New journalism heroes?
January 19, 2007 in Academics, hope for the future, industry news
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
I need some additional heroes. Add them in the comments. #
UPDATE: Stabe recommends these additions: #
how about josh wolf?
Good one, David. And as long as we're talking about the rough side of the trade, there's also Brad Will.
[...] 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. [...]
[...] 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.” [...]
I came up with 10 over at my place.
[...] (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.) [...]
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.