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New multimedia extended workshop launches in Louisville

August 5, 2010 in CICM shop talk, Conferences

CICM Story Project V3The CICM Story Project • Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1-6:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 28, 9 a.m.-9 p.m., continues intermittently until 6:30 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 31 (schedule allows regular convention participation)

College journalists and advisers looking for an intense hands-on multimedia training experience taught by some of the nation’s most pioneering pros will have a unique opportunity during the ACP/CMA National College Media Convention in Louisville this October.

The CICM Story Project, a special four-day extended workshop beginning Oct. 27, will take 60 participants and outfit them with audio, video and computer gear along with support from a team of expert coaches. Attendees will receive both classroom training and field experience as they produce and launch by workshop’s end the interactive site “Main Street Stories: 12 Blocks in 12 Hours.”

This immersive workshop will allow participants to learn practical multimedia skills they can take back to their newsrooms and into the professional workplace. More than just an academic exercise, this workshop will have participants producing content that can serve as real and lasting additions to their portfolios.

The workshop will feature a dozen instructors and coaches, including David Stephenson, winner of the 2010 Pictures of the Year International multimedia news story; Seth Gitner, nationally award-winning multimedia producer/editor with Roanoke.com, now at Syracuse University; Carissa Ray, MSNBC.com multimedia producer; Lee Clontz, former New York Times, CNN web developer; Carrie Pratt, multimedia producer for the St. Petersburg Times; Jim Hayes, former TNN/CMT network producer; Meg Fenton, former photojournalist/multimedia producer for the Chattanooga Times Free Press;  with additional new media experts/instructors. The final list of instructors is subject to change. Participants will work with instructors in a group setting, in small teams and one-on-one.

Workshop participants will actively learn multimedia story planning, audio and video content capture and editing, and other tools and tips for executing compelling online story packages. The workshop will begin with an intensive story development and production instruction session on Wednesday.

On Thursday, workshop participants will hit the streets in Louisville to cover character-driven stories on 12 specific blocks near the convention hotel. Content gathered by attendees will be produced and edited with assistance from the professional instructional staff throughout Friday and Saturday.

The workshop’s final product will be added to the national “Mapping Main Street” collaborative documentary media project, sponsored in part by Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR. The site created by workshop participants will be unveiled to all convention attendees during the Sunday morning general awards and keynote session.

The CICM Story Project workshop is an initiative of CMA’s Center for Innovation in College Media. Participants will work exclusively with the workshop Wednesday and most of Thursday, Oct. 27-28 and during special sessions Friday through Saturday, Oct. 29-31. The workshop schedule is designed to allow attendees the opportunity to also participate in most convention activities.

Workshop participation is limited to 60 individuals, with both students and advisers invited. There is a $129 pre-convention workshop fee required for enrollment. Participants will work in teams and be provided video cameras and accessories, audio recorders and access to Apple laptop computers with necessary software. Participants are encouraged to bring a personal digital still camera and are encouraged to bring other personal gear, though it’s not required.

This workshop will fill up quickly, so immediate registration is recommended. Registration will be available within a couple of weeks at the Associated Collegiate Press web site. If you want the best and most challenging ACP/CMA/CBI conference experience, you’ve found it.

Princeton Review’s “20 Best College Newspapers” is a joke (rant)

August 5, 2010 in College Media, College Media News

facepalmVia Dan at College Media Matters, we find the Princeton Review’s “Top 20 Best College Newspapers.”

Wow. What a list. Some names you probably recognize: Yale, Texas, North Carolina, Duke, Harvard, Maryland. The entire list is reproduced at CMM. (Dan has also added 15 other papers he believes should be on the list.)

Pretty impressive, eh? Unfortunately, the list is complete and utter bull.

How do I know? I mean, it’s the Princeton Review, right? It has “Princeton” in the name, so there must be something there. They must have some pretty impressive methodology to quantify what are the 20 “Best” college newspapers in a country with around 2,000 such newspapers, right? They must have had a huge matrix of quantitative and qualitative measures and operational definitions of “best” to come up with this list.

Sadly, no.

This is the methodology for naming the “top 20 college newspapers”:

The 62 ranking lists are based on surveys of 122,000 students (average 325 per campus) at the 373 schools in the book during the 2009-10 and/or previous two school years. The 80-question survey asked students about their school’s academics, administration, campus life, student body, and themselves.  The surveys were completed online at http://survey.review.com.

The question they asked students about the newspaper on their college campus: “How popular is the newspaper?”

How popular is the newspaper?!?!?!

Setting aside the obvious epic fail that is popular=best (c.f., Fox News), the survey question is flawed because it asks people about what other people think. Who cares? Really, is that verifiable?

Look, I may think the Daily Eastern News is very popular on Eastern’s campus. But if you were to ask me to prove it, I’d have to get some facts to back it up, maybe survey some students, maybe get some circulation/return figures, things like that. Did every student who responded to Princeton Review’s survey do that? That’s a rhetorical question.

As well, how on earth do you rank college newspapers based on the opinions of people who have no interaction with other college newspapers? I mean, do most University of Texas students read the Daily Collegian at Penn State?

How do you even rank anything in a survey without using an ordinal survey question?

The answer is: You don’t. Unless you’re peddling some kind of b.s. college ranking book for $22.99.

And this is NOT a knock on any of the papers on the list. I’m pretty sure they are high-quality journalistic outlets. But I haven’t done any research to find that out. And neither has the Princeton Review. That’s the point.

Look, I know people like lists. I get asked frequently to give a list of student news outlets who are doing innovative things online. I can never rank them. Why? Because the most innovative student online outlets all excel at different things. And who am I to quantify which ones are best? Obviously, I’m not the Princeton Review. Maybe I should just ask some random students off the street how popular the student news web site on their campus is and rank them that way.

I haven’t delved into the other rankings in the Princeton Review‘s survey, although the “Best College Radio Station question” is like unto the newspaper one: “How popular is the radio station?” But if those two are indicative of the kind of high quality survey methodology Princeton Review is basing their “Best” list on, I’m guessing the entire rest of the book is filled with fertilizer as well.

And, yes, I realize they’ve been publishing this since 1992.

Anyone who bases any decision on what college to attend based on this type of pseudo-scientific stuff should probably consider whether going to college is in their best interests to begin with.

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ICM looking for blog contributors

August 5, 2010 in industry news

compAs we gear up for the new school year, some housekeeping matters:

1. Later today or tomorrow, we will be releasing details about the intensive, hands-on multimedia workshop that will be taking place during the fall National College Media Convention in Louisville, Ky., Oct. 27-31. Stay tuned.

2. Every so often, I invite people interested in college media to post here on the site. In the past, we’ve had guest submissions by Brad Arendt from Boise State, Kiyoshi Martinez (still with the most popular post ever on the blog), and Madison McCord, among others, not to mention the work from our interns over the past three semesters.

So as a new semester begins, I’m putting out the hat again to ask for new contributors, new voices, some fresh perspectives to add to the conversation here on the blog. I’m sure some readers would like to read more than this grumpy old guy saying “Get off my hyperlinks!” all the time.

If you’re interested, e-mail me at scmurley -at- gmail.com.