Turow, Joseph
Loading...
Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
Communication
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Position
Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication
Introduction
Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication. • He is the author of more than 60 articles and 9 books on mass media industries. • His continuing work on the internet, marketing and society has received a great deal of attention from the popular press as well as the research community. • He has written about media in the popular press, including American Demographics magazine and The Los Angeles Times. • His research has received financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Federal Communications Communication, MacArthur Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. • The winner of a number of conference-paper and book awards, he was a Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer at LSU and a Potruck Distinguished Lecturer at Penn State. • He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Poetics, and New Media and Society.
Research Interests
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 66
Publication Hidden Conflicts and Journalistic Norms: The Case of Self-Coverage(1994-04-01) Turow, JosephBecause news and entertainment firms are increasingly under the same corporate umbrellas, it is likely that reporting by journalists on the cultural products and activities of their affiliated companies will rise. The theme of this study is that the phenomenon of reporting on one's own company is best understood through perspectives on goal conflict and organizational culture. The article argues the need to modify contemporary scholarly contentions that news firms expect open conflict between reporters and their superiors on policy issues. Interviews at two daily newspapers and Time magazine support the theoretically based proposition that investigation of their own organizations is very much an area where journalists draw away from confronting key professional conflicts. Centering on phenomena such as silent bargains and silent routines, the study suggests how conflicts about self-coverage are managed and how this conflict management is tied to larger dynamics of organizational control.Publication Producing TV's World: How Important Is Community, an Essay Review(1982-04-01) Turow, JosephTwo views of the televisionl film business examine the media’s New York-California connection. Up the Tube: Prime Time Television in the Silverman Years by Sally Bedell. New York: Viking, 1981. Media Made in California: Hollywood, Politics, and the News by Jeremy Tunstall and David Walker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.Publication Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age(2005-01-01) Turow, JosephThis study melds "contextualist" and "resource dependence" perspectives from industrial sociology to explore the implications that audience construction by marketing and media firms hold for the core assumptions that are shaping the emerging media system of the twenty-first century. Marketers, media, and the commercial research firms that work with them are constructing contemporary U.S. audiences as frenetic, self-concerned, attention-challenged, and willing to allow advertisers to track them in response to being rewarded or treated as special. This perspective, a response to challenges and opportunities they perceive from new digital interactive technologies, both leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture.Publication The Impact of Differing Orientations of Librarians on the Process of Children's Book Selection: A Case Study of Library Tensions(1978-07-01) Turow, JosephThis paper represents an attempt to apply current organizational theory to the understanding of a large juvenile library system's selection goals and guidelines. Writings on goal conflict within organizations suggest that the two groups characteristically involved in a large library's book selection process, the coordinators and branch librarians, would display differing orientations toward the process which would result in conflicting objectives and organizational tensions. A case study using nonparticipant observation, interviews, and a questionnaire survey was carried out to examine this hypothesis. The findings challenge the traditional view of forces guiding book selection in a children's libraryPublication Advising and Ordering: Daytime, Prime Time(1974-03-21) Turow, JosephThe patterns of advice-giving and receiving and order-giving and receiving among television's dramatic characters provide an efficient and economical way in which to study the relationships between knowledge, activity, and sex of characters seen on the home screen. In addition, the study of these patterns allows comparison of the dramatic world of daytime TV - addressed primarily to women - with that of prime time. This article is a summary of some of the findings from a study on the advising and ordering patterns of men and women in soap operas and evening dramas.Publication The FTC and Consumer Privacy in the Coming Decade(2006-11-08) Turow, Joseph; Hoofnagle, Chris Jay; Mulligan, Deirdre K; Good, Nathaniel; Grossklags, JensLarge majorities of consumers believe that the term "privacy policy" conveys a baseline level of information practices that protect their privacy. In short, "privacy," like "free" before it, has taken on normative meaning in the marketplace. When consumers see the term "privacy policy," they believe that their privacy will be protected in specific ways. In particular, when consumers see the "privacy policy" they assume that a web site will not share their personal information. Of course, this is not the case. Privacy policies today come in all different flavors. Some companies make affirmative commitments not to share the personal information of their consumers. More frequently, however, privacy policies are used to inform consumers that unless they "opt-out" of certain information sharing, the company will communicate their personal information to other commercial entities. Given that consumers today associate the term "privacy policy" with specific practices that afford a normative level of privacy protection, the use of the term by a web site in the absence of adherence to these baseline practices can mislead consumers to expect privacy that, in reality, they are not afforded. This is not to suggest that companies are intending to mislead consumers, but rather that consumers today associate certain practices with "privacy policy" just as they associate certain terms and conditions with the word "free." Because the term "privacy policy" has taken on a specific marketplace meaning and connotes a particular level of protection to consumers, the Federal Trade Commission should police the use of the term "privacy policy" to assure that companies using the term deliver a set of protections that meet consumers’ expectations, and that the term "privacy policy" doesn’t mislead consumers during marketplace transactions.Publication Local Television: Producing Soft News(1983-04-01) Turow, JosephA reliance on prepackaged features and public relations sources, coupled with a desire for upbeat, visually interesting stories, results in a similarity of soft news across programs and stations, despite differing programming strategies.Publication Personalized Marketing of Health Products the 21st Century Way(2007-03-01) Turow, Joseph; Gellman, Robert; Turow, JudithPublication Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities That Enable It(2009-09-01) Turow, Joseph; Bleakley, Amy; King, Jennifer; Hennessy, Michael; Hoofnatle, Chris JayThis nationally representative telephone (wire-line and cell phone) survey explores Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers, a controversial issue currently before government policymakers. Behavioral targeting involves two types of activities: following users' actions and then tailoring advertisements for the users based on those actions. While privacy advocates have lambasted behavioral targeting for tracking and labeling people in ways they do not know or understand, marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible. Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults. This survey finds that Americans want openness with marketers. If marketers want to continue to use various forms of behavioral targeting in their interactions with Americans, they must work with policymakers to open up the process so that individuals can learn exactly how their information is being collected and used, and then exercise control over their data. We offer specific proposals in this direction. An overarching one is for marketers to implement a regime of information respect toward the public rather than to treat them as objects from which they can take information in order to optimally persuade them.Publication Curing Television's Ills: The Portrayal of Health Care(1985-10-01) Turow, Joseph; Coe, LisaContent analysis of TV programming across day- and night-time genres shows drugs and machines as the ubiquitous modes of healing, with doctors diagnosing incorrectly only three percent of the time.