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A college media Thanksgiving (reprint)

November 25, 2010 in blogging, hope for the future

Ed. Note: I wrote this last Thanksgiving week, and it pretty much sums up my attitude again this Thanksgiving. Hoping you and yours have a good holiday. (edited slightly to reflect time differences).

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For our U.S. readers, this is the week of Thanksgiving, when schools call a recess from the frantic pace of the semester to allow everyone to meet with their families and friends and overdose on various foodstuffs and enjoy watching games of skill and chance involving an oblong leather ball. There’s also some shopping involved.

But the principle meaning for the holiday is to stop from the bustle of life to reflect and give thanks or express gratitude for the blessings of the present day.

Given that charge, I’ve put down a list below of some of the things I’m thankful for about college media this holiday season. Feel free to add your own in the comments below. Happy Thanksgiving.

I’m thankful …

… for the Internet, and the challenges and opportunities it has brought to college media and the news media in general. Without it, we’d know a lot less than we do now – for good and for bad.

… for college media outlets that continue to produce journalists who provide some accountability to the powers that be on college campuses across the country.

… for Organizations that help protect the First Amendment rights of student journalists in high schools and colleges.

… for Organizations that protect college advisers from undue and unwarranted threats from administrators who don’t want to see the student media do its job.

…for Organizations (like ACP/NSPA and JEA) that help provide training and recognition for student journalists beyond what can be given on many campuses.

… for Journalism departments that work closely with student media outlets and support a truly student-run college media experience (especially my own department at Eastern Illinois).

… that there have been no massive layoffs (that I know of) at any college media outlet in the U.S.

… for college journalists who are shifting to a web-first mind-set in publishing news, trying new ideas and overcoming old print/broadcast/web silos.

… for college media outlets that are continuing to find piecemeal solutions to the business model conundrum.

… that part of my academic career is watching college media change before my eyes, and seeing the successful collegiate online journalists of today move forward and succeed in their careers.

… that I can be a blogger AND a journalist, and for five years (as of November, 2010) of blogging about college media and the online world.

… for Chris Carroll and Ralph Braseth, who have been integral to this effort (the CICM and the ICM weblog) from day one.

… for the many colleagues (advisers and professors) who have listened, challenged my assumptions and offered ideas and inspiration as we’ve had this conversation about the future of college journalism.

Every so often I tend to get a little bit pessimistic about The Future of Journalism, possibly because we (collectively: academics, journalists and business folk) tend to circle the same topics every 6-12 months like dogs eating our own vomit. But it’s helpful to take a step back and see how far we’ve come.

We’ve come a long way from where we were five years ago (YouTube was a new service at that time. Nobody had heard of Twitter because it didn’t exist). We’re not where we are going yet, but we’re farther along the track, and we’ll get to The Future mostly intact, I believe.

I’m reminded of a quote from Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy):

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

That’s the list as it stands now. What are you thankful for?

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Happy birthday to us!

November 12, 2010 in blogging, CICM shop talk

cake

As best I can tell, today marks the official 5th anniversary of the founding of this weblog. Yes, here is the first post.

It’s been a busy five years. Approximately 1,800 posts (about 1 per day, including 1,600 by yours truly), several workshops, numerous consultations and conferences, two contests, three interns and over 200,000 visitors. The staff here at ICM would like to thank those who have contributed, those who have stopped by and commented, and those who quietly read along.

On a personal note, there have been numerous people I could and should thank for the assistance and support over the past five years. Foremost among them are Chris Carroll and Ralph Braseth, who set this blog in motion in late 2005 with an e-mail asking me to set up a web site for them. “I’ll set up the site, but you have to provide the content.”

You can see how well that worked.

I would also like to recognize the support from my colleagues in the journalism department at Eastern Illinois University, who see the value in my research interests in this area and encourage me to continue.

As for the future, we’ve just begun. Thanks to College Media Advisers, Inc., we’ve got some exciting workshops planned for the future, and I’m still plugging away trying to keep up with the tsunami of changes in the news industry.

Stay tuned.

