Rewrite time

From the nature of convergence to the impact of the digital newsroom on professional journalistic identity. The emphasis of my research has shifted more substantially than I realised over the past year (mainly because I didn't look at my research questions for months on end but just kept on reading in the tiny cracks of time between teaching and marking).

When I looked yesterday at the research aims and objectives I wrote at the beginning of the year, they looked dull and shallow. So I've completely rewritten them to reflect my more recent reading and to focus on what for me is a far more interesting question than the nature of convergence - what it means as a journalist to be a professional and how that professionalism is being challenged now that readers can insult them in comment boxes and blog in a parallel universe.

Cue piles of books on sociology, ethnography and the workings of groups and organisations, all vast areas of scholarship, as I'm now starting to realise. I keep telling myself that I may not be a sociologist by training (or at all) but that journalism studies at Sheffield is in the Faculty of Social Sciences, which gives me what sociologists might call a "pseudo-legitimacy".

My next task after a week's holiday next week: to draft two chapters of 8,000 words each on the context of my research and a review of the literature. I've worked out that if I write 1,700 words a day I should be able to do it in two weeks. Just keep writing....

It's 5am - it must be research methods

A sabbatical is a huge luxury as I'm now realising. After six weeks back at work, I've managed to read a grand total of three journal articles and have temporarily almost forgotten what my research is about. Almost, not quite, because I reread my draft contextual chapter last week and could hardly believe I'd written it.

Every Friday I get up at 5am to catch a train to Sheffield to atttend a Research Methods seminar. All very useful stuff but I'm so tired by the time I get there from London that I can hardly make my brain connect. My fellow PhD students are all full time and have the luxury of sitting in the library all day.

But. I have a full time job as an academic and they don't. Getting an academic job is the reason why most people do PhDs. I've just done things the other way round and I don't have to get a PhD to keep my job. I'm doing research because I want to, as I have to keep reminding myself. Will this be enough incentive to carry me through the next six years? It's going to have to be.

A good start....

A good start - my supervisor was pleased with my draft contextual chapter. This didn't mean she didn't have questions and comments about what I'd written. It would have been worrying (if flattering) if she'd told me everything was marvellous. Now I've got to get on with the next phase - formulating my main research questions. I did this at the very beginning, when I applied to Sheffield in the first place and submitted a research proposal. But as I formulated a series of questions off the top of my head in an hour between teaching first year Approaches to Journalism and second year Online Journalism, it's fair to say the questions need work. Just maybe not today. No pressure...