MediaShift

Collaboration

Collaborative Innovation Dominates New APME Award Category

by Jenny Xie

When winners of the Associated Press Media Editor (APME) Journalism Excellence Awards were announced earlier this month, "collaborative innovation" was a winning theme. The investigative journalism collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ) was honored with the first ever Innovator of the Year for College Students award....

• July 25, 2012
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EducationShift

Teaching Innovation Is About More Than iPads in the Classroom

by Aran Levasseur

Innovation is the currency of progress. In our world of seismic changes, innovation has become a holy grail that promises to shepherd us through these uncertain and challenging times. And there isn't a more visible symbol of innovation than the iPad. It's captured the hearts and minds of disparate subcultures and organizations. In education it's been widely hailed as a...

• July 16, 2012
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Education

The Digital Age, Memory and Learning

by Paul Barnwell

I remember plenty of seven-digit numbers from my youth -- the Gabrielli's home phone, the Young's, and the Bardo's among them. I probably had about 20 numbers cataloged in my 12-year-old brain. I remember memorizing directions to ride my bike to various swimming holes in Concord, N.H., including the old train bridge spanning the Merrimack River off I-93′s exit 16....

• July 11, 2012
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EducationShift

Covering the Olympic Trials: 8 Lessons in Journalism Education, News and Business

by Ryan Frank

Two blocks from our newsroom, 20,000 fans yelled, clapped and stomped for a world record. A former University of Oregon decathlete, Ashton Eaton, crossed the finish line in time to make history. When Eaton grabbed a U.S. flag in celebration, Tess Freeman, a student photojournalist on our staff,  captured the trials' defining moment. For 11 crazy days, elite track and...

• July 10, 2012
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EducationShift

The New Journalism Master's: All About Entrepreneurs

by Dena Levitz

From about the time I found out journalist was a real job it became my one and only career aspiration. In fact, as a northern California high school student, my decision -- a pretty unheard of one at the time -- to attend the University of Georgia was almost entirely motivated by the school's coveted journalism program, which I believed...

• July 6, 2012
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Education

University News Outlets Explore Training Journalists to Bring in Revenue

by A. Adam Glenn

A burgeoning array of university-based news projects have been quietly experimenting with new ways to organize and staff their newsrooms, to gather and produce news, and to deliver information and engage their audiences. There's one thing, though, that almost none of them have successfully tackled: how to make money at it. Rather than create breakthrough business models, university-based news services...

• July 2, 2012
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Education

Bridging the Digital Divide in Rural Schools

by Sarah Butrymowicz

Surrounded by farmland and ranches, Colorado's Edison School sits off an unpaved road, with tumbleweeds blowing across its dirt parking lot. As recently as a few years ago, many families relied on solar or wind power instead of electricity; today, many still haul home their water from wells. Principal Rachel Paul estimates that 25-30 percent of her students don't have...

• June 29, 2012
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Social Media

How to Defend Yourself Against Facial Recognition Technology

by Sameer Padania

Facial recognition technology is now just about everywhere we are. It's in our phones, social networks, and media management, and this itself carries vast implications. (See this post about how the technology works, where it is, and how legislators and regulators are reacting to it.) But it's also increasingly used by law enforcement and for surveillance of "public" spaces, as...

• June 18, 2012
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EducationShift

Edward Wasserman Named Dean of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

by Rosa Ramirez

The University of California Berkeley has announced it has appointed Edward Wasserman, a veteran newspaper editor and writer and currently the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, as dean-designate of the Graduate School of Journalism. Wasserman is scheduled to start Jan. 1. His decision to join the journalism school is...

• June 13, 2012
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EducationShift

The Ups and Downs of Game-Based Learning

by Nathan Maton

Games have shown great promise for learning, but it's not always easy to figure out the logistics of how to use them in class. Every student and teacher's experience is unique, and it takes time to calibrate and tinker to get the best out of the experience. What's more, using games might lead to something neither students or teacher anticipated...

• June 11, 2012
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NewspaperShift

5 Lessons From The Oregon Daily Emerald's Digital Reinvention

by Dan Reimold

The web address: future.dailyemerald.com. The one-word header atop the homepage: Revolution. And the tagline just beneath it: "The Oregon Daily Emerald, reinvented for the digital age." The student newspaper at the University of Oregon -- best known for its five-day-a-week print edition -- is morphing into a more wide-ranging, digital-first "modern college media company." On a special site that went...

• May 31, 2012
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Mediatwits

Mediatwits #50: Facebook Face-Plant; Craig Newmark + Poynter; Crowdfunding Bible

by Mark Glaser

Welcome to the 50th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali as co-hosts. The joy of the Facebook IPO was quickly replaced with disdain as the stock nosedived and lawsuits ensued. We run down the headlines, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Oregon Daily Emerald killing daily print editions for thrice- and twice-weekly editions, respectively....

• May 25, 2012
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Business

Why We Killed Our College Daily Paper for a More Digital Future

by Ryan Frank

We're about to close the book on the Oregon Daily Emerald. After 92 years, the University of Oregon's newspaper will end its run as a Monday-to-Friday operation in June. Yes, it's the end of an era, and we're sad about that. But it's also the start of a new era, the digital one. Next fall, we will replace our traditional...

• May 24, 2012
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EducationShift

How Journalism Education Can, and Should, Blow Up the System

by Eric Newton

The following is the text from a speech given by Eric Newton, the senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation, earlier this month at a national conference of journalism educators at Middle Tennessee State University. The text has been edited for length. You can read the entire version here. In 2005, two of America's largest foundations created the...

• May 23, 2012
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NewspaperShift

Why It's a Bad Idea for Student Press to Fall in Love with Pay Walls

by Dan Reimold

The Daily O'Collegian at Oklahoma State University is enjoying marginal success with its metered pay wall a bit more than a year after enacting it. At the start of spring semester 2011, the paper became the first U.S. student media outlet to charge a subset of readers for its content online, requiring a $10 yearly subscription fee for individuals outside...

• May 2, 2012
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Education

Student Photojournalists Arrested; What Are Their Rights?

by A. Adam Glenn

As student journalists increasingly arm themselves with mobile phones for multimedia newsgathering in the field, more may find themselves on a collision course with local authorities unenthusiastic about having their actions captured in living color. A reminder of that comes in the pending criminal trial of Pennsylvania photojournalism student Ian Van Kuyk, arrested earlier this spring while shooting a routine...

• April 30, 2012
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Education

A Progress Report on a College Paper's Pioneering Metered Pay Wall

by Alexa Capeloto

It was just over a year ago that a college newspaper in Oklahoma became a digital media pioneer. In what was believed to be a first for a college news outlet, The Daily O'Collegian at Oklahoma State University began charging for online content. Sure, the Wall Street Journal, Times of London and other professional publications had already gone for pay...

• April 23, 2012
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Education

Facebook Groups for Schools Raises Concerns

by Katrina Schwartz

The explosive growth of online social media sites specifically targeted at schools has compelled Facebook to edge its way back into the fertile ground of college campuses. Last week, the company announced a new feature available only to students and faculty with an active .edu email address, Groups for Schools. It's billed to be exclusive -- even alumni and prospective...

