7/27/2019 Historians Seek a Delay in Posting DIssertations

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B6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JULY29, 2013

MEDIA

By DAVID CARR

Justin B. Smith, whose digitalstrategy swiftly transformed TheAtlantic, one of the statelier me-dia vessels around, is about to geta bigger boat.

On Monday, Bloomberg willannounce that Mr. Smith, thepresident of Atlantic Media, willbe named chief executive of theBloomberg Media Group. He willreport to Daniel L. Doctoroff,chief executive of Bloomberg.Andrew Lack, who managed themedia division for five years, willbecome chairman.

After joining The Atlantic in2007, Mr. Smith developed a rep-

utation as an aggressive pro-moter of digital media who wasable to reconfigure a 156-year-oldmagazine into a genuine multi-platform property.

In a letter to the staff about Mr.Smiths departure, David Brad-ley, the owner of Atlantic Media,credited Mr. Smith with bringingthe company to profitability forthe first time under his owner-ship; doubling revenue; and cre-ating a number of successful digi-tal start-ups, including The Atlan-tic Wire and Quartz.

His quick results at the Atlan-tic Media Company drew the at-tention of executives at Bloom-berg, who began talking to him atthe end of last year.

We know that every part ofmedia is being disrupted by tech-

nology, and we need someonewho understands that, Mr. Doc-toroff said. Justin can drivethings forward here because he

has an incredibly digital sensibil-ity with a unique understandingof the confluence of journalismand multiple platforms.

The move will give Mr. Smithsignificant scale and aconnectionwith Bloombergs lucrative ter-minal business, which producesrevenue that allows the companyto invest aggressively in mediaproperties. The company has hadsuccess in moving from a lineartelevision business to a more di-verse model of video distribution,while the acquisition of Business-week gave Bloomberg an editori-al cachet it historically lacked.

Even with those successes, the

media division has long beentreated as a marketing amenityfor subscribers to the terminalbusiness. Despite its recent

growth, the media division hasstruggled to gain a consumerbase for its properties, which in-clude television, print, radio, mo-bile, events and digital media.

The company was heavily crit-icized several months ago afterrevelations that some of its re-porters had used the Bloombergterminals to gain access to dataabout its users, prompting Eric T.Schneiderman, attorney generalof New York, to begin lookinginto the practice, The Wall StreetJournal reported.

The companys assets itssuccess, its size and a hard-driv-ing business culture might

make bringing about change dif-ficult. But Mr. Smith said the fitwas a natural one.

If you look at the entrepre-

neurial roots of this company andits history of market disruptionand innovation, I think it is thebest positioned media companythere is, he said. The theory thatlarge companies cannot innovate,he said, has not been historicallytrue at Bloomberg. He added,This is a company where youcan take big risks with longer ho-rizons.

Before joining Atlantic Media,Mr. Smith opened the Americanedition of the British newsmaga-zine The Week in 2001. Beforethat, he was head of corporatestrategy for The Economist inLondon, Hong Kong and New

York. He also founded BreakingMedia, a collection of Web sitesthat includes Above the Law,Dealbreaker and Fashionista.

Mr. Smith has no experience inthe television business and saidhe would work closely with Mr.Lack in that area. He said he wasinterested in creating new prod-ucts, including ones aimed at theglobal market, while bringing ad-ditional digital muscle to Bloom-bergs existing businesses.

Eric Schmidt, executive chair-man of Google, met Mr. Smith atone of Atlantic Medias confer-ences and they became friends.

How many people have reallymanaged to be successful in digi-tal media? Mr. Schmidt said in aphone call. Everyone has triedand few have been successful.

Justin is one of them. He is mov-ing very fast, but this is the nextlogical step. Its a serious gain forBloomberg.

Bloomberg Media Recruits a New Chief From The Atlantic

DANIEL ROSENBAUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Justin B. Smith, as president of Atlantic Media, developed areputation as an aggressive promoter of digital media.

By JANE L. LEVERE

THE Air Force, as part ofits recruitment efforts, isapproachingyoung peo-ple for help in solving

real-world technological prob-lems using a collaborative onlineplatform.

The initiative, which will be in-troduced on Thursday, will cre-

ate a digital program called theAir Force Collaboratory,in whichyoung people will be challengedto develop technologies forsearch-and-rescue operations incollapsed structures;to createsoftware code for a quadrotor, atype of unmanned, aerial vehicle;and to determine where to placethe newest GPS satellite.

The Air Force hopes the pro-gram will attract students in so-called STEM subjects science,technology, engineering andmathematics to workwith itsairmen on developing solutionsfor the three challenges, and, ide-ally, consider enlisting.

The initiative which the AirForce will promote through digi-tal advertising, social media andpartnerships with groups like

Discovery Education is the lat-est recruiting effort created forthe Air Force by GSD&M, anagency based in Austin, Tex., thatis part of the Omnicom Group.

GSD&M has been the AirForces agency since 2001, devel-oping campaigns to help it attractthe over 28,000 recruits it needsannually; the agency said itswork had helped the Air Forcemeet its recruiting goals eachyear.

