George Sylvie

Associate Director
Associate Professor
Multimedia Area Head

Contact Information:
CMA A5.1148
512-471-1783
g.sylvie@mail.utexas.edu

George Sylvie is an associate professor in The University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism.

Sylvie is an expert on technology, change, innovation, and decision-making in the newspaper industry. His work has been presented at various international conferences as well as the United States, where his latest research has focused on newspaper editors’ styles and decision-making values, in addition to newspaper online advertising markets. Sylvie recently was a visiting research fellow at the Media Management Transformation Centre at the International Business School at Jönköping University, where he extended his decision-making research to Scandinavia. His previous study, a national survey of mid-level U.S. editors, uncovered five style predictors: gender, experience, social values, journalistic values and organizational values, suggesting possible tools that newspapers can use in implementing newsroom change.

In addition, Sylvie is studying the viability of long-distance, online advertising for electronic newspapers. Since the late 1990s, he has co-authored several structural analyses of online newspaper markets, discovering that all online newspapers attract traffic from outside the print edition’s primary circulation area. He is currently examining U.S. daily newspaper online usage statistics to determine the feasibility of long-distance advertising.

Sylvie has co-authored a leading media management textbook, Media Management: A Casebook Approach, set for 2007 for its fourth edition in publication by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Erlbaum also published Sylvie’s 2002 work on the reluctant change of American newspapers in Time, Change, and the American Newspaper.

As co-author of various articles and book chapters, Sylvie has written, among other subjects, about:

• The New York Times/Jayson Blair incident and its impact on the management of that newsroom’s culture,

• factors that affect news and newspaper managers’ attempts to remain competitive,

• the role of technology in the African-American press,

• market influences on interdepartmental cooperation in daily newspapers,

• job satisfaction in U.S. newsrooms,

• editorial page diversity,

• technological impact on newspaper design, and

• technology impact on newsroom management.

Sylvie joined the University of Texas at Austin faculty in 1992, served as the journalism school’s associate director from 2001-2006, primarily monitoring undergraduate concerns. He also is the assistant director of UT's Dow Jones Center for Editing Excellence, sponsored by Dow Jones, and coordinates the UT ASNE High School Journalism Institute.

His reviews have appeared in numerous journals and he is on the editorial board of The Journal of Media Economics and The Journal of Media Business Studies. Sylvie holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Louisiana State University in Shreveport, and the University of Missouri in Columbia, respectively, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked as a journalist and editor in Louisiana for 10 years, and has won numerous awards for research, reporting, advising and public service.

Recent Courses: J320D Intermediate Reporting, J348S Media Management, J373D Advanced News Reporting.