• April 20, 2012
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Collaboration

Mercer Center for Collaborative Journalism Aims to Put the 'Lab' in 'Collaboration'

by Tim Regan-Porter

April 1 marked my first month on the job as director of Mercer University's new Center for Collaborative Journalism. While the center doesn't open its doors until August, and the bulk of the program starts in late 2013, I already feel the pressure. The vision established by Mercer, the Knight Foundation, and our media partners, The (Macon) Telegraph and Georgia...

• April 10, 2012
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EducationShift

Why We Need to Teach Mindfulness in a Digital Age

by Aran Levasseur

Think of sitting quietly in a spartan room. There are no TVs, computers, smartphones, books, magazines or music. If you're like most people, this probably sounds like a recipe for boredom. In our culture, we avoid moments of "not-doing" because we don't associate boredom with having any value. And our aversion to boredom and not-doing have been amplified in our...

• April 4, 2012
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EducationShift

How Educators Are Using Pinterest for Showcasing, Curation

by A. Adam Glenn

Pinterest is the "in" site of 2012, and its phenomenal growth has sparked interest among millions of users. It's also spread to journalism educators, who are increasingly experimenting with it in the classroom. The social network launched two years ago, but in recent months has drawn red-hot excitement for its unique visual, topic-based curation approach. While its 10 million users,...

• March 20, 2012
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Philosophy

Pizza With a Side of Attitude: The Rise of Snark Online

by Devin Harner

On Mondays, when my students ask me what I did over the weekend, I often reply, "read, wrote, and then read and wrote some more." Most of the time, I'm being more serious than they know. A few weekends ago was an exception, at least initially. I visited my family in Pennsylvania, made pizza with my mom, and repaired the...

• March 19, 2012
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Mediatwits

Mediatwits #42: SXSW Special: Homeless Hotspots; Ambient Apps, CNN/Mashable?

by Mark Glaser

Welcome to the 42nd episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week is a special episode dedicated to all things South by Southwest (SXSW), the media confab covering technology, music and film down in Austin, Texas.

• March 16, 2012
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EducationShift

Students Demand Right to Technology in Schools

by Tina Barseghian

I've heard arguments from ed tech experts about how using technology for learning may in fact deepen the divide between wealthy and low-income kids. Students who have access to technology and are encouraged by teachers and parents to leverage it for new ways of learning, the argument goes, will leap even further ahead than low-income students who are forbidden to...

• March 14, 2012
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Collaboration

Howard Rheingold: Knowing How to Collaborate Is Essential

by Roland Legrand

I just read the Kindle edition of "Net Smart," written by writer and critic Howard Rheingold. The book provides a thoughtful analysis of some major theories and discourses about the "always on" era, while at the same time giving new insights and practical advice about the literacies we need to thrive in this environment. I've followed Rheingold's posts and videos...

• March 12, 2012
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EducationShift

Technology Journalism: The Jobs Are There; the Journalists Are Not

by Clyde Bentley

BARCELONA -- If journalism is a profession in trouble, you would never know it from the newsroom at the Mobile World Congress. It's hard to find one of the 500 seats in the newsroom empty as journalists from around the world file stories for specialty newspapers, websites and blogs. Unfortunately, few journalism schools can boast about placing their alums here....

• March 1, 2012
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EducationShift

Why Journalism Teachers Should Give Format-Agnostic Assignments

by Ivan Oransky

It has become a truism -- if one not repeated often enough -- that those of us teaching journalism are now preparing our students for jobs that didn't exist when we started our careers. That might make some think of social media editors, reporter-programmers, and community managers. But even among graduates whose titles would be recognized by the most grizzled...

• February 16, 2012
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Social Networking

College Memes Madness: Students Posting Non-Stop on Facebook

by Dan Reimold

College memes are suddenly invading the Facebook streams of students at schools throughout the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As The Cherwell, Oxford University's student newspaper, explains, the meme is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture by imitation. Internet memes follow this principle, humorous images are copied and re-captioned, concisely describing or satirizing the activity of...

• February 14, 2012
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EducationShift

Epistemic Games Are the Future of Learning, Letting Students Role-Play Professions

by Aran Levasseur

Imagine you're a senior manager at a leading videogame company. Your job is to devise the company's competitive strategy in a rapidly growing and dynamic industry. What prices will you set for the consoles? How many games will be available for your platform? This is the premise of Platform Wars, an epistemic game, or management simulator, developed by MIT's Sloan...

• February 6, 2012
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Mediatwits

Mediatwits #36: Facebook IPO Fever; Dive into Media; $30 Million to Columbia/Stanford

by Mark Glaser

Welcome to the 36th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with Google privacy concerns, Amazon falling short in earnings, and much more. But the dominant news was Facebook filing for an...

• February 3, 2012
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Education

American University to Offer Master's in News Entrepreneurship

by A. Adam Glenn

As debris from the firewall that once separated journalism from the business of journalism continues to fly, a new educational landscape is developing, one that supports and trains those straddling the line.

• January 26, 2012
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Public MediaShift

How Social Media, Collaboration Fueled Reports on Australia's Refugees

by Julie Posetti

An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup. The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a "citizens' agenda." The result...

• January 19, 2012
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Ethics

3 Laws for Journalists in a Data-Saturated World

by Tristan Stewart-Robertson

At the Cyberspace Conference in London in November, Igor Shchegolev, the Russian minister of communications and mass media, referred to sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human...

• January 11, 2012
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EducationShift

Steering Girls to Science and Tech Careers

by Tina Barseghian

For Ebony Green, a career as a scientist might have seemed unlikely just last year. The stereotypical outcome for girls like Ebony, an eighth-grader at Frick Middle School in a rough part of East Oakland, isn't necessarily a high-paying job in science, math, engineering or technology. In fact, 40 percent of Oakland Unified School District students drop out.

• January 10, 2012
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EducationShift

In the Digital Age, How Much Is Informal Education Worth?

by Audrey Watters

You can learn anything you want on the Internet, so the adage goes. But even if that's true, even if it's now easier than ever to learn about almost any subject online, there are still very few opportunities to gain formal recognition -- "credit," if you will -- for informal
learning done online.

• January 5, 2012
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EducationShift

The Pedagogy of Play and the Role of Technology in Learning

by Aran Levasseur

The goal of the videogame "Civilization" is to build a civilization that stands the test of time. You start the game in 4000 B.C. as a settler and, with successful gameplay, can create a civilization that lasts until the Space Age. Throughout the game, you need to manage your civilization's military, science, technology, commerce and culture.

• January 3, 2012
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EducationShift

Year in Review: 6 Trends in Journalism Education

by A. Adam Glenn

As the year comes to a close, it's worth a look at the some of the most intriguing developments in journalism education in the last year - from approaches to using social media and curation to new initiatives on data journalism, from academe's role in the news industry to leveraging publishing platforms.

• December 30, 2011
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EducationShift

Year in Review: Most Viral Student Media of 2011

by Dan Reimold

Strippers. Shootings. The Oscars. Osama bin Laden. One-night stands. Natural disasters. Asians in the library. And skinny jeans. These are a few of the most prominent buzzwords at the center of the student news stories, columns, online creations, and video rants that went viral in a major way over the past year.

• December 22, 2011
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EducationShift

Why We Teach Journalism to Specialists, Instead of the Other Way Around

by Robert Steiner

After 25 years in and around journalism, my understanding of media changed with one table in the "2009 State of the News Media Report" by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Time Magazine and Newsweek each saw ad pages drop 19 percent in 2008, it said, while Motortrend gained 24 percent and Car and Driver increased 4 percent.

