UPDATE: Be sure and check out Mindy McAdams’ additions to the list.
Martin Stabe asks for journalism schools to give journalism students new heroes to replace the old standbys of Woodward and Bernstein.
Unfortunately, I think those new heroes will only come with hindsight. The digital change in journalism is still taking shape. And I think there are a lot of these heroes who are just now doing their best work.
But for a start, I’ll offer a few names that you should drop into your curriculum along with the “giants” of the profession:
- Rob Curley
- Adrian Holovaty
- Richard Hernandez
- Joe Weiss
- Rebecca MacKinnon
- Jim Brady
- Seth Gitner
- Steve Yelvington
- Kevin Sites
- Salam Pax
Right now, it seems to be overwhelmingly male and white (I’m avoiding naming academics, or there are several females I’d list as personal new media heroes).
I need some additional heroes. Add them in the comments.
UPDATE: Stabe recommends these additions:
on Jan 17th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
how about josh wolf?
on Jan 17th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Good one, David. And as long as we’re talking about the rough side of the trade, there’s also Brad Will.
on Jan 17th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
[…] Bryan Murley (who writes this blog) encourages me to keep looking out for new heroes. In this post, he suggests some. I only really recognised Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, as I have read his rather rubbish book. The content is brilliant, but really, the best thing about blogs is their immediacy. Putting them in print just defeats the point. […]
on Jan 18th, 2007 at 1:24 am
[…] I’ll second Bryan’s list as the first part of a response, but the bit in Lee’s post that made me raise my eyebrows and grin was this, about his experience in an online journalism class: “Knowing HTML in principle is useful - but being taught to use Dreamweaver is an utterly useless skill. We’ll only end up being re-trained in a year or two. Teach us the qualities that make a good online journalist - not how to use a piece of software that will be replaced next year.” […]
on Jan 18th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
I came up with 10 over at my place.
on Jan 23rd, 2007 at 6:44 am
[…] (In any event, for helping to spread CAR techniques — and showing genuine political successes with it — Mulvad and his new business partner in Denmark, Tommy Kaas, should go on that growing list of new role models for journalism students.) […]
on Feb 13th, 2007 at 7:20 am
A useful list I’ll be showing my students - agree with some (Holvaty’s work with databases; Hernandez’ and Gitnes’ work with multimedia; Salam Pax’s blog providing an Iraqi perspective on the war; Kevin Sites’ groundbreaking work as an independent online journalist), but for others it would be good to have more extensive explanation of why they’re included.