(photo courtesy flickr user Rob J Brooks under Creative Commons license)

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Get off my lawn: the tired, tired refrain that we’re teaching too much tech in journalism schools

November 10, 2010 in Academics, blogging, Tech Talk

Editor’s Note: This piece has been sitting in my “draft” folder since mid-September, which means it’s ancient in blog years. But since the topic is bound to come up again sometime soon (see the rule of online journalism discussion below), I’m posting it for posterity.


crankyclint

After five years of blogging about college media, I have formulated the following rule of online journalism discussion:

If you follow the “journorati,” i.e., the navel-gazing portion of the journalism industry that spends an inordinate amount of time talking about journalism, you will eventually hear the same arguments repeated, usually in 12-18 month cycles.

Which brings me to to the latest in a long-running, seemingly endless series of pearl-clutching, couch-fainting, concern-trolling articles about how journalism students are learning too much technology and not enough fundamentals.

This scene of the badly-scripted remake of “Groundhog Day” comes from Tony Rogers, a journalism instructor and journalism “Guide” at About.com (found via Dan Reimold). Rogers believes there is too much technology in journalism schools. The title of his article posted in September: Is There Too Much Tech Training at the Nation’s Journalism Schools?

NO.

This concludes another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

For a more detailed response, follow me below the fold.

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Vote early or vote on time, but vote

October 26, 2010 in blogging

votedThis is your public service announcement for the week. Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, is an election day around the United States. In Illinois, early voting ends today. If your state has early voting, I’d encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity to cast your vote without having to stand in line on Tuesday.

If you can’t vote early at this point, make a point of doing so on Tuesday. It’s your civic duty.

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Sex on Campus: Nightline episode

October 20, 2010 in blogging, College Media

reimold

Congrats to Dan Reimold, College Media Matters blogger, for an appearance on ABC’s Nightline this week. You can view the episode (sadly, they don’t allow embedding) here.

Maybe I’m just cranky, or I’m just burned out on the breathless reporting that exemplifies so much of “investigative journalism” on TV, but the story itself seemed to be the result of a lot of nostalgia for a past that never existed.

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Three things I challenge j-profs to do along with their students

July 16, 2010 in Academics, blogging, College Media, Student voices

Office the The Hoya student newspaper on the f...
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Brian Manzullo, late of the Central Michigan University Central Michigan Life student newspaper, has written a thought-provoking blog post with the enticing title: Three things I dare journalism students to do before they graduate. Hey, it’s a dare, right? So I’m going to piggy-back on Brian’s post and propose that j-profs engage in these activities as well. This post is specifically *not* geared toward administrative staff or students involved in campus media on the student services side of the spectrum, although the thoughts could be adapted to serve those readers as well.

1. Propose major curriculum adjustments to your journalism school – and get support:

Some of my own thoughts: I’m sick of seeing online media as an option, or a track, in the journalism degree. Online media should be a requirement. Media law should still be a class, but it also should be taught to various degrees in other classes. Social media should be taught, but as a universal topic (because who knows what we’ll be using 3-4 years down the road). Experience at a student newspaper or internship should count as credit.

I’m happy to say that Eastern Illinois University‘s journalism department overhauled part of its curriculum two years ago to require all journalism students have a basic class in multimedia reporting. I agree with Brian’s sentiments there. In fact, I’d say any journalism school that isn’t requiring a course in multimedia reporting at this stage of the game is doing a disservice to its students.

If your journalism department doesn’t require a course in multimedia reporting (at least hyperlinking, blogging, audio and video-based reporting), you need to be pushing for that requirement.

Unfortunately, academic bureaucracy moves slowly, so it may take a couple of years for the course and curriculum to be approved. But every delay puts you that much more behind the curve.

Brian’s second point hints at integration of skills into other classes. This is more problematic, as there are several hurdles that must be overcome. First, many classes are already packed with material. When I taught beginning newswriting, we never finished covering all the topics that were covered in the textbook. Adding multimedia/social media skills to that mix will be a challenge. Also, professors may not feel comfortable with the software/terminology or what constitutes “good” work in these areas.

At Eastern, we have a campus technology center that provides tutorial classes for students across campus on some basic computer programs. If you’re tasked with trying to integrate “new” media into your class, you might check and see if your campus provides similar opportunities. This fall, I’m requiring my multimedia students to attend a tutorial class on basic Final Cut Express skills, for instance.

For a basic writing class, instructors could – at the very minimum – require students to submit a certain number of hyperlinks to related content with all of their stories.

Other ways to integrate new media into another class can be as elementary as creating a class wiki, or requiring students to write blog posts, or following certain politicians or celebrities on Twitter and study the ways these individuals use the platform.

