IJ-6 Academic Track: Call For Papers

IJ-6, The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism

Stanford University
May 18-20 2009

Here is a pre-announcement for IJ-6. We are presently working on the conference layout with this years' InJo Fellows, and will soon come back with more info.

The opening speaker will be Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, and the person most often called 'the father of the Internet'. Vint is an advisor to the new VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University.

Since Innovation Journalism has attracted considerable interest from researchers at universities, the conference this year will offer a special track for academics, besides the traditional mainstream conference which mainly targets professional journalists and innovation experts.

Here is the academic track call for papers:

THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS AND THE NEWS

The Vinnova Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism invites you to IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism. The academic track is a venue for researchers to present work and ideas relating to the interplay of journalism in innovation ecosystems, increasing our understanding about the role of attention work in innovation economies.

About IJ-6:
IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism is a meeting place for researchers and professionals to discuss the best ways of covering innovation in the news, the business of doing that work, and how innovation journalism interacts with society. The conference welcomes a varied set of participants: Working journalists, policy-makers in media and innovation, academic researchers, faculty and students in related areas of study, and other professionals connected to the news industry.

Main themes of IJ-6 Academic Track:

• How journalism and innovation interact
• The ability of journalism to cover innovation, and the practices
• Towards a system view: public attention in innovation ecosystems, its stakeholders, and the interaction between them.

Examples of research topics of interest

• The concept of attention work, the professional generation and brokering of attention,
• The concept of innovation communication systems; the flow of attention in innovation systems.
• How innovation processes and innovation ecosystems interact with public attention, with news media as an actor
• Interdependencies between journalism and other actors in the system.
• The roles of reputation and trust in the innovation ecosystem
• How journalism can cover innovation processes and innovation ecosystems
• Professional codes of ethics and principles of innovation journalism
• How newsroom and other professional organization affect the coverage of innovation
• Business Models for innovation journalism
• How journalism plays a part in connecting innovation with various publics and with democratic processes and the public interest.
• Models of innovation and the media, including firm, industry and economy-wide innovation systems
• State of the art as well as theory and practice in the teaching of innovation journalism
• Public narratives of innovation

Call for papers:

Schedule:

• March 10, 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (800 words).
• April 12, 2009: Notification of abstracts accepted for presentations
• May 15, 2009: Deadline for submission of full papers (max. 20 pages, APA format).

Dr. Vilma Luoma-aho (vilmaluo@stanford.edu) is the point person for submission of abstracts. Please send Word documents, not .pdf. Your abstract should have a title and 2-5 key words, with no identification information visible. Please include in your email message text the following: the tentative title to your abstract, your full name, phone number, email address, organizational affiliation and street address.

Academic Program Committee

• Vilma Luoma-aho, Stanford University
• Marc J. Ventresca, Naval Postgraduate School and University of Oxford
• Turo Uskali, University of Jyväskylä
• David Nordfors, Stanford University, Conference Chair

For more information on previous conferences and on Innovation Journalism:

• Previous conference: The Fifth Conference on Innovation Journalism (2008) http://ij5.innovationjournalism.org/
• Official Innovation Journalism publication series site http://www.innovationjournalism.org/essays/