• December 15, 2011
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EducationShift

New Etiquette Needed for Technology In (and Out of) Classrooms

by Doug Ward

If you want to see a teacher fume, just bring up the topic of cell phones in class. Technology, especially social media and text messaging, competes for students' attention as never before. When half of social media users say they check messages from bed, and 11 percent of those 25 or younger are willing to interrupt sex for a Twitter or Facebook message, what chance do teachers have of keeping students' attention in class?

• December 14, 2011
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EducationShift

Collaboration Profile: A Look at WNYC and NYT's SchoolBook

by Amanda Hirsch

SchoolBook is an ambitious new web offering from WNYC and the New York Times that provides news, data and conversation about New York City's
schools. The site, which launched just before the start of the school year, has been lauded by members of the education establishment, parents and journalists, and provides an interesting model for other public media stations to consider.

• December 12, 2011
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Business

Tear Down the Wall Between Business and Editorial!

by Dorian Benkoil

For too long, reporters and editors have been unaware, even hostile to the business sides of their organizations. Those attitudes have helped push the news industry into its current dire state. And that's why I say: Tear down the wall between business and editorial. Before you start sharpening your pitchforks, hear me out. I'm not proposing a free-for-all money-grab that...

• December 7, 2011
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EducationShift

Can 35,000 People Learn Anything from an Online Class?

by Audrey Watters

This summer, Stanford University announced its plans to make three of its introductory computer science classes available for free to the general public. The classes -- Machine Learning, Introduction to Databases, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
-- were to be taught by Stanford faculty and held online in conjunction with the regular on-campus courses held during this October-December term.

• December 5, 2011
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EducationShift

What Is a Great Education App Really Worth?

by Audrey Watters

Walk the aisles of any toy store and you'll see miles of shelves lined with $20-$30 board games and toys. We're accustomed to paying that amount because that's where the market set the price years ago. It's predicated on production costs, overhead for toy manufacturers, distribution, and the store's cut of the margin, among many other factors.

• November 29, 2011
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Ethics

Juan Williams, Lisa Simeone and Public Media's Quest for Integrity

by Stephen Ward

Trust "is perhaps the most important asset public broadcasting carries forward into evolving public media future," writes Byron Knight. Knight should know. He's had a long career in public broadcasting. Now, he is co-director of the Editorial Integrity for Public Media Project, a ground-breaking attempt to define public media's principles for a digital age. Leading public broadcasters, NPR, PBS, and...

• November 28, 2011
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EducationShift

Journalism Education Roundup, Nov. 22, 2011

by Nathan Gibbs

The best stories across the web on journalism education1. Evaluating Plagiarism: Part I & Part 2 (Best Colleges Online)2. Four ways journalism educators are using Storify as a teaching tool (Poynter)3. Ricky Bordelon: Social media in the classroom has some benefits, many drawbacks (The Ram)4. Journalist's Resource attempts to make academic research more user-friendly for journalists (Nieman Journalism Lab)5. University of Missouri to limit lecture recording (Associated Press)6. Stanford lends its name to...

• November 22, 2011
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EducationShift

Digital Updates for a Good Old-Fashioned News Writing Class

by Devin Harner

When I designed the curriculum for our college's recently launched journalism minor, I included courses in nuts-and-bolts digital reporting, and in new media form and theory, but I kept my introductory news writing and editing class pretty old school, and even anachronistically scanned and posted photocopied handouts on news value, canned stories and lede assignments, and notes on story structure that dated from the 80s to Blackboard.

• November 18, 2011
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Your Take

What Do You Think About Journalism School?

by Mark Glaser

There is a long tradition of journalists winning awards but never attending journalism school -- or even college, in the case of the late Peter Jennings. Now, in the digital age, there are good arguments for and against going to journalism school. In the pro camp, journalism schools can provide great training, experience and tech know-how before you get out...

• November 18, 2011
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Mediatwits

Mediatwits #28: Journalism Education Special with Sree Sreenivasan, Sarah Hill

by Mark Glaser

Welcome to the 28th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, filling in for Rafat Ali. This week is a special edition of the podcast dedicated to teaching journalism in the digital age -- and part of our week-long special "Beyond J-School 2011." How can educators keep up with the changes happening in journalism and keep students ahead of the curve?

• November 18, 2011
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Education

5 Key Takeaways from the ONA Educators Group on Facebook

by A. Adam Glenn

Teaching digital journalism sometimes feels like living on the slope of a volcano -- you never know when some seismic rumble in the news industry will give your curriculum a tumble, or when a new technology will erupt and leave your tools up to their kit in hot lava.

• November 17, 2011
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EducationShift

8 Lessons in the Art of Teaching Journalism Online

by Amy Eisman

I'm not the only one saying this: Online journalism educators should be good at teaching journalism online. After all, we are comfortable communicating clearly, are early adapters of technology, and we like being first.

• November 17, 2011
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Education

In Journalism Class, Think Visceral

by Alexa Capeloto

Every semester I conduct a small experiment with the undergrads in my Journalism in the 21st Century course. On the day devoted to discussing media consumption, they walk into class and I ask for their cell phones. They blink, then laugh, then gape as I collect their phones and pile them in a corner behind me.

• November 16, 2011
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EducationShift

How Journalism Professors Can Navigate Social Media

by Nathan Gibbs

Teaching journalism today requires an aptitude for learning new technology and experimenting with social media and mobile tools. It's a rewarding challenge, a constant race to stay ahead of the curve. But while some might expect a challenge in staying ahead of students regarding social media, it can sometimes be the opposite.

• November 16, 2011
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Business

Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson: School's Not Enough for Media Entrepreneurs

by Dorian Benkoil

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson was talking to a class of master's degree students last week, telling them their education wasn't necessary if they wanted to be successful entrepreneurs.

• November 15, 2011
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EducationShift

Special Series: Beyond J-School 2011

by Mark Glaser

Teaching journalism has never been such a moving target. All week on MediaShift, we're exploring the challenges and opportunities of teaching tomorrow's journalists, offering tips, tools and insights.

• November 14, 2011
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Education

How to Get the Most Out of Tech Tools for Teaching

by Susan Currie Sivek

Though you don't have to use technology to teach effectively, sometimes a little bit of tech can go a long way toward making the job easier. And, of course, teaching media and journalism courses today requires that instructors be familiar with as many different technology tools as possible -- and be willing to experiment with the rest.

• November 14, 2011
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EducationShift

Teaching Without Technology?

by Aran Levasseur

New technology is a lightning rod and polarizing force because, as Nicholas Carr articulated in his book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains," it not only begins to influence what we see and how we see it, but, over time, who we are.

• November 10, 2011
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EducationShift

Journalism Education Roundup, Nov. 8, 2011

by Nathan Gibbs

The best stories across the web on journalism education 1. Leveraging a "teaching hospital model" in journalism education (New America Foundation) 2. Students "may be 'digital natives,' but they're wretched at searching" (Wired) 3. American Public University enlists faculty to write e-textbooks (Inside Higher Ed) 4. Census: Journalism majors make about $50,000 (Poynter) 5. News bosses talk shop in panel discussion on entrepreneurial journalism (Buzz...