2. Form a news startup online and compete with the student newspaper:

This is a bit more tricky for some professors who also serve as advisers to student newspapers (like several of our faculty at Eastern). When do you stop encouraging students to innovate and explore new avenues of coverage and start cannibalizing your other media outlets?

Joe Gisondi, a colleague at Eastern, had an interesting twist on this last year in his sports reporting class. Rather than compete with the Daily Eastern News by having his students do stories about Eastern athletics, he set up a site specifically for the local high school. The students got to experience online sports coverage in a way that didn’t directly compete with the campus sports writing staff.

Obviously, on a larger campus, with more j-students, an online site that competes with the campus media outlets might be much less of a conundrum. Either way, engaging students to think like entrepreneurs is a good thing. And crossing the professor/student divide to collaborate on such a project can have myriad intellectual benefits for all parties involved.

3. Form a network of students that meets regularly to discuss readings and projects:

It’s simple: Get a group of awesome young journalists together (and maybe a professor or two, if you’re so inclined) and think of a good time during the week where everyone can spend one to two hours in a room together.

I would amend Brian’s proposal a bit and suggest that you form a network of forward-thinking journalists (professors and students) to meet regularly and discuss readings and projects.

I have benefited tremendously from my interactions with the CoPress gang, for instance (at one point they were meeting weekly on Sundays). And at times, I’d like to hope that I’ve challenged their thinking enough that they considered some things that you might not see from a student’s perspective.

This could be a problem if students use the time to complain about professor so-and-so’s lecture style, or a class project deadline.

But if the focus is really on improving the educational environment, and growing through the inclusion of different, challenging ideas, then I think both professors and students could benefit from a group like Brian suggests. Brian also has some great suggestions for different activities that could be included in such a group.

We’re all in this together

At times, I get disheartened when I see blog posts like the one I’m responding to, because I get a sense that students think journalism professors are all about hindering the progress that could be made if only the students could shake things up. There is – undoubtedly – some of that. But I’ve experienced the opposite effect at times as well – students who are too set in their print/tv/radio ways to really embrace the myriad ways the Internet can improve journalism.

It’s not an either/or proposition. I know many journalism professors who are earnestly working to better j-education, just as are many students. And I tend to think we’d get farther if we could work at this together to break through whatever barriers exist in the minds of other j-profs, j-students, or j-pros.

Are there other things j-students and j-profs might be doing beyond those listed above? Please feel free to comment.

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8 summer tasks can help start the new year fresh

June 10, 2010 in blogging

summer.jpgWhile most people think college professors and student media advisers(and k-12 teachers) spend the summer lolly-gagging around doing nothing, that’s not usually the case. After a school year spent in the trenches of teaching, grading, advising, attending committee meetings, presenting workshops, attending conferences, and doing all sorts of other things, summer is a time to catch up on some of the niggling affairs of professional life that get put off during the school year.

So here’s a list of some things that you can do over the summer to prepare for the new year. Some of these are directly related to “work,” but others are meant to provide a little extra inspiration for the new year. This is really more my own list of resolutions, but it might be useful for others as well, so take it for what it’s worth to you.

