The first week of publication each fall means, for me, getting back into the routine of doing a daily critique. The critique is my most important, day-to-day teaching tool. Every adviser does it a little differently, but for me it consists of a marked-up newspaper, a written sheet or two stapled on top, and then the same written material placed online so students can access it from anywhere. I try to view the paper and Web site as a typical reader, raising questions and comments the public might have. 

A thorough critique takes time – particularly when done over the course of a typically busy newsroom day. I try to make myself start early and be mostly done by noon, before the newsroom fills with students and everyone’s occupied with tomorrow’s paper instead of today’s. 

If the critique isn’t done and placed in the newsroom by early afternoon, students start asking about it. They read it religiously; I always tell them it’s one person’s take on that day’s product and that they shouldn’t put too much stock in it. But they do. Creative people – writers, photographers, designers – crave feedback on their work. I’ve realized over the years that the daily critique is often the only constructive feedback our students get.  

I’ve also realized that, once they graduate, it may be a long time before they get thorough feedback on their work. At small dailies and weeklies, only the best editors find time for regular critiques. The rest starve their staffers, who end up leaving because they aren’t growing. 

My process has become more complicated over the years, as more and more students have wanted feedback. Our Web site has lots of unique material, so I need to comment on a few items there each day. Our online radio station produces daily podcasts; those need attention, too. Most days, there just isn’t time to focus on everything. So I’ll direct most of the comments to the most prominent issue that day. Most often, I focus on good reporting and writing. Sometimes it’s grammar and style problems. Sometimes it’s photo composition, or good design. But I do try to include at least one daily comment on each major aspect of the paper: reporting, writing, editing, design, photo, online. The critique needs to relevant to every student every day. 

I’d be interested to see comments from other advisers / students / alumni about different forms critiques can take. What works for you?

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These are the last few days of quiet. A student media office is a creepy place when no students are around. The fun of this job is the energy level found in a newsroom full of motivated students. This week, though, I need the quiet as I plan for our newsroom training week.

We’ll pack a whole lot of information into next week – how-to sessions in all departments and, in particular, legal and ethical issues our students will need to understand. We’ve found that before classes start is the only time we have their undivided attention.

Here’s the hard lesson about training, though: Its ultimate success does not depend on my teaching skills, or those of Maria, our business adviser. We’ve taught the same material to different staffs over the years with widely varying results.

My teaching, enthusiasm and overall credibility as adviser all play some role with the whole staff. But what matters more is helping to shape the attitudes of the top editors. The staff takes its cues from them – not me – on just about every issue: the level of professionalism in their journalism and general office atmosphere … the spirit of fun that either pervades this place or doesn’t … the focus or lack of focus on tangible goals … and the amount of grumbling about low pay. 

Which is why we spend the first couple of training days with just the managers and editors. Sure, we go over newsroom basics. But it’s more about setting a tone. What we’re really doing is formally putting the Northern Star into their hands. The year’s success level rests with them. We can give them tools and support, but the ship is theirs.

Early in my career as an adviser, that was one of the toughest adjustments. I spent 10 years as a daily newspaper reporter and editor. Everything about those jobs was hands-on. The quality of each day’s paper depended a lot on me. Whereas, an adviser’s role is – to quote an old article by Ron Johnson – “train ’em and trust ’em.”

In that order. That’s why next week is so important.

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I’ve spent the past two days at the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star, specifically to soak up the culture change of a newsroom that has committed to putting all breaking news online first. What I soaked up was a completely new world.

For a few years as an adviser, I would spend a couple of weeks every summer in that newsroom, either as a reporter or a copy editor. My bosses at NIU were smart enough to see the value in this and allow me a couple of weeks away when the students weren’t around. It’s been several years now since I’ve done this – completely my fault and far too long, I quickly realized.

The newsroom looks the same and many of the same faces are there, but everything has changed.