• November 8, 2011
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Philosophy

TrueTies Activist Demands Transparency Without Transparency

by Mark Tapscott

This piece originally appeared in the Washington Examiner It is reprinted here with permission. An Op-Ed appeared earlier this month on PBS MediaShift that seemed to describe a civic-minded endeavor aimed at increasing awareness of who on the nation's editorial commentary pages was trying to influence public opinion. "Every day, Americans read the opinion and commentary of seemingly impartial 'experts'...

• November 3, 2011
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Must Reads

Journalism Education Roundup, Nov. 1, 2011

by Nathan Gibbs

The best stories across the web on journalism education 1. Should we teach journalism students to be more like Julian Assange? (Charlie Beckett) 2. Are you competing with Facebook during class? (GigaOM) 3. Do school newspapers hold the future of print media? (European Journalism Centre) 4. Tips on getting a student newspaper online (Prof KRG) 5. How journalism professors can use screencasts as...

• November 1, 2011
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EducationShift

A Case for Using Social Networking for Learning

by Aran Levasseur

We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation. 

• October 18, 2011
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Europe

In Spain, 'Little Black Book' of Journalism Shows Profession in Crisis

by Valentina Giménez

Pressure from the publishing industry has weakened the watchdog role of journalists, turning them into lapdogs at the service of corporations and politicians and unable to serve their readers. That's one of the conclusions of Bernardo Diaz Nosty, journalism professor at the University of Malaga. Diaz Nosty, also a journalist, is the author of "Libro Negro del Periodismo en...

• October 17, 2011
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EducationShift

How a $35 Tablet Could Revolutionize Classroom Learning

by Audrey Watters

When Amazon unveiled its new Android tablet, the Kindle Fire, last month, analysts said that its price could well make it a viable competitor to the wildly successful iPad. Indeed, while the iPad has ignited great interest in tablet computing, particularly in schools, that interest has really just been in iPads.

• October 13, 2011
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EducationShift

Using Facebook, Hoot.me as a Study Tool

by Audrey Watters

Protecting student safety has been the rationale behind the recent spate of "laws restricting teachers' and students' communication via social networking. The laws call into into question once again the educational value of these sorts of online social tools: Why do teachers need to talk to students on Facebook? Shouldn't students be studying? Isn't Facebook just a waste of time?

• October 11, 2011
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EducationShift

Students Go Old School, Create Newspaper with Typewriters, Xactos, Film Cameras

by Devin Harner

As if taking their cues from an entertainment industry increasingly inclined to remake just about anything from the '80s, today's college students seem to be jumping into a collective Hot Tub Time Machine. We watch as our journalism students covet Atari, combat boots, Star Wars and other throwbacks as if they discovered them.

• October 10, 2011
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Ethics

TrueTies.Org Wants to Increase Transparency on the Op-Ed Page

by Gabe Elsner

The following is a guest opinion from Gabe Elsner of The Checks and Balances Project, which recently launched a new project aimed at increasing transparency at news outlets. Every day, Americans read the opinion and commentary of seemingly impartial "experts" from think tanks on critical subjects in the pages of the nation's newspapers. What these readers don't know is that...

• October 7, 2011
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EducationShift

In the Digital Age, Is Teaching Cursive Relevant?

by Audrey Watters

Reading and writing are fundamental to learning. But as more kids read and write via some sort of computing device -- laptop, tablet, cell phone -- how we teach those skills is changing, and one significant change is the decision to teach cursive. When it comes to equipping students with "21st century skills," typing is in, cursive is out.

• October 6, 2011
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EducationShift

Learning in a Digital Age: Teaching a Different Kind of Literacy

by Aran Levasseur

"Education," scholar and writer Ralph Ellison once said, "is a matter of building bridges." And perhaps, no bridge is more important than the bridge to the future. As educators, it's our responsibility to prepare students for the world of tomorrow. Yet tomorrow isn't what it used to be.

• October 4, 2011
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EducationShift

Class, Turn on Your Cell Phones: It's Time to Text

by Audrey Watters

As we noted in August, cell phones are in the hands of the vast majority of adults, and whether schools like it or not, they're in the hands of most students. While many schools still see cell phones as a distraction rather than as an educational tool, it's hard to deny that these devices are quickly becoming the primary means...

• September 29, 2011
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Legal Drama

Colleges Run Afoul of First Amendment in Barring Sports Journalists

by Rob Arcamona

College athletics are, in some ways, the epitome of what sports are supposed to represent. In our collective minds, college sports are pure, a reminder that decades ago, we too were once young, agile, and full of potential. Every season, alumni forced to move away from "dear ol' State" descend upon land-grant campuses in a tribal, nearly reflexive migration. But...

• September 28, 2011
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EducationShift

School Libraries Struggle with E-Book Loans

by Audrey Watters

Just as many predicted, sales figures show that more people are opting to buy e-books rather than printed copies. Sales of e-books rose 167 percent in June, reports Publishers Weekly, with sales totaling $473.8 million for the first half of the year. But sales of print books -- both paperbacks and hardcovers -- continue to decline.

• September 26, 2011
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EducationShift

Cell Phones in Classrooms? No! Students Need to Pay Attention

by Greg Graham

In the battle for the hearts and minds of students, the front line for educators has changed over the last couple of decades. Rather than the age-old struggle for access, the foremost concern today is one of attention.

• September 21, 2011
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EducationShift

Has Technology Changed the Way Children Play?

by Audrey Watters

Last spring, there was a minor outcry when the Auburn School District in Maine announced that it would be piloting a one-to-one iPad program with its kindergarteners. Part of the uproar involved the cost of the program -- some $200,000. But much of it involved the notion that somehow young children should not be exposed to technology, that somehow iPads and other gadgets inhibit their imagination and make them play less -- or, to slightly modify one of Apple's famous logos, to "play different."

• September 7, 2011
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EducationShift

Teaching Magazine Journalism Beyond the Magazine

by Susan Currie Sivek

While magazine industry professionals struggle to come up with the best ways to use today's technology, magazine journalism educators are working hard to prepare their aspiring co-workers. Journalism schools with strong magazine programs have developed innovative courses and assignments to challenge students to think beyond the printed page. Three magazine journalism educators shared specific innovations and ways of thinking that...

• August 30, 2011
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EducationShift

Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones, and Use Them for Learning

by Audrey Watters

Last week, a  study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that cell phones have become "near ubiquitous": 83 percent of American adults own one. Over half of all adult mobile phone owners had used their phones at least once to get information they needed right away. And more than a quarter said that they had experienced...

• August 29, 2011
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EducationShift

How e-Textbooks, Online Modules Could Keep Journalism Education Current

by Alexa Capeloto

Journalism textbooks can be a challenge (or as one commenter on my recent post on the subject called them, an oxymoron) in today's fast-changing media world. The long wait between writing and publication usually means at least portions of a book about journalism will seem outdated when it finally reaches the hands of college students. Imagine trying to write about...

• August 25, 2011
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EducationShift

Teaching Journalism in an Age When News Comes to You

by Lynne Russell

Does it matter where a story comes from, as long as it makes the news? Apparently it doesn't matter at all, to many of the latest crop of journalism students who believe their smart phones hold the keys to truth. And so, a sinister thing is happening in the world of journalism, and I'm going to get right to the...