  1. Clean out your e-mail inbox: A couple of weeks ago, I had over 7,000 unread messages in my in-box. Most of those were from e-mail lists that I had subscribed to, but never read (lots of washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com e-mail editions, for instance). But there were a few of those “I’ll respond to that in a few days”-type e-mails that slipped off the first screen of my browser before I responded. This week, I’ve whittled down over 2,000 unread e-mails, and I’ll be slowly working through the backlog all summer.
    Some people have declared “e-mail bankruptcy” by just starting over, saying “if you’ve sent me an important e-mail, please send it again.” Obviously, we can’t all do that. But cleaning out the unread items can lead to a fresh start. I’m also making a habit to either read or delete everything that comes into my inbox as soon as I see it. I wish I could get into that habit with my snail mail.
  2. Unsubscribe to junk e-mails: Related to the first suggestion, this is a big one. I don’t know about you, but I’ve conducted quite a bit of business via the Internet (booking airline tickets via Orbitz, for example), and somehow, every time I do this, I get signed up for a company’s e-mail list (even if I check the “no, I don’t want to receive special offers” button.
    So this week, I’ve been using the “Unsubscribe” option on all of these junk e-mails that I never read. As I’ve done so, I’ve searched my inbox and deleted all the previous e-mails. Not only does it remove clutter, but it insures the clutter will not return. Likewise, in the past, I’ve subscribed to various tech-related e-newsletters that never get read. I’m cutting some of these off as well. ZDNet is a notorious offender, sending way too many tech updates every day.
  3. Catch up on your RSS reading: This semester, I found a lot of interesting articles via people I follow on Twitter. But Twitter is a real-time social network, and I’m not on Twitter all the time. So a great deal of good material slipped through the cracks of my attention span. This summer, I’m devoting some time to clearing out my news feeds with the goal of getting down to a fresh start by the beginning of fall semester.
    If you don’t have an RSS reader with some good news feeds, now might be the time to get one. I’m also pruning out blogs that haven’t been updated since the last time I checked my reader, and trying to find some new voices to add to the stream.
  4. Read a few books that have nothing to do with your field: This summer, I finally started reading Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, about the early Puritans who settled Massachusetts, for instance. This doesn’t have to be fiction. It could be non-fiction, as well. A few years ago, I read The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (1865-1929), and the paperback has numerous dog-eared pages that have inspired some of my thinking about what it means to innovate. The point being: don’t just confine your imagination to your field.
  5. Clean off your desk: If you could see my desk, you’d understand this one. Over the semester, a variety of books, papers, committee reports, assignments, etc. winds up stacked high on various corners of my desk. It has ever been thus, unfortunately. At the end of the semester, I file the books away and sort through the papers, chucking a great deal of stuff into the recycle bin. This is obviously not the most organized way to do this. But come fall, I will have a fresh desk to work with. Maybe next year …
  6. Rethink your courses/Rethink your advising system: This summer I am totally rethinking a couple of courses that I’ll be teaching in the fall, based in part on experiences in past semesters, and also based upon changing technology and cultural implications. I realize this is work, but it’s the kind of work that hopefully will bring a fresh excitement for the next school year. I actually do this every year, even with a course that I’ve taught multiple times. Such is the changing nature of the media business.
  7. Spend some time outdoors: I tend to be an indoors-type person, especially during the school year. Now that the days are longer, I’ve started walking a little more in the evenings, and spending time outside. They say a certain amount of sunlight is good for you, as is the fresh air. It can’t hurt.
  8. Learn something new: I’ve known several web workers (Greg Linch comes to mind) who have made it a point to try to learn a new skill or topic over their summer break. This summer, there are a number of topics I’ll be refreshing my mind on (like Final Cut Express), and some that I’ll be learning for the first time (like HTML 5). I may not get through everything on the list, but at least I’ll get started. Don’t feel like you have to learn everything at once. Start with one thing, even if it’s a small thing like Twitter (yes, there are still people who aren’t on Twitter).

So there you have it. Eight things you can do this summer that will likely make your return at the beginning of the new school year a new adventure.

I sometimes tell my students that the beauty of the academic world is that you go to class for 15 weeks, struggle through the material, and then it’s over. You get a fresh slate next semester. The “real” world doesn’t work that way.

Any other suggestions for summer projects? Leave a comment.

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Blogging specific links

March 8, 2010 in blogging

links

Here are a few links to some “meta” discussion specifically about blogging – blogs about blogs – that I’ve come across recently. And all were recommended by one blogger.

They contain some excellent advice and tips if you are interested in the topic, or looking for ways to improve your own blogging skills.

Remarkablogger

Blog for Profit

Chris Garrett on New Media

Via John Haydon

Also, Problogger.net

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7 links: Interns, paywalls, cleverness, failure, Flash, press conferences and internships

January 21, 2010 in blogging, Links

linksHousekeeping: I’m in the midst of heavy revision of my dissertation draft, so posting will likely be light over the next few weeks unless something big breaks.

Reminder: Feb. 1 is the deadline for applications for the Spring 2010 CICM internship. $500 stipend. Work from anywhere. Write about the future of college media.

Via Doug Fisher, journalists and PR experts scrum over how to handle a press conference about new USC football coach Lane Kiffen when he left U. of Tennessee after one year. I especially like the point where the PR guy says, “just remember, you’re in our building.” The University of Tennessee is a public institution.

Updating Flash Journalism (Part 2) – Mindy McAdams details some of the steps a journalist should take if she wants to learn Flash CS4, since Mindy isn’t going to be updating the excellent Flash Journalism. Worth a read. And here’s a link to Part 1.

