about it on my blog but why wasn't I able learn about this cool bit of anthropology on an anthropology feed? I did hear about it from a US News and World Report feed but I wish we had our own feed that rivaled theirs.
I have a project I have started with a group of anthro majors in my program at Fresno State called "Making Anthropology Public". Like AnthroBlogs, our blog is intended to make Anthropology real for the rest of the world.
As inductive analysts, Anthropologists have skills most others lack. My hope now is to get more people thinking about these issues for the betterment of our field.
Posted by theanthrogeek at March 22, 2008 12:22 AM
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Comments
Looks like an excellent program! It's a good idea to think about how to get anthropological topics into the news. Something I've been thinking about a lot (and advocated when possible) is that in an era when most anthro majors go on to do things other than professional anthropology, we should especially push the field as a major for future journalists. As you suggest in your first paragraph, there is a concern with writing and authenticity nearly built into anthropology these days, and it would be great to have successful journalists writing across the genres with some background in anthropology.
Posted by: JohnN ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.anthroblogs.org/anthroblogblog/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 31, 2008 11:02 PM
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