Archives
By Month
By Category
Contact Us
If you know about a story that we should be following, let us know.
Social Networking
Canadians Prefer to Get News from Friends (not Editors) on Social Media
Journalists today are expected to be active on social media, sharing observations, anecdotes and links with their audience. Facebook itself is reaching out to newsrooms, recently launching the Journalists on Facebook page as a resource for the media. But a study from Canada suggests more people prefer to get their news via their friends and acquaintances on social media, than...
more »
EducationShift
UBC Students, Globe and Mail Investigate Hidden Cost of Shrimp
Twenty-something university students usually head to Thailand in search of exotic adventures. But when a group of 10 University of British Columbia journalism students went almost a year ago, they were searching for the untold story of shrimp, a seafood delicacy that has become common in North America.
more »
EducationShift
How to Teach Social Media in Journalism Schools
Social media is such a new phenomenon that it is easy for someone to claim to be an expert in the subject. A search on Twitter throws up all sorts of people claiming to be social media gurus. But at journalism schools, professors are working out how to teach social media to ensure that graduating students are proficient, if not expert, in this new addition to the curriculum.
more »
EducationShift
Rethinking the Role of the Journalist in the Participatory Age
Students who dream of a career in journalism are entering the profession at a time when the question of who is a journalist, and even what is journalism, is open to interpretation. The function of journalism is still to provide independent, reliable and accurate information considered vital to a vibrant democracy. But defining who is a journalist is much harder.
more »
NewspaperShift
Canwest Buyers, OpenFile Bet on Value of Local News in Canada
Two Canadians took a gamble that local news still matters this week. The two represent the hopes of both old and new media. One was a $1.1 billion buyout (in Canadian dollars) of Canada's largest newspaper chain, the Canwest newspapers, led by experienced news executive Paul Godfrey. The other was the launch of a hyper-local, participatory news start-up called OpenFile.ca,...
more »
EducationShift
Flexibility, Freelance Key for Journalism Grads in Tough Job Market
Stephanie Lim is a bright twenty-something who graduated top of her class in May 2009* from the UBC School of Journalism in Vancouver, Canada. When she returned home to Toronto, she had to face the reality of looking for a position in an industry reeling from fragmented audiences, declining profits and job losses. "Even though I had high hopes upon...
more »
Citizen Journalism
Mainstream Media Miss the Point of Participatory Journalism
The ability of anyone to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and sharing news and information is seen as one of the big shifts in journalism over the past 10 years. But a growing body of research suggests that the advent of participatory journalism, or user-generated content (UGC), has done little to change the way...
more »
EducationShift
Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand
As a journalism professor, I have found there is one thing guaranteed to set off a flurry of frenzied activity in the classroom. It has nothing to do with exams or story deadlines. Rather, it is prompted by a simple question to students: How many own your name as a domain name? This seemingly innocuous question acts as a trigger,...
more »
EducationShift
Revamped Journalist's Role More About Mindset Than Multimedia Tricks
With a new Web 2.0 service apparently springing up every week, it can be bewildering for a journalist trying to remain relevant in a digital age. Too often, new technology is seen as a burden that adds to an already packed workday. But while many journalists want to embrace new ways of reaching audiences, they flounder when it comes to...
more »
EducationShift
Advice from the Pros to Journalism Graduates
It's an anxious time to be graduating from journalism school. The economy is in the tank and newsrooms are being decimated. But yet, it is also a great time to be a journalist, with more news and information available than ever before and more ways than ever to reach audiences. At the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at...
more »
EducationShift
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front...
more »
EducationShift
Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors
One of my students landed her first A1 story on Monday. Amanda Ash's story on auditions for the sequel to the teen vampire blockbuster "Twilight" was splashed across the front page of the Vancouver Sun. But she first alerted me, and her 130 other followers on Twitter, to the tears and tantrums at the event on Sunday evening when it...
more »
EducationShift
UBC Begins Study Program of New Media and Society
The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage with the world. But while today's students may blog...
more »
EducationShift
The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education
Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course...
more »
EducationShift
J-Students Take Multiplatform Approach to City Politics
Here's a recipe for how to cover local elections. Take a bunch of bright and eager journalism students. Give them two weeks to fan out across the city and come back with multiplatform stories on issues as diverse as creating bike-only roads, spending almost $30 million on a dog pound and treating Vancouver's sewage. This is what the first-year students...
more »
EducationShift
Learning How to Make Multimedia Story Decisions
Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism. We started by first asking...
more »
EducationShift
J-Schools Use Geo-tagging, Wikis, iPhones to Teach
Professors are commonly stereotyped as people who know more about books than technology. But as classrooms are now filled with a generation who grew up with computers, iPods and the Internet, more and more professors are starting to experiment with new digital learning tools. At last week's Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, academics...
more »
Embedded Report
Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility
At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow. At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs. The advice...
more »
EducationShift
Journalism School Students Get Fewer Textbooks, Collaborate More
With students flooding back into classrooms in universities across North America, the key to getting through this demanding first week of term is simple -- planning, planning and more planning. In practice, this means an August that becomes a hectic month of preparation, getting syllabi in order, ordering textbooks from the bookstore and making sure the technical gear and software is ready to go.
more »
EducationShift
Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism
Classic Hollywood movies tend to idealize the job of the reporter, from Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." All they needed was a pen and a notebook. Fast-forward to the 21st century and the picture changes dramatically. Not only would they need to have strong research, reporting and writing skills, the journalists would also be expected to file for the website, upload some photos, shoot video and, of course, write for next day's paper.
more »EducationShift
University of British Columbia Takes Integrated Approach to Teaching Journalism
"Multidisciplined" and "flexible" were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying. The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.
more »