The Right to Link – Jeff Jarvis takes down Rupert Murdoch’s silly campaign to exsanguinate the Internet by disallowing links to News Corp. web sites.

Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link). The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.

It is always baffling to me how journalists want to wrap themselves in the mantle of a free press when it benefits them financially, but refuse to practice the sort of openness they preach about for elected officials. You can read more at right2link.org.

Mark Johnson: Failing faster – Daniel Bachhuber sums up a talk given at ICANN about experimentation and innovation. This summary should be familiar to readers of this blog:

There’s a difference between innovating and creating. Innovating is trying new things. Instead of covering the council meeting and writing about it, bring an audio recorder, a couple of microphones, and try to tell the whole story without using your own voice. That’s innovating. Creating, however, is about developing a routine that makes you prepared to produce. Technique isn’t creativity. The people who know all of the ins and outs of Photoshop, but can only produce within the scope of the assignment aren’t creative enough.

Too often in the day-to-day grind of producing a newspaper, the routine becomes preparation to produce what you’ve produced in the past. Even if what you’ve produced is “new” media. The challenge is to incorporate fresh ways to tell stories into your routine.

Notes on the Cleverness Economy – Ryan Sholin uses the humorous aspects of Twitter to make a point about the news business today. And it’s a really good point:

“Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers.

But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. For example, I’ve gone back to this New York Times piece on the 2008 Democratic primaries more than a few times over the last year, sometimes for political reference, and sometimes just to demonstrate the sort of displays of information that interest me these days.

Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours.

I’d say the same applies to bloggers, educators, students, etc. Writing a quick hit blog post is relatively easy to do (I’m doing it now!), but there should be content that explores the boundaries and implications of what’s going on in your area of expertise as well.

What we won’t learn from the New York Times’ paywall – Steve Yelvington is one of many who have or will be commenting about the new effort by the Times to get blood out of the Internet turnip (see here for links to other discussion). Yelvington is usually pretty lucid and informative, so his take is worth a look. While it’s nice to discuss the effort of the “paper of record,” the implications for smaller newspapers are less than you’d know if you just read journoblogs all day.

From an unpaid intern: Are unpaid internships a necessary evil? – Chris Dunn posits the question based on a discussion over the fall break about the issue.

My take: No. SATSQ (simple answer to simple question).

The businesses who offer unpaid internships are taking advantage of the marketplace to get work done for nothing. Free work that they wouldn’t expect from a “professional.” Part of the problem with American society in general is that we don’t value labor enough, and free internships don’t help. I realize broadcasters have been using free interns for years. But that doesn’t make it right. I should expand on this thought sometime.

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Student blogs take on campus newspapers

January 17, 2010 in blogging, College Media, General Media, industry news, innovation

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that upstart student blogs are challenging their more established newsaper counterparts.

The article takes a look at how fledgling blogs at many universities are causing headaches for campus broadsheets — scooping stories, attracting online readers, and not to mention wooing advertisers.

From the Chonicle:

… (Student blogs) are challenging student newspapers in Web hits, says Daniel R. Reimold, a visiting assistant professor of journalism at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, who studied nearly a dozen online student news outlets for a 2008 College Media Review article. Readers devour these sites. College officials fret over them. And competitors carp about their edgy methods, which sometimes include a publish-it-now-correct-it-later approach to campus rumors.

Davis Shaver, a sophomore at Penn State, scoops the 200-staffed Daily Collegian, from the comfort of his PSU dorm room with his blog Onward State, which has a staff of 20 and touts itself as “one of the quickest and most informative places for Penn State students, faculty, staff and alumni to find the news that matters most to them.”

The article also discusses the success of NYU Local, a blog launched by senior journalism major Cody Brown and the more established North by Northwestern, founded in 2006.

This is not a universally applauded procedure. Rossilynne Skena, editor in chief of the Collegian, reads Onward State daily and says the competition makes her paper better. But she holds her staff to traditional standards like avoiding anonymous sources, preventing reporters from covering groups to which they belong, and vetting information before printing it.

“Bloggers can post anything,” she says, and they easily retract errors. “For us, getting something wrong is very egregious.”

Maybe so, but campus newspapers could take a few cues from their Web counterparts.  As the Chronicle points out, few student blogs survive their founders’ graduation, but it’s certain that campus newspapers aren’t used to the competition. That competition could be what’s needed to help campus media thrive.

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