Each  semester, I ran into several problems with the equipment: it was too complicated, or it wouldn’t work well with the software, or the files were so huge that it took forever for students to back up their work.

This year, we rethought the needs of the classes while making a purchasing decision on a new set of multimedia kits for the classrooms.

The upshot was that we wanted something simple and easy to use, that would also work well with our software. First, we looked at the Flip Camera, but at about the time we were getting our proposal together, Flip stopped producing cameras.

Then, we looked at the Kodak Zi8, similar to the Flip because it had the ability to use an external microphone. But after we’d put together the proposal, Kodak discontinued the Zi8. Grrrr!

So now we’re in possession of two classes worth of Kodak PlayTouch cameras. The cameras include a dual-purpose headphone/mic in jack.

The cameras are very easy to use. On-screen menus are not terribly confusing, and the video and audio quality are pretty good for a pocket video camera. They also record in m4v format, which makes importing into video editing software incredibly easy.

One of the purposes for choosing a pocket video camera instead of a higher-end camera was to remove as many technical obstacles as possible for beginning students, many of whom aren’t planning on careers as videographers. By removing the technical obstacles, the idea is that they (and their instructor) can spend more time focused on the purpose for video – telling the story.

I know some college media outlets are already using these cameras for reporters. For those who were looking at the Flip or Zi8, this seems like a pretty good alternative – at least until they discontinue it too. The price for the camera itself is around $125. I would encourage you to invest in a carrying case, however, as these things are definitely small and seem like they’d be easy to break.

I’ll report back more after we’ve used them for a semester.

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Image via CrunchBase

Neil Augenstein has a good post up at the PBS MediaShift blog about using his iPhone 4 for radio reporting. It’s worth a read because Augenstein is producing professional radio news with his phone, and it works.

So is it worth it? A year in, iPhone-only reporting isn’t perfect. While audio editing works great, with the phone’s built-in microphone I’d estimate the sound quality of my field reports is 92% as good as when I use bulky broadcast equipment. Getting better audio for my video is a real challenge. And if I ever have to cover a story from a subway tunnel or location where there’s no WiFi or cell coverage, I won’t be able to file until I resurface.

As digital equipment continues to morph I’m sure my tools will be substantially different within a few years. Every day, new applications open new opportunities for a reporter who’s willing to work around the limitations of iPhone-only reporting while maximizing the benefits.

This semester, we’ve been looking at using smaller equipment in our multimedia reporting class precisely because of the miniaturization of the news gathering equipment. I’ll talk more about the changes we’re making soon.

Is anyone out there in college media using mobile phones or iPod Touches (for instance) for gathering news on a consistent basis?

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Ellen Kennerly, professional-in-residence at the LSU Reveille, sends along word that the Reveille has released an iPhone app. (link goes to Apple app store) The app was developed after Kennerly approached student developer Logan Leger about working for the Reveille. Leger spent most of the fall developing and tweaking the app while Kennerly went through the process of getting it approved for the app store.

Other college news media have released apps for the iPhone (unsure of any for the Android platform currently), but I am not aware of another student media app that was entirely designed by students. If you know of one, drop a note in the comments, or e-mail me.

Right now, the app features a feed of headlines, an archive search function, the ability to save articles, and current weather conditions for Baton Rouge. It will be interesting to watch what features are added in the future.

“It was fun — except for dealing with Apple — but it was still a blast to see what happens when you take journalists, add web developers and a smidge of nudging and stir …,” Kennerly wrote in an e-mail. “My takeaway as in Atlanta, where we did something similar, is that amazing chemistry explodes when you mix creative technologists and creative journalists.”

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Late last year, news leaked that Yahoo! might be shuttering delicious.com, the social bookmarking service that it acquired earlier. It’s not the first service Yahoo! has killed after spending money to acquire it (jumpcut.com was my first experience with this phenomenon). Apparently, Yahoo! has since said that it is seeking a buyer for delicious.com.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying out diigo.com, which is similar to delicious, but has some other features going for it as well. I’ve already imported all my bookmarks from delicious (a relatively painless process, I might add), and started using it to post the “Items to Read” posts here on the blog.

From the diigo website:

Diigo provides a browser add-on that can really improve your research productivity. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. Unlike most other web “highlighters” that merely clip, Diigo highlights and sticky notes are persistent in the sense that whenever you return to the original web page, you will see your highlights and sticky notes superimposed on the original page, just what you would expect if you highlighted or wrote on a book!

Moreover, all the information — highlighted paragraphs, sticky notes, and the original url — are saved on Diigo servers, creating your personal digest of the web, your own collection of highlights from the web – ones that are meaningful to you! You can easily search, access, sort and share this collection from any PC or even iPhone.

For those who are looking for an alternative to delicious, it’s worth a try, and the basic features are free to use, unlike some other alternatives that are out there. And if you’re interested in following my links on diigo, I’m Scmurley.

Thanks to Megan Taylor for the cue to check out this service.