• August 22, 2011
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NewspaperShift

Revolution in Georgia: Student Newspaper Goes Digital First

by Dan Reimold

The Red & Black, one of the largest and most-feted college newspapers in the country, recently dropped a bombshell on its readers and the student journalism community. In a wraparound section of a special issue published on the first day of the new school year, the University of Georgia student newspaper revealed it will be switching from a daily to...

• August 18, 2011
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EducationShift

Twitter Interview Requests: #Innovative or #Epicfail?

by Dan Reimold

Over the past year, I have noticed an emerging student press trend sweeping the Twitterverse: the tweet greet. An increasing number of student journalists appear to be using Twitter as the prime spot to seek sources for their story or class assignments and to make first contact with these sources. The result: a dramatic rise in brief, public, and sometimes...

• August 15, 2011
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Education

Journalism Textbooks Suffer Slow Path to Publication

by Alexa Capeloto

Rachele Kanigel had two thoughts when she started reading about the journalistic potential of Google+, the new social-networking program that just might push onto Facebook's turf. The first: "This academic year, everyone is going to discover Google+ and student newsrooms are going to be doing a lot with it." The second: "Darn." Kanigel, a journalism professor at San Francisco State...

• August 11, 2011
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EducationShift

The Literacy of Gaming: What Kids Learn From Playing

by Aran Levasseur

"When people learn to play videogames," according to James Paul Gee, "they are learning a new literacy." This is one of the reason kids love playing them: They are learning a new interactive language that grants them access to virtual worlds that are filled with intrigue, engagement and meaningful challenges. And one that feels more congruent with the nature...

• August 3, 2011
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EducationShift

The Parent Show: Will Augmented Reality Be Our Kids' Reality?

by Courtney Lowery Cowgill

This week on MediaShift, we're running a special series exploring the relationship between kids and media. In that vein, the following video from our partners at PBS Parents looks into augmented reality and what that means for kids. In this episode of The Parent Show, Angela Santomero (the creator of "Blue's Clues" and "Super Why?"), talks with PBS Kids' Jeremy...

• August 3, 2011
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Media Usage

Special Series: Kids & Media

by Mark Glaser

We've all been there before. Whining kids at a grocery store with their dad, they can't sit still until finally the dad hands over his iPhone, and peace is restored. Kids are growing up with media all around them, from computers to smartphones to tablets to flat-screen TVs. And even in households without as many screens, kids find ways to...

• August 2, 2011
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EducationShift

Screen Time for Kids: Balancing Fun, Learning, Media Creation

by Tina Barseghian

This week, MediaShift will be running a special series on navigating the relationships between kids and media. Stay tuned all week as we explore topics like this one. When it comes to videogames and apps, what’s a parent to do? On one hand, we’re bombarded with messages about the perils of letting kids play with computer games and gadgets....

• August 1, 2011
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EducationShift

Is Digital Education a Luxury for At-Risk Youth?

by Tina Barseghian

For schools in low-income communities, the idea of investing money, time, and energy into a digital media program or mobile-learning program might seem superfluous. Administrators and teachers already have so much to contend with — safety issues in high-crime communities, chronic student truancies, debilitating health issues due to poverty, families in constant state of flux, not to mention blocked access...

• July 28, 2011
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Ethics

Rethinking Journalism Ethics, Objectivity in the Age of Social Media

by Stephen Ward

In response to the rapidly changing media environment, many schools and academic programs are offering novel approaches to journalism education. This seismic change creates tensions within programs, especially when it comes to how to teach ethics for this increasingly mixed media. In an earlier column, I put forward some principles for teaching ethics amid this media revolution. But these principles...

• July 27, 2011
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Guides

Your Guide to the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal (or 'Hackgate')

by Tristan Stewart-Robertson

From time to time, we provide an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. We've previously covered Twitter, local watchdog news sites, and Net neutrality, among other topics. This week MediaShift U.K. correspondent Tristan Stewart-Robertson looks at the...

• July 26, 2011
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EducationShift

Why Missouri J-School Should Rescind Its Apple Laptop Requirement

by David Teeghman

This story originally appeared on J-School Buzz and was edited and adapted for MediaShift with permission. It was written by David Teeghman, a recent graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. To incoming students in the Missouri School of Journalism planning to buy an Apple MacBook just because it's a J-School requirement, don't do it. Apple computers offer almost nothing...

• July 25, 2011
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EducationShift

Wikipedia Taps College 'Ambassadors' to Broaden Editor Base

by Anne Nelson

From what I can tell, most of my fellow educators spend more time criticizing Wikipedia than engaging with it. The conversation tends to go round in a fairly tiresome circle: The first educator points to an article on the subject of his/her expertise and points to a glaring error to demonstrate that the whole enterprise is worthless. The interlocutor responds...

• July 19, 2011
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EducationShift

College Students Miss the Journalistic Potential of Social Media

by Devin Harner

This piece was co-written by Alexa Capeloto. A couple of days after news broke of Osama bin Laden's killing in Pakistan, a group of students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where we teach journalism, sat in a classroom and talked about how they were first alerted to the story. Most said Facebook. Some said friends or family, primarily...

• July 11, 2011
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EducationShift

How Important Are Writing Skills for Modern Journalists?

by Gary Moskowitz

When I ask my university journalism students why exactly they want to be journalists, a majority tell me it's because they "like to write." Considering most of them are in their 20s and grew up with the Internet, this response always surprises me. With a seemingly endless supply of emerging technology and digital storytelling tools at their fingertips, why pursue...

• July 6, 2011
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EducationShift

Virtual Worlds Are Scary for Parents, Liberating for Kids

by Audrey Watters

There are more than 1 billion users of virtual worlds, online communities where people have avatars and participate in various simulated environments. Even more impressive than that number: Roughly half of those virtual world users are under age 15. With a number of news stories lately about kids under 13 on Facebook (violating the social network's Terms of Service), you'd...

• June 30, 2011
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Social Networking

The Twitter Effect: How Social Media Changes the News Narrative

by Devin Harner

The Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, best known for the bleak and cynically fatalistic love poem, "Dover Beach," once described journalism as "literature in a hurry." As the news cycle has been spurred on by Twitter and social media, and quickened to the point of being nearly instantaneous, I can't help but wonder what Arnold would think of...

• June 28, 2011
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Media Usage

Silicon Sisters Builds Videogames for Women by Women

by Audrey Watters

The stereotypical videogame player is a young male under age 18, but study after study has shown that the majority of the game-playing population does not fall into that demographic. Only 18 percent of gamers are under age 18, and women over 18 represent a significantly greater proportion of this population (37 percent) than do boys age 17 or younger...

• June 27, 2011
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EducationShift

The Case for Videogames as Powerful Tools for Learning

by Aran Levasseur

The famous videogame designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, known for creating some of the most iconic and successful videogames in history, such as Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda, once said, "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock n' roll." In retrospect, we know rock 'n roll's influence has gone beyond creating a new kind of...

• June 13, 2011
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EducationShift

Scienceline: A Case Study in Teaching Specialty Journalism

by Ivan Oransky

I learned how to be a journalist at my college paper. I didn't go to journalism school. But I teach at one, and from the time that I became an adjunct at New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) in 2002, I would periodically think about how to recreate the experience of working at a college paper...

• May 27, 2011
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EducationShift

Why Every Student Should Learn Journalism Skills

by Tina Barseghian

How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturylit. I interviewed Esther...