GSD&Ms recruiting strategyfor the Air Force which has al-ways sought tech-savvy candi-dates previously featured anAirman Challenge online videogame. A separate campaign in-cluded television spots whosetheme was, Its not science fic-

tion.Col. Marcus Johnson, chief of

the strategic marketing divisionof the Air Force Recruiting Serv-ice, said the Air Force focused ongoing after the best and bright-est young men and women, withan emphasis on the STEM sub-

jects. Whether theyre in highschool or college, those topics

translate into what we do in theAir Force.He said the collaboratory pro-

gram was meant to appeal tomen and women ages 16 to 24, in-cluding high school students stilldetermining their future plans.

Ryan Carroll, a creative direc-tor at GSD&M, said the Air Force

was very much like the Applesand Googles of the world in rec-ognizing the huge need for scien-

tists and engineers. They reachout to kids at an early age andshow them the amazing thingsthey can do with science andtechnology. He pointed to initia-tives like the Google Science Fair,an online, annual, global sciencecompetition for teenagers, as anexample.

Similarly, the collaboratoryprogram aimsto inspire thenext generation of scientists, en-gineers, technologists and math-ematicians, and to show them allthe amazing, science-relatedthings the Air Force does, Mr.Carroll said. The program willalso allow students to partici-pate and solve real problems theAir Force solves every day, headded.

Young people will be able tolearn more about the initiativeschallenges at the Web siteairforce.com/collaboratory,which will act as a forum. Chal-lenge participants will be able touse custom-built tools to shareideas and work with airmen andother experts to develop solu-tions.

Not surprisingly, digital mediawill primarily be used to promotethe program.Custom editorialcontent is being developed forthe STEM hub of Good.com, aglobal community of pragmaticidealists, while custom videosare being filmed for DNews, anonline video series from Discov-ery Communications; the videoswill feature the DNews hostsTrace Dominguez and AnthonyCarboni. The technology networkTechnorati is asking bloggers tocreate customposts on the col-laboratory and related subjects,while the Air Force will pay toplace videos on Web sites likeYouTube, Blip and Machinima. Inaddition, the Air Force will pro-mote the initiative on Facebookand Twitter.

Digital banner advertising will

run on the Web sites of ScientificAmerican, Popular Science andThe Verge. One set of ads depictsan Air Force helicopter ap-proaching a scene of destructionafter a 7.0-magnitude earthquakethat has trapped dozens of survi-vors. The copy reads, Your ideacould save them. The Air ForceCollaboratory. Search and rescue2.0 is now open. Start collaborat-ing.

The Air Force also is workingwith Discovery Education, a divi-sion of Discovery Communica-tions, on an outreach program forhigh school science and mathteachers.

Colonel Johnson said that al-though the collaboratory wouldrun through November, new

challenges could be created afterthat. In addition, he said the Website would carry no overt recruit-ing messages, nor wouldthe AirForce actively recruit challengeparticipants, since the initiativewas meant to raiseinterest in theAir Force and possibly encourageparticipants to seek out more in-formation about opportunities

there.The budget for the campaign is$3.7 million.

Diane H. Mazur, a former AirForce officer, professor emeritusof law at the University of Floridaand author of A More PerfectMilitary: How the ConstitutionCan Make Our Military Strong-er, said that although the collab-oratory concept was good, itsnot sophisticated to the degree itneeds to be to attract the peoplethey think they want to get. Sheadded, This is a good direction ifyou do it well.

David R. Segal,a professor ofsociology at the University ofMaryland who specializes in mili-tary sociology, said that while re-cruiting high school students towork in military laboratories on

military problems was not new,what seems new is having in-terns work online with Air Forcescientists.

I think they will certainly re-cruit a good number of highschool students interested in sci-ence, engineering, technologyand math to work on the prob-lems identified. That part iseasy, he said. Recruiting thesame people then to come intothe Air Force as enlisted men andwomen might be more difficult.They are likely to want to go tocollege.

As a result, he said, the collabo-ratory would probably be moresuccessful recruiting Air ForceReserve OfficersTraining Corpsstudents than airmen.

SENIOR AIRMAN MICHAEL CHARLES/U.S. AIR FORCE

Mathew Harrington, an Air Force senior airman, working on an oscilloscope at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

ADVERTISING

Air Force Asks Students to Solve Real-World Problems

An online platformthat promotes scienceand math.

By NOAM COHEN

FIRST came years of beinga foot messenger in NewYork City and working indata entry. Then, frustrat-

ed with his life, and feeling the re-sponsibility of providing for achild, Michael D. Hattem enteredthe Borough of Manhattan Com-munity College the only col-lege that would admit him, hesays, as a high school dropoutwith a G.E.D. He succeeded atcommunity college, and, in 2011,graduatedfrom City College.

Today, Mr. Hattem, 38, is agraduate student at Yale workingon a dissertation in American his-tory that explores the role ofcompeting historical memories of17th-century Britain in shapinglate colonial political culture.

He told his exceptional story tohelp explain why he came to the

defense of the American Histori-cal Association last week when itissued a statementcall ing on uni-versities to allow newly mintedPh.Ds to embargo their disser-tations for up to six years thatis, keep them from being circulat-ed online.

