Faherty Research Team Studies Traditional Companies' Use of New Media With the beginning of Fall Semester 2000, the first Michael J. Faherty Broadcast Management Laboratory graduate research team is hard at work. “We wanted to help graduate students become more actively involved in research and be published,” said Dr. C. Ann Hollifield, coordinator of the Faherty Lab, whose is leading the project with fellow lab coordinator Dr. Dwight Brooks. Seven members make up the team of three doctoral students and four masters’ candidates. Participation is voluntary, or students may receive a credit for independent study. The team has already decided the focus of its research. They want to discover the way in which traditional media organizations are dealing with new media. Their first step is to perform SWOT analyses of particular media companies. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Hollifield hopes these analyses can be turned into chapters in a book on how traditional media is adapting to new media technologies. Members of the team also expect that the data collected for the SWOT Analyses will be used for research that will be published in journals. Hollifield anticipates that serious data collection will be done by the end of fall semester, in time to present at a national conference in 2001. Participation in the project has another incentive. The Faherty Laboratory has $4,000 set aside for conference travel, and this year, the Media Management and Economics Meeting will take place in New York City. “The team will decide who goes to New York,” said Hollifield. At this meeting, the team members selected will be able to interview managers of media companies and receive practical information about these traditional companies’ use of new media.
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