• May 23, 2011
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EducationShift

Children and Facebook: The Promise and Pitfalls for Social Media

by Tina Barseghian

With more than 500 million Facebook users across the world, it's hard to refute that the social networking site has profoundly changed the way we communicate and share information. But what's the Facebook effect on kids? When it comes to navigating the social networking world -- whether it's Facebook or fan fiction sites -- the terrain becomes even murkier. Parents...

• May 20, 2011
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Mediatwits

Mediatwits #8: LinkedIn's Bubbly IPO; Grueskin on the New York World

by Mark Glaser

Welcome to the eighth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the big IPO of business networking site LinkedIn, with the stock price doubling to more than $90 per share in its first day of trading, valuing the company...

• May 20, 2011
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World View

3 Non-Profits Train Foreign Journalists to Boost Global Coverage

by Rebecca Wolfson

About seven years ago, Global Press Institute founder Cristi Hegranes was working as a foreign correspondent in Nepal. During a visit to a village in the Eastern part of the country, Hegranes offered a pen and notebook to the matriarch of the village, and asked her to write down her own story. "What she came up with was a really...

• May 16, 2011
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EducationShift

NextGen Journal Gives College Students' Spin on Global Events

by Dan Reimold

Connor Toohill is attempting to break the college bubble. Last fall, with the help of friends, Toohill launched NextGen Journal, a student-run news and commentary site, writ large. Its roughly 90 contributors are currently enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. In terms of sheer geography, Toohill has arguably filled college media's biggest niche. At the moment,...

• May 9, 2011
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EducationShift

Columbia J-School Students Try to Keep Professor Off Social Media

by Carla Baranauckas

News of Osama bin Laden's death brought a huge surge of activity to Twitter and other social media platforms Sunday night and Monday. So it's a strange quirk of timing that this is the week that Sree Sreenivasan -- digital media professor, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and longtime social media enthusiast -- has agreed...

• May 4, 2011
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EducationShift

Live-Blog at RJI: Fellows Share Lessons from Spot.Us, NoozYou

by Jen Lee Reeves

COLUMBIA, MO. -- I am live-blogging from the Reynolds Journalism Institute, which is holding a week-long RJInnovation Week. It's a chance for the Institute to look at an incredible number of projects and ideas that are flowing through the organization. Today is focused on the 2010-11 class of RJI fellows. Each fellow gets 45 minutes to present what they worked...

• April 28, 2011
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EducationShift

5 Great Media Literacy Programs and How to Assess Their Impact

by Katie Donnelly

Increasingly, Public Media 2.0 projects are moving not only beyond broadcast to social and mobile platforms, but into the realms of digital and media literacy training. Producers of such projects recognize that in order to participate fully in the new media world, children and adults need to be able to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a wide variety...

• April 21, 2011
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Business

Dan Gillmor Excited by Experiments by Entrepreneurial Journalists

by Dorian Benkoil

Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here. He's an entrepreneur, author and outspoken evangelist of entrepreneurial journalism, but Dan Gillmor wants you to know he doesn't...

• April 18, 2011
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EducationShift

Many Journalism Schools Put Minimal Effort into Facebook Pages

by Jennifer Paull

As students at the Missouri School of Journalism, we've learned about the importance of social media to the news industry. But beyond the scope of journalism, we use social media every day just to communicate with each other. From perusing Spring Break pictures to keeping up with friends' birthdays, Facebook and Twitter are constant companions for many college students. So...

• April 11, 2011
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EducationShift

5 Teachable Lessons From the Washington Post's Mistake

by Nathan Gibbs

It's rare for the public to see news sausage in the grinder. The gore of the editing process is kept from view. Yet while the factory floor of the newsroom may be less sanitary than a meat processing plant, a glimpse inside the news process may still be more likely to inspire confidence in the final product. We got such...

• March 31, 2011
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EducationShift

Why Missouri's J-School Should Rethink Its Approach to Twitter

by Jennifer Paull

Do you check the official Twitter feed for the Missouri School of Journalism on a regular basis? Probably not, based on its dismal number of followers. As of today, the official Twitter account of Mizzou's J-School had just 630 followers. That is a far cry from most other top journalism schools and a negative reflection on our own. How does...

• March 15, 2011
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EducationShift

What John Keats Can Tell Us About Teaching Journalism

by Devin Harner

Perhaps it's because I've got a Ph.D. in English and a background in print journalism, but when I consider the state of the press today, it brings to mind the poet John Keats' idea of negative capability. In a letter he wrote to his brother in December 1817, Keats described the concept as "when man is capable of being in...

• March 10, 2011
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EducationShift

How to Integrate Social Tools into the Journalism Classroom

by Nathan Gibbs

Integrating social media into university classrooms can be a daunting task for many journalism educators. Professors are typically required to use clunky online systems for grading and communicating with students. It's an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. These awkward systems don't inspire creativity, enrich collaboration, or instill a passion for experimentation -- all of which are required to survive and succeed in a rapidly changing media industry.

• February 24, 2011
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EducationShift

UPIU Mentors, Publishes Student Journalists Around the Globe

by Dan Reimold

Suleiman Abdullahi was recently an eyewitness to the birth of the world's newest nation.
In early January, the 20-year-old Kenyan journalism student flew to Juba, Sudan to cover the massive referendum responsible for the creation and upcoming independence of South Sudan. As Abdullahi wrote, he arrived in the prospective nation's capital city with a travel visa, a press pass, a story budget, and a 48-hour window to interview, observe, and report upon "the history that was about to be made."

By the end of his first day, he was under arrest.

• February 18, 2011
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EducationShift

Blizzard Builds KOMU Community with Mobile Video, Facebook

by Jen Lee Reeves

I've always dreamed of a time when my community could come together with the help of our on-air and online collaboration. All it took was a blizzard to make it happen. Mid-Missouri was hit with a blizzard-like storm that dumped 17.5 inches of snow into Columbia, Mo., and even more south of the city. The entire viewing audience of KOMU-TV was home and stuck inside.

• February 17, 2011
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EducationShift

5 Principles for Teaching Journalism Ethics in the Digital Age

by Stephen Ward

Our global media ecology is a chaotic landscape evolving at a furious pace. Professional journalists share the journalistic sphere with tweeters, bloggers, citizen journalists and social media users around the world. The digital revolution poses a practical challenge to journalists: How can they use the new media tools responsibly?

• February 15, 2011
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EducationShift

NYU's Studio 20 Creates Innovative, Collaborative Hothouse

by Corbin Hiar

This week, three senior staffers from ProPublica will visit the second class of students enrolled in the Studio 20 program at NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. The reporters and students will begin formally collaborating on a question the non-profit newsroom has puzzled over since its founding in 2008: How can you quickly and clearly summarize the basic facts of the investigations ProPublica specializes in?

• January 24, 2011
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EducationShift

Aussie Academic Journal to Publish Peer-Reviewed Journalism

by Julie Posetti

An Australian journalism professor has started an online academic journal with a twist: It publishes journalism, rather than just studies of journalists and their work. The fledgling journal -- believed to be the first of its kind in the world -- is called Research Journalism and it's the initiative of Edith Cowan University journalism lecturer Dr. Kayt Davies.