One reporter and one copy editor start at 6 a.m., writing and filing short stories for the Web. These range from briefs, like a quick weather forecast and overnight police and fire reports, to full-blown scoops. This morning, for example, an acquaintance in Hong Kong e-mailed one of the editors an AP photo of a Rockford-area woman who was a contestant on Bob Barker’s final “The Price Is Right” show, taped yesterday. Before 7 a.m., the reporter, Sadie Gurman, had localized the AP story about Barker and it was online. By 8, she had spoken by cell phone to the local winner, still in Los Angeles, and had filed another update. Turns out that the woman was the show’s big winner, snagging two cars, a cruise and other stuff.

Online readers knew all of this a full 24 hours earlier than they would have just a couple years ago, when editors would have simply prepared the story for the next day’s paper and then sat on it, praying that competing TV and radio stations didn’t find out about it. The story would have made it onto the Web site, but only after the print edition hit the streets.  

No longer. “News Now” stories are posted online every few minutes and show up as a scrolling list at the top of the homepage, each with a time stamp. Where once the paper updated its site three or four times on a good day, today 40, 50, 60 daily updates are commonplace. The record stands at 71, I’m told.

Sure, there’s risk that electronic competitors will see these stories, pursue them and air them before the next day’s paper comes out. Too bad. The term I heard often was “repurpose,” as in repurposing the day’s online content for the next day’s newspaper. Not the other way around.

Project stories and non-breaking news often still get published simultaneously in print and online (after being promoted online). Sometimes longer versions of the online updates appear in print the next day. But everything is carefully integrated. User traffic to the day’s online updates stories helps determine story placement in both media.

Reporters have at their disposal several “mojo” – short for mobile journalist – backpacks. Each is stocked with a laptop computer equipped with a cellular phone card; a point-and-shoot digital camera that also can shoot digital; a digital audio recorder and a detachable microphone. Photographers are being trained to shoot and edit video; I spent a large chunk of this morning watching photographer/videographer Alan Leon edit a piece about a man with brain cancer.

It’s one thing to know and understand that these kinds of changes are occurring in journalism. It’s quite another to spend time in a newsroom where it’s happening. Compare it to the difference between studying a foreign language and spending time in the country where it’s spoken.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for advisers to regularly spend a day or two in an online-oriented newsroom. I once did this yearly exercise simply to keep my skills sharp. By the end of the two weeks I’d feel pretty confident that my reporting and editing skills weren’t wasting away. After the past two days, I realize I now have to do it or risk falling hopelessly behind the relevancy curve.

I plan to visit a couple of other, similar newsrooms this summer. It’s not so much about the reporting and editing. Those I can still do. And it’s not about trying to learn the latest video-editing software. That might only depress me. It’s about knowing the newsroom culture my students will step into once they graduate. Not just knowing about it. Knowing it. Only then can I help prepare them for it.

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Early summer is indeed a time for advisers to catch their breath, but there’s a big downside: Even though the students are gone, the news doesn’t stop.

Sometimes, daily journalism is like that old “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy and Ethel are working in a candy factory. The news rolls at you faster than you can keep up.

From early May to mid-June, there’s no one at all minding the conveyor belt, but the news keeps coming. I keep a pile of clippings from the local daily, of press releases, of national stories that would be great to localize … knowing that when the students get back, they’ll gobble up a few of those stories, but others will pass unnoticed.

When I was relatively new at advising, that was one of the toughest things to get used to: the fact that, even at a good student newspaper, a lot of great potential stories go untouched. In the summer, at least there’s a better excuse because few students are here. It happens during the fall and spring semesters, too, though, and it’s one of those frustrations for an adviser: You can (and should) point out potential stories, but you can’t (and shouldn’t) make the students do those stories.

So you have some options:

1. Point out every day how many good stories they are missing. This can work in small doses, but do it too much and it’s demoralizing for even your best students.

2. Stop worrying about it and just let them find stories on their own, resigning yourself to the fact that they will miss some big ones and it will reflect poorly on them. This one’s no good because you abdicate part of your role as teacher.