Though policies vary from uni-versity to university, the practiceincreasingly is to require that dis-sertations be filed electronicallyupon acceptanceand to providethem to anyone with access to auniversitys online collection.

The statement, which ap-peared to come out of the blue,caused more than a few double-takes. Dont historians want theirresearch to be immediatelyshared, stimulating argumentsand, ideally, new research that ei-ther refutes or reinforces those

arguments? And why wouldsomeone work years to produce adissertation and then insist that itnot be seen for as many as sixmore years? Academics almostby definition are delayed-gratifi-cation specialists, but still.

Ideally, I would want all of ourwork freely available, Mr. Hat-

tem said in a telephone interview,

but we have to deal with the waythings are.And the way things are, he

said, is that university pressesare known to be skeptical aboutagreeing to publish a book whenthe Ph.D dissertation it is basedon is readily available online.

If you want tenure at a univer-sity, you have to publish a book,he said. Its professional curren-cy.

This term, embargo socommon in how journalism dolesout information in the digital age perhaps is evidence that someacademics are learning from

journalists: readers simply haveless interest in old news, even oldnews about the British colonies.

The historical association,which is based in Washingtonand has 14,000 members, includ-ing high school teachers, govern-ment historians and universityprofessors, was inspired to act,officials said, because of simmer-ing concerns that institutionswere moving to require that stu-dents work be shared freely.

I have heard from juniorscholars, newly minted Ph.Ds, Ihave heard from my colleagueswho are mentors to these young-er scholars, from university pressacquisition editors, who say weare very happy you released thisstatement, said JacquelineJones, a history professor at theUniversity of Texas at Austin,who is the vice president of theprofessional division at the his-torical association.

Critics of the embargo arguethat knowledge should circulate

freely on the Internet. In thiscase, they say that if incentives inacademic hiringdiscourage suchsharing, then the American His-

torical Association should agitateto change those incentives, not

promote the idea of embargoes.The idea of locking up ideas

for six years is not right, saidHeather Joseph,the executive di-rector of the Scholarly Publishingand Academic Resources Coali-tion, which favors open research.The thing that bothered us themost is that it was a one-dimen-sional response to a multidimen-sional issue, and a missed oppor-tunity.

The association has tried toframe the issue as givingschol-ars a choice, while also notingthat it has pressed for greater in-clusion of digital-based scholar-ship. Questions and answers pub-lished in response to criticismtried to lower the stakes.

Is the A.H.A. recommendingthat students embargo their dis-sertations? was the first ques-tion, and No was the first an-swer, with the explainer, TheA.H.A. is recommending that uni-versities adopt flexible policiesthat will allow newly mintedPh.Ds to decide for themselveswhether or not to embargo theirdissertations.

Despite this clear explanationof motive and intention, a lot offogginess remains in the argu-ments fromal l sides, beginningwith the central question:Do uni-versity presses really care if adissertation is available whenthey are publishing a thoroughlyrevised work years later?

A recent survey of universitypresses found a sliding scale ofconcern among executives whowere asked about publishingwork derived from a dissertation

that was openly available. De-pending on how the findings areinterpreted, they could be worri-some only 10 percent respond-ed always welcome or re-assuring in that a large majoritysaid they were open to givingsuch work a chance to impress.

Peter M. Berkery Jr., the exec-utive directorof the Associationof American University Presses,said he spent a day quickly learn-ing about the issue, which hadnot been on his radar, and cameaway confused by the stir.

He said he spoke to 15 heads ofuniversity presses, and I ha-vent found one person who hassaid if it is available open access,we wont publish it. Citing hisown experience at Oxford Uni-versity Press, he said that a bookwas necessarily an entirely dif-

ferent work from the dissertationthat laid its groundwork, and is

judged on its own terms.Still, Professor Jones and oth-

ers say they know directly fromtheir students that there is pres-sure to keep material out of gen-eral distribution. As for the lead-ers of university presses, shesaid, They dont necessarilyknow what their acquisition edi-tors know.

Other arguments in defense ofthe graduate studentsput the au-gust Ph.D in a less than flatteringlight.

Professor Jones and others de-scribed the dissertation as littlemore than a rough draft on theway to becoming a monograph,on which the hopes of academictenure rest. When a new Ph.D de-cides to withhold her work, she isreally saying to her professionalcolleagues,do notjudge my re-search and analysis until I amready to publish in print.

Really, if my scholarly careerwas based on my dissertation Iprobably would be washing dish-es at Dennys, she said, addingthat, four years later it was agood book.

In a post Mr. Hattem said hewould publish on The Junto, agroup blog on early Americanhistory, he wrote that he expect-ed to wait at least two years be-fore sharing his own dissertation.

He said in an interview that heregretted that these were theterms he must live under as ascholar. But they were not new tohim.

It may look to us like a step

back, but they have neverstepped forward, he said. Westill do the degrees in the way wedid in the 1800s.

DOUGLAS HEALEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Michael D. Hattem, a doctoral student in history at Yale, backsan effort to let Ph.D.s keep dissertationsoffline for six years.

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Historians Seek a Delay

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