• January 20, 2011
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EducationShift

Learning How to Teach Multimedia Journalism

by Nathan Gibbs

Doing multimedia journalism and teaching it are two very different things. The past semester marked my first as an adjunct professor. It was probably the best thing I could have done for my own education.

• January 7, 2011
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EducationShift

Should Journalism Schools Give Students Specialized Beats?

by Alexandra Bosanac

Does journalism education need a new approach? The University of Toronto thinks so. In fact, Robert Steiner, director of the journalism lab at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, thinks the school's proposed master's of journalism program currently under consideration is the future of journalism.

• January 4, 2011
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EducationShift

J-School Incubator News21 Balances Investigations, Innovation

by Corbin Hiar

During the slow news week of Thanksgiving, two articles about the shortcomings of the National Transportation Safety Board were published on the websites of Fox News and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland. On the busiest travel week of the year, their story selections would be unsurprising were it not for their provenance. Both were written over three months earlier by students taking part in News21, an immersive journalism education program.

• December 15, 2010
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Ethics

WikiLeaks and the Power of Patriotism

by Stephen Ward

A narrow patriotism -- the psychological equivalent of a knee jerk -- is an under-recognized force in modern journalism ethics. It distorts our thinking about the role of journalism as soon as journalists offend national pride and whistleblowers dare to reveal secrets. Narrow patriotism turns practitioners of a free press into scolding censors. Suddenly, independent journalists become dastardly law breakers....

• December 14, 2010
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EducationShift

J-Schools Shift from Learning Labs to Major Media Players

by Geneva Overholser

Perhaps the most striking change for journalism schools is the degree to which we have shifted from being learning labs whose actual journalism (if any) was limited in its distribution and impact, to being significant -- even major -- media players in our communities. It is clear that in journalism schools across the United States major projects are increasingly making substantial contributions toward filling the holes left by the hollowing out of local "legacy" media.

• December 9, 2010
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EducationShift

UBC Students, Globe and Mail Investigate Hidden Cost of Shrimp

by Alfred Hermida

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.

• December 6, 2010
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EducationShift

10 Reasons Our Student Newspaper Blog Stinks

by Dan Reimold

Amid many scoops and successes this semester, The Minaret, the weekly campus paper I advise at the University of Tampa, has endured a major bust. Roughly three months in, our efforts to launch a buzzworthy and newsworthy blog have failed -- spectacularly.

• December 2, 2010
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EducationShift

Why We Gave Our Students Droid Smartphones to Capture News

by Wayne MacPhail

This semester at Ryerson University in Toronto, thanks to help from Motorola and Telus, a major Canadian cell phone provider, my fellow third-year online journalism instructor Vinita Srivastava and I have been able to provide all our two dozen students with Android-powered Droid smartphones.

• November 29, 2010
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Thought Leader Q&A

Knight Fellows Switch from Sabbaticals to Hands-On Projects

by Mark Glaser

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. For much of the past 40 years, the idea of a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University was a dream come true for mid-career journalists,...

• October 19, 2010
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EducationShift

How Journalism Teachers are Failing, and How to Stop It

by Wayne MacPhail

I am writing this article on an iPad which is tapped wirelessly into a coffee shop's WiFi. The device knows where it is in space and, if I allow it, will broadcast that information to any application I choose. Nearby, a young man browses the web on his iPhone. A woman is using a Blackberry. We are all online, all wireless and all capable of sending video, audio or text anywhere in the world.

• September 29, 2010
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EducationShift

The Challenge of Digital Media in the Classroom

by Anne Nelson

This fall, more than 70 million students headed back to school in America, of which 50 million are going to public elementary and secondary schools, and a record 19.1 million are enrolled in colleges and universities. These students are wired as never before -- in school, at home, and at every stop in between. It is now commonplace to see third-graders with their own cell phones, and even junior high schools expect students to work from a laptop with an Internet connection.

• September 22, 2010
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EducationShift

Professors Speak Out About Changes Coming to J-Schools

by Sandra Ordonez

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. This article was co-authored by Abby Moon. A previous article on MediaShift mined the OurBlook series of interviews with leading journalists and academics to...

• September 20, 2010
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EducationShift

NYC J-Schools Take Divergent Paths on Training, Hyper-Local

by Davis Shaver

Universities around the country have had to shift the approach of their journalism programs to accommodate a quickly changing media landscape. New York City's journalism schools, in particular, are working to rethink their offerings and adapt to the new world.

• September 13, 2010
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EducationShift

Columbia, Medill Training New Breed of Programmer-Journalists

by Craig Silverman

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. Roughly two years ago, a group of prominent journalism educators, administrators and academics gathered in a room at Columbia University. Attendees included Nicholas Lemann,...

• September 9, 2010
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EducationShift

How College Students Became Mini-Media Moguls in School

by Dan Reimold

In April 2007, Zephyr Basine arrived at school for her noontime biology seminar -- and immediately zoned out. Instead of learning science, the sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst carried out a "fashion-scoping session." While the professor spoke about organisms and evolution, Basine focused on her fellow students' outfits and accessories, scouting for something new, chic or trendy.

• September 8, 2010
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EducationShift

Spending the Summer in 'Journalist Law School'

by Nick Baumann

What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a journalist? Most of the time, of course, you get a lawyer. You know: The kids who worked so hard on the college paper but jetted off to Boalt when the prospect of years of unpaid internships scared them off. Most journalists remember a few people like that. (I know a dozen or so.)

• September 7, 2010
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4MR

4 Minute Roundup: Helping Journalism Students Get Tech Skills

by Mark Glaser

In this week's 4MR podcast I talk about MediaShift's "Beyond J-School" series so far, including the stories on teaching social media, the 5Across roundtable and Jen Lee Reeves' take on getting j-students over their fear of technology. I talked with Reeves more about how she is asking her students this semester to pay $36 each for Lynda.com courses on learning the basics of Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Reeves talked candidly about her students and their fears of failing with technology.

• September 3, 2010
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EducationShift

Business, Entrepreneurial Skills Come to Journalism School

by Dorian Benkoil

For decades, journalists in mainstream news organizations were shielded from the revenue side of the operation. Many argued their lack of knowledge helped avoid even the appearance of commercial influence in the editorial well. But with increased stress in the news industry and new disruptive technologies giving even entry-level reporters an understanding of audience behaviors and income streams, things have started to shift.

• September 3, 2010
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EducationShift

How to Conquer Journalism Students' Fear of Technology

by Jen Lee Reeves

In a time and age when many of my generation assume the younger generation understands technology, I have been surprised by the number of students who walk into my class and announce that they "don't know anything about computers." It's a rampant attitude. I beg each and every student who says this to pretend they never said it and try everything I introduce to them in my class.

• September 2, 2010
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EducationShift

Revamping J-Schools in Australia to Bring in 'Citizens Agenda'

by Julie Posetti

As Australian democracy hangs in the balance, and with the outcome of the August 21 national election unlikely to be resolved for weeks, I'm considering the implications for journalism education -- and how we can invent new models for political reporting.

• September 1, 2010
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EducationShift

Special Series: Beyond J-School

by Mark Glaser

After the success last month with our "Beyond Content Farms" series, we decided to do another in-depth special series on MediaShift. This time the series will look at "Beyond J-School," chronicling how journalism education and training are changing, and how journalists need more than traditional j-school. They need multimedia skills, social media knowledge, community management chops, and must learn to collaborate with their audience. It's more than just learning the basics of journalism: They also need more background in business, entrepreneurship, technology and even programming.

