Paul Conley wrote something the other day that spurred this post, a late addition to the Carnival of Journalism (April edition).

Conley notes an Editor & Publisher article about newly displaced print editors looking for work as journalism instructors. Conley is succinct, as usual, in his assessment:

it’s not in the interest of journalism students for schools to hire people who either can’t or won’t adjust to the changes in media. Heck, journalism schools are already filled with people who don’t understand modern journalism. And there’s little doubt that those teachers have been producing graduates who are ill-prepared for the workforce.

Over the past 7 years as an adviser and instructor, I’ve watched the tide slowly shifting as professors and college media advisers have faced the challenges that impact their industry. Anecdotes are all I can offer, but I’ve seen some journalism professors who’ve been around for more than 20 years who face the future with a keen interest, and others who are still mired in the past. Ditto with advisers.

My sense of things now is that even if someone is entirely dismissive of new media (online media, multimedia, whatever you want to call it), they are not as prone to display their contempt as they were, say, three years ago.

I would add to Paul’s comments by saying that people leaving the industry shouldn’t look to academia as a place to hide. Right now, academic journalism is pushing forward to keep pace with the industry, even as the industry’s pace of change ramps up further. In our department, we’re trying to figure out ways to get students engaged with online/multimedia tools early in the sequence so that they are skilled when they leave. If a retiring editor doesn’t like using blogs in the workplace, I can’t imagine they’ll like using blogs for class assignments (which I see more and more of, btw).

For most of the past five years, I’ve followed the academic journalism job market pretty closely, partly out of my own employment concerns, and partly because I ran the job board for College Media Advisers, Inc. The trends during that time showed a lot more desire for people who could understand, teach, or research in the area of multimedia or convergence. There were lots of positions open for Public Relations/Advertising, a good number of broadcast TV/radio positions, and multimedia positions. Print positions were not as well-represented, and the competition in those areas is already fierce.

In the advising sphere, it’s not much better.

College media outlets are scrambling to replace declining ad revenues just like their “professional” media counterparts. They have the challenge of training students for the skills they’ll need in the future while maintaining their traditional media imprints - no small feat with a mostly volunteer staff.

And a final word of caution for an editor hoping to make the jump from industry to academia (especially in an advising role), there’s an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. In most student media settings, advising is mostly a post hoc enterprise. The adviser doesn’t “tell” the students what to put in the paper, how to write the stories, where to go for coverage - unless the adviser is asked.

That could be a heavy transition for a newspaper editor to make.

With all of that said, I’m keen to see the day when some of the multimedia whiz kids return to colleges to do some advising, teaching and research. But I suspect that won’t be for a while. The industry needs that young blood and is willing to pay more for those skilled practitioners right now.

Last week, I submitted an itemized list for the multimedia storytelling class at Eastern Illinois University (see here for syllabus and here for FAQ). Below the fold, I’m pasting the list I sent to my department head. Each “kit” costs about $400, and we plan to have one kit per student by the time the class is up and running.

The biggest issue with coming up with the kits was the video camera. There were only two entry-level video cameras that has a mic input, and none with a headphone input as well. As this is a beginning class, it was hard to justify the additional hundreds of dollars that would be necessary to get gear with both mic and headphone inputs.

These kits would also be useful for a campus media outlet that wants to get into multimedia in an inexpensive manner.

So here’s the list. Feel free to add comments below.

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Several questions arose in the comments to the post I wrote yesterday about the multimedia course syllabus. To answer some of those questions, I’m creating a FAQ (although they aren’t really “frequently asked” questions at this point). Hopefully, this additional information will be useful to you. If anyone has further questions, I’ll answer them as I can. Check below the fold.

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UPDATE: Check out the FAQ about the syllabus

UPDATE 2: Here’s the proposed mojo kit for the class.

Yesterday, I mentioned that Eastern Illinois University has approved a multimedia journalism class as a requirement for journalism majors beginning in Fall 2008. Below the fold, I’m posting the tentative course outline and some syllabus information for anyone who might want to take a look. Keep in mind that this is an introductory class. The goal is to give every student a rudimentary knowledge of different ways to tell stories with multimedia. From there, if they want to learn more, there are advanced classes.