Related articles

• Scott Meis: 17 Reasons Delicious.com Users Should Head to Diigo – For Bloggers, By Bloggers (bestbloggingtipsonline.com)
• The Best Alternatives to Delicious [Video] (lifehacker.com)
• 5 Alternatives for Social Bookmarking To Prepare for Delicious’ Passing (socialtimes.com)
• Top Delicious Alternatives To Hop Onto (techie-buzz.com)
• The 4 Best Alternatives to Delicious.com (wisebread.com)

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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.

One of the things you’ve probably picked up if you’ve ever hung around people who do serious, original research for a living is this: Anecdote does not equal data. Or, anecdote != data. What this means is that an observation of a single instance of a phenomenon, or even several instances of a phenomenon – does not mean that such a phenomenon is a trend, an emerging problem, or even very widespread at all. To say that something is a trend, widespread, or even an epidemic, requires some sort of research to determine how widespread the phenomenon is.

So when I see sentences like:

But some journalists and educators alike are starting to wonder if lessons in the fundamentals of newsgathering are being pushed aside in favor of an ever-expanding array of tech-related classes.

I tend to have a strong allergic reaction.

I don’t really care whether “some journalists and educators” are “starting to wonder” if something is happening. I care whether something is actually happening. And I don’t see it.

In some sense, I agree with University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Stephen Ward, who said:

Journalism schools should be creating a new generation of responsible communicators. If we go to the route of defining journalism programs totally in terms of technology and entrepreneurialism then we’re abandoning the core of what universities should be doing.

Amen. We shouldn’t define journalism programs totally in terms of technology and entrepreneuralism. But the question is: who’s advocating the position he’s describing?

I can’t think of a single journalism pundit – from Jeff Jarvis to Steve Buttry to Jay Rosen to Nick Carr – who is advocating such an approach to journalism programs.

It’s a straw man, and a very popular one, at that. But nobody is advocating replacing journalism fundamentals with a string of tech “how-to” classes.

Sure, you get stories from instructors who seem to feel that students know how to shoot and edit video but don’t know how to ask a simple question of a source.

But I want to know where these students are. Because I find a wide spectrum of knowledge and skills among students in my interactions with them. Students can be broken down into roughly four groups:

Students who don’t know journalistic fundamentals and don’t know digital skills (NJF/NDS)

Students who know journalistic fundamentals and don’t know digital skills (JF/NDS)

Students who know journalistic fundamentals and know digital skills (JF/DS)

Students who don’t know journalistic fundamentals and know digital skills (NJF/DS)

If I had to guess (and I’d be guessing just as much as the journalism professors quoted in the article linked above), I’d put more students down in the NJF/NDS group. They are not grounded enough in the “fundamentals of journalism,” but they don’t know that much about “digital skills” either. And as often as not, students who are relatively skilled with technology are skilled with these software and tools in their personal lives, but don’t connect them to their professional lives as well.

So, for instance, adding a single introductory course in multimedia skills to the core requirements for a journalism degree (as Eastern did two years ago) isn’t going to break the curriculum and create a generation of elite tech geeks who don’t know how to sniff out a good story.

And if “technology-related” courses are being added as electives, or as different concentrations, then the classes that are getting cut aren’t really fundamental, are they?

Quite frankly, it isn’t as easy to learn digital skills as people make it out to be. Sure, it’s easy to put out a 140-character text message on Twitter, and find information about people on Facebook. But telling a compelling story using multiple formats – yes, technology – isn’t any easier than writing a 4,000-word investigative article for a newspaper. In fact, combining multiple formats with an investigative story idea is harder and more time consuming than writing a 4,000-word article for the newspaper.

We can teach some very basic multimedia skills over a four-day period (as we did recently in Louisville), but you can teach someone to write a story in that time period too.

In fact, combining multiple formats with an investigative story idea is harder and more time consuming than writing a 4,000-word article for a newspaper.

And let’s be honest – some damned fine journalists didn’t even major in journalism.

Just one more thing about this “too much technology” complaint. See the picture above? Know what that is? It’s a cello. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, it can create beautiful music. But a cello is a form of technology. Keeping it tuned and in proper working condition takes a level of knowledge about the instrument. Knowing where to fret and how to bow the strings takes technical skill. But you can’t play cello well unless you know the fundamentals of musical notation, of reading the composer’s instructions, etc.

So music instructors teach “technology” and “fundamentals” in tandem. It’s the same in any creative process – from architecture to art. You can’t design an awe-inspiring building without some familiarity with the materials necessary to construct that building. You can’t paint a masterpiece without knowing how pigments interact or clay must be molded to hold its shape.

Every discipline has “technology.” We are surrounded by it, and it is not going away. And anyone who is proposing abandoning “fundamentals” in favor of whiz-bang technology probably shouldn’t be teaching journalism to begin with.

(Cello Image courtesy Flickr user firepile used with permission under Creative Commons license.)

Related articles

• You can’t go back to the basics in journalism education; go forward with the basics (stevebuttry.wordpress.com)
• Journalism Schools’ Dilemma: How to Train Students for Jobs That Don’t Yet Exist? (dailyfinance.com)
• How technology is transforming journalism education (cyberjournalist.net)
• How journalism schools are teaching social media (reportr.net)
• How to Teach Social Media in Journalism Schools (voices.allthingsd.com)

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