3. Continue to point out good potential stories every day. Make peace with the inevitable fact that you are not the editor and that many of your story ideas will never see print. Realize that your job is to model the role of a good journalist without actually doing that journalism. And then model journalistic thinking – where everything in life is a potential story idea. Even if they don’t catch it all now – and they won’t – what you want is for them to develop that mindset. And they will.

That helps take your focus off the conveyor belt.

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A big summer task here is assembling the annual Northern Star Alumni newsletter, which we call Telescope. We are blessed to count hundreds of people in our active and vigilant alumni group. Graduation years extend back to the late 1940s, back when the paper still was called “The Northern Illinois” (how’s that for pizzazz?).

And there aren’t many degrees of separation among our alumni. It’s a pretty tight family. Counting the two of us today (Business Adviser Maria Krull and myself), the Northern Star has had exactly four advisers in the past 46 years.

Keeping an open line of communication with your alumni takes time, but what an investment. Maria keeps track of the database and I manage the e-mail listserv, the Web site and an occasional blog. The e-mail list has proven especially helpful to us as advisers. We use it sparingly and only when truly needed – kind of like the Bat Signal, I guess. This past spring we posted information about the College Campus Press Act in Illinois. Many, many alums – some in high places in Chicago media – contacted their Illinois legislators to urge support for the bill. At other times, we’ve asked for and received advice about the future of the Star’s Web site, or input on a print redesign. When alums have won or been named finalists for Pulitzers, we’ve been able to get the word out quickly.

For the newsletter, we do a few news articles about the Star and its alumni and noteworthy happenings from the past year. Big attention is paid to our annual Hall of Fame induction. But by far, the most space is devoted to Alumni Updates – hundreds of blurbs people e-mail us about what they’re doing now.

Many of these alums endured free-press struggles here that helped pave the way for the freedoms our students enjoy today. At the annual Hall of Fame banquet, we strategically seat our current students with alums who used to have the same jobs here. Sometimes this has led to mentoring relationships, job connections … or even just a sympathetic ear when struggling with a particular newsroom issue.

So, my point in all of this is that an alumni group can be a huge support system for student media, and especially for advisers. It’s worth the time to establish and maintain.

We’ll have this year’s newsletter out in mid- to late June, I hope. At that point, I’ll link to it for anyone interested.

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Here’s installment No. 1 from me, in a blog about advising college media.

Summer’s here, at least in academia. In our world here, that means going, overnight, from 100 mph to about 10 mph. The students won’t be back for another month, and it’s eerily quiet in this newsroom. Time to clean house, literally. I rolled a big trash bin over to my office door yesterday and have been raising a dust cloud by pitching stuff. Piles of newspapers. Scraps of paper with irrelevant notes from last September. More piles of newspapers. Folders full of articles and instructional handouts that I saved and read, but now have little use.

I was born with a packrat gene. (Want proof? Here you go.) My offices, both at work and at home, are crammed with boxes of newspapers, sports and journalism memorabilia. Most of it is useless to anyone but me (and honestly, most of it is useless to me, too). “Someday when I die,” I tell my kids, “all of this will be yours.” No such promises here at the Star, so I perform my annual May ritual. This year I’m going even deeper into the dust. Some of the stuff I’m dumping, I haven’t touched in years. I tell myself, “I think I’ll be OK without these writers workshop notes from 1998.” As of this writing, the dishwasher-sized trash bin is two-thirds full. I’m going to need another one by later today.

Housecleaning is something I never had time to do when I was an editor and reporter, because there never was a down period. Every day of every year, you feed the monster. So the junk just piles up – both literally and figuratively. One of the best parts about college media, for advisers, is that there’s always a finish line in sight. Maybe life and a career are best tackled in bite-sized chunks, with seasonal opportunities to digest, reassess and look ahead. It certainly takes the stress level down. That’s something I remind myself during the more frustrating days of advising: That this is a pretty good life, and one that a lot of my friends in the newspaper biz would kill for. I’ll take vacation time in the coming days and weeks, work ahead on staff training plans for late summer, visit a few newsrooms in our area, and learn some multimedia skills I’ve needed to catch up on. For this week, though, it’s back to the dust cloud.

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