Students in the class are required to pay a lab fee, which will help with the purchase of necessary equipment. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

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UPDATE: Here’s the course outline/syllabus for the course.

Earlier this semester, the faculty of Eastern Illinois University’s journalism department (one of only 109 accredited programs in the country) took the ambitious step of mandating a multimedia storytelling course for all students in the journalism program.

Here’s my answer to Megan and Mindy and Pat Thornton and anyone else who keeps banging their heads against the walls of academia: Every journalism student should be required to take a course in multimedia storytelling.

I say this is an ambitious step, because most of the big journalism programs don’t require multimedia reporting classes for students. I know this because Bob Bergland studied the 109 ACEJMC-accredited programs for converged courses, and found that fewer than half had a required course in multimedia/convergence journalism (click here for the paper).

The course has been approved by the college of arts and humanities and now by the university. In the fall of 2008, every beginning journalism student at Eastern will have some exposure to audio, video, and web storytelling. I hope to get clearance in the next couple of days to tell you how we’re hoping to structure the classes. And I’ll be talking in the coming days about equipment, I’m sure.

The point is, this isn’t something that Eastern is unique in doing. We shouldn’t be. Everyone should be doing this. It’s not like Columbia or Missouri or Texas or whoever has a monopoly on the Internet. It’s yours to grab as well. Do it now, while you have the chance.

This Friday, I spent most of the day with faculty and students at Simpson College in Iowa, as a visiting outside consultant. Simpson’s Communication department is looking at ways to revamp their curriculum for the future. While there, I got to meet with the editors of The Simpsonian, the nation’s oldest continuously published student newspaper, and talk about college media in general and how they can better use their web presence.

Thanks to Brian Steffen for the invitation and the hospitality.

After a week of moving and new faculty orientation, I’m finally in my office for more than 10 minutes, so I’m posting a PDF of the paper I presented last weekend at AEJMC: “Shifting Mindsets: College Media Adjusts to New Challenges.” This is the paper that was mentioned in the InsideHigherEd article.

I’d appreciate any feedback. And thanks to all the advisers who participated in the survey. I hope to have more information from the survey, and repeat it again this spring.

shifting-mindsets-murley.pdf (200K PDF)

Melissa Worden points out the deadline for the 2007 Online News Association awards: June 30, 2007. Here are complete details.

There’s one category that should interest college media types:

 Student journalism: This category honors excellence in digital journalism by a student or team reporting on a single story or issue. The work must have appeared originally in a student- or school-based Web site and have been created by full-time student(s) (at the time of publication). Unpublished entries do not qualify.

Cost of entry is $50-$100, depending on how many visitors your site gets each month. I’d love to see a college media outlet win this award, as opposed to the class-produced projects that usually crop up in this type of contest. Nothing against those folks, but producing multimedia on deadline for a student-directed publication is vastly different from coming up with one whiz-bang project with the help of professors during an entire semester.

Bob Stepno, who has been way ahead of the curve in a lot of areas of online journalism, is leaving the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to take a position at Radford. Too bad UT-K couldn’t pony up the tenure-track position to keep him there. Knoxville’s loss is Radford’s blessing.

Update (4-18-07, 9 p.m.): Another example is in this AP video of the newly released “multimedia manifesto” by the VT killer, which features a 15-second Microsoft ad. Sorry, MS - now is not the time, this is not the video for pre-roll ads.

Yahoo! News has video from the Virginia Tech shootings, including this video of a cell phone capturing audio of gun shots being fired. But you know what you have to get through to get to the video? @$#%@ 30 seconds of an M&Ms video! This is the problem with pre-roll commercials - they are inappropriate at the beginning of some stories - including any stories involving the deaths of human beings. This isn’t the only pre-roll I’ve had to sit through today that irked me.

I understand that Internet video costs money, and advertising pays the bills, but there are times when advertising should be kept out of the equation. This is one of those times.