I just gave the students in my Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class their first quiz. Overall, not bad. But I have to report this piece of breaking news:
Only 1 out of 16 students said that it was UNethical to “download a photo from the Web server of a blogger, upload it to your server, using it on your site along with credit to the original creator.”
I’m dying to talk with them about this on Thursday to hear more about their rationale. Maybe it says something about how they see bloggers. Maybe it says something about the way they see ownership of content.
Fail fast, fail cheap. Isn’t that what they say? Well, today I did it. My first attempt to live blog a class discussion didn’t work out. But neither did my first attempt to … well, do just about anything…
This week is the first of a new semester in my Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class — a journalism class in which the students must work 30 hours with a community partner over the course of the semester. Our goal this semester — expose the students to all of the journalism models that Len Downie and Michael Schudson outline as potential replacements for a decline in public affairs reporting at newspapers.
This semester, the 18 students in the class will be divided among four partners:
OrangePolitics.org, a liberal blog about local politics run part-time by a single “citizen jouranlist”;
N.C. DataNet, a newsletter of from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Program on Public Life, edited by a former News & Observer reporter and opinion editor;
a public broadcast outlet here in North Carolina.
If any of these sources will be part of the reconstruction of American journalism, the students in the class will help determine how it’s reconstructed. At the very least, the students will be able to report back to the rest of us more details about what they find in these laboratories of post-newspaper news.
Stay tuned… and add your suggested reading for the class via the Delicious bookmark tag JOMC491-examples-s10.
Monday kicked off a new semester, and I started by challenging the students in my online news production class with this statement: News organizations should not have a Web site.
The statement picks up on a session I led at last summer’s N.C. Press Association’s Newspaper Academy. In a time of tight budgets, news organizations must be focused on delivering their core product, service or experience. Everything they do must be justified — including having a Web site. Unless a news organization can clearly state why they have an online presence, they should drop it.
The students’ responses focused on the Web as a platform for competing on breaking news and for reaching audiences — especially young people — where they are. My goal for the semester is to help them see that online journalism is a wonderful tool for telling more memorable and relevant news stories, and not just about 24/7 distribution.
With a new semester about to begin on Monday, I wanted to share some of the work done by some of the students in UNC-Chapel Hill’s JOMC 463: Newsdesk (PDF) class last semester. The assignment was this: Do an online profile of a person or organization using interactivity and multiple media. They were limited by producing the story in a somewhat wonky version of a Drupal-based CMS that I had set up for the class.
The bottom line is this: most of this student work was very good, and it’s important to show industry and other journalism students how we’re preparing the next generation to lead change in newsrooms. Students are young and therefore their work is not perfect, but it can be awfully good. Here are three examples, and the reason that each gives me hope for the future of journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
“What I see a lot of today is the realization of ideas that were being tried unsuccessfully in 1999,” Thornburg said. “A lot of the ideas we see as trends today were dismissed as flops 10 years ago.”
Among the trends to look for in information and news, Thornburg said, will be the rise of content targeted to a user’s location at a given moment, via ubiquitous high-speed Internet access. Other possibilities include new markets for buying and selling small pieces of information, and a divide between high-quality information that people pay for and free lower-end news – often focused on social and political points of view, entertainment or sports.
Public health issues often only make the news when some dramatic event provides a clear narrative that journalists can use to craft a compelling story. I was in the middle of one of those stories this week when the Miami-Dade County Health Department told guests at the downtown Epic Hotel not to use the water there because it was the suspected source of Legionnaires’ Disease. After more than a week of lost revenue, the hotel’s now been cleared as the source of the deadly bacteria — but not before the incident provided some good lessons about the roles of government, professional reporters and citizen journalists in public health stories that tend to be much more important over the long term than during an initial safety scare.
Alright, wise crowd. I need you to show me what you’re made of.
I’m writing for college students a book about online journalism. The book connects the traditional elements and values of journalism with new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences. It will start with a discussion of online news values and elements and the unique characteristics of the online news audience. Then it’ll take readers through the gamut of digital media skills and tools, and wrap up with a section that talks about how to make sensible use of the tools to create journalism that’s more engaging and relevant.
But… what should I call it? Please vote below and then leave any comments here.
Last week a reporter from Argentina’s Clarin asked me what I thought about the French government’s plan to spend $22.5 million over three years to give 18-24 year-olds a free, yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice. The biggest problem of many that I see with this plan is that it doesn’t address the true issue with news consumption among young people. Here’s what I’d do with $22.5 million to invest in the future of news — sponsor a grant competition for people 18-24 to conceptualize and create solutions to their peer’s lack of interest in current affairs.
Alejandro Alfie, a reporter at Argentina’s Clarin newspaper, had done his homework before he interviewed me there last week. Toward the end of a long interview during which I pontificated broadly about the future of news, he wondered what it might say about the future of online news if it is being espoused by someone who hadn’t updated his blog in about five months.
Chagrined, I told him I thought my disappearance provided a good anecdote about the potential future of news — many people will start blogs because it is easy to do. But few will provide the day-after-day reliable coverage that societies need to remain informed and that media businesses need to remain viable.
Perhaps professional journalists will be a bit like firefighters. Citizens may not pay much attention to them most of the time, but we’ll need to find a way to pay them just in case disaster strikes.