• August 31, 2010
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5Across

5Across: Beyond J-School

by Mark Glaser

Just as traditional media has struggled with disruptive technology and the Internet, so too have the institutions that run journalism education. Most journalism schools and training programs are run by people whose careers were framed by print, broadcast and traditional PR, so how can students get the skills they need in the digital age? We convened a group of journalism educators, a trainer, a student and a J-school dropout to discuss how journalism education is shifting.

• August 31, 2010
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EducationShift

How to Teach Social Media in Journalism Schools

by Alfred Hermida

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.

• August 30, 2010
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EducationShift

Social Media, Entrepreneurship Dominate AEJMC 2010

by Christina Mueller

The problem with five jam-packed days of panels and events is that you can't do it all. Presentations and business meetings for the 93rd annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), which was held in Denver earlier this month, ran concurrently from 7 a.m. until, for some, after midnight. I hustled from my booth in the exhibit hall to sit in on sessions across the different groups, but especially to eavesdrop on discussions among attendees.

• August 19, 2010
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EducationShift

Journalism Education 2.0: Training in an Age of Radical Change

by Julie Posetti

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. "We are not going to make it with uninspired and uninspiring teachers!" Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged delegates in his closing address to the second...

• August 5, 2010
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EducationShift

Learning From Failure in Community-Building at Missouri

by Jen Lee Reeves

I recently had an opportunity that is rarely handed to a journalism school professor: The chance to be a member of the inaugural class of the Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellows in the 2008-09 school year. I already have a unique job.

• July 30, 2010
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EducationShift

How Content Farms Train Their Writers to Write for the Web

by Craig Silverman

At the core of every content farm's success is an ability to rapidly recruit and integrate new writers. Publishers like Demand Media, Examiner.com, Suite 101 and others are always hiring, always looking to expand their ranks and replace talent that churns out. These operations rely on abundance: of contributors, of content, of traffic.

• July 22, 2010
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EducationShift

Rethinking the Role of the Journalist in the Participatory Age

by Alfred Hermida

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.

• July 9, 2010
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EducationShift

The Influencer Project Showcases 60 Speakers in 60 Minutes

by Neal Rodriguez

The world is flooded with multi-day web marketing conferences and other educational opportunities aimed at teaching people how to use social media. But this week the shortest social media conference ever lined up 60 thought leaders to speak for 60 seconds each.

• July 8, 2010
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EducationShift

Free Online Journalism Classes Begin To Gain Ground

by Andria Krewson

The CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is currently teaching a free online journalism class through Peer 2 Peer University, an online community of "open study groups for short university-level courses." The online class syncs with a graduate-level class Ito teaches at Keio University in Japan, and features a UStream presentation and IRC chat once a week.

• June 28, 2010
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EducationShift

Your Guide to Digital Training Programs for Mid-Career Journalists

by Craig Silverman

The pace of change in journalism over the last few years has left many experienced journalists feeling as though the profession is passing them by. So how can a mid-career journalist build their digital and multimedia skills? Get training, and fast. Luckily there is a wealth of free or reasonably priced workshops, tutorials and other forms of training available online and in person.

• June 23, 2010
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EducationShift

Is Aussie Journalism Education Lagging in Teaching Online Skills?

by Tammi Ireland

I graduated last year with a journalism degree from Curtin University of Technology in Bentley, Western Australia. As with many journalism programs, the first year was an introduction to print and broadcast. It wasn't until the latter half of second year that the word "online" was used. That's too late in my book.

• June 21, 2010
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EducationShift

What Skills Will Future Journalists Need?

by Sandra Ordonez

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at learn.news21.com. For the past two years, OurBlook.com has been conducting interviews with top experts in journalism and media about the future of journalism. In my...

• June 9, 2010
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Social Networking

Social Media Training: From Conferences to the Classroom

by Neal Rodriguez

She sat in a chair signing an autograph, as the camera's flashes made the stones on her Ms. America crown sparkle. A man knelt about five feet in front of American royalty and drew a sketch of her on the iPad. Caressa Cameron, Miss America 2010, was addressing the audience at the 140 Character conference in New York City last...

• May 28, 2010
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World View

College Media in Iraq Offers Independent Voice for Students

by Dan Reimold

When Namo Kaftan was 9 years old, his father, a biomedical engineer, brought a laptop from work home to the family's residence in Sulaimani, Iraq. For Kaftan, now 21, it was love at first boot-up. "I was really amazed to see a new advanced technology like that," he said. "I guess at that time nobody even knew what it was...

• May 10, 2010
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MagazineShift

The Ethics of Digital Magazine Advertising

by Susan Currie Sivek

In my recent discussions with magazine editors, executives and experts, I've heard a lot about how magazines will integrate new forms of advertising, and "monetization" opportunities, into their digital content. From digital editions to social media to mobile apps, magazines are exploring a variety of ways to provide advertisers with novel opportunities to reach audiences, just as they have in...

• April 28, 2010
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EducationShift

How Arizona State Teaches Digital Media Entrepreneurs

by Craig Silverman

Two weeks ago, I sat in a room at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University and listened as several groups of students delivered their pitches. At most journalism schools, this would have involved the students proposing ideas for articles or TV or radio reports. Instead, the groups of three or four students stood...

• April 27, 2010
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EducationShift

How Going Online Can Help Save Struggling College Papers

by Dan Reimold

In an old episode of "The West Wing," a leader of an AIDS-stricken African nation tells the president plainly, "It's a terrible thing to beg for your life." The quote comes to mind as I read about the current plight of the Technician, the student newspaper at North Carolina State University. In a recent editorial, the few remaining staff at...

• April 12, 2010
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4MR

4-Minute Roundup: Apple's iAds; Journo-Programming Degree

by Mark Glaser

Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at Apple's plan to enter mobile advertising with its new iAd platform. Apple has been known for hardware and software but has never handled ad sales before, and now finds itself squarely in competition with Google and AdMob in that arena. Plus, Columbia University announced a...

• April 9, 2010
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World View

Navigating Media Ethics and Censorship in Dubai

by Stephen Ward

Around the world, dozens of organizations, from Freedom House to Reporters Without Borders, advance the ideal of a free press and a free citizenry. The ideal suggests there is one type of free press to be secured globally: the Western model of a constitutionally protected free press. What stands over and against the free press? The typical examples are the...

• April 7, 2010
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EducationShift

Journalism Fellowships Adapt to Meet Economic, Digital Challenges

by Jaclyn Schiff

For years, journalism fellowships have afforded young and mid-career journalists the opportunity to hone their craft, pick up new skills and learn more about their beats. These paid programs last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a full year, and often require journalists to take time off from the newsroom. The resource site JournalismJobs.com lists more than 40 programs...

• February 10, 2010
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EducationShift

Flexibility, Freelance Key for Journalism Grads in Tough Job Market

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• January 20, 2010
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Media Usage

8 Lessons Journalists Can Learn From Scientists

by Andria Krewson

The ScienceOnline10 conference starts this Thursday, and about 275 scientists, educators and science writers from around the world will gather near Raleigh, N.C. to discuss many of the same online tools and issues that journalists are examining. Sessions will focus on topics like "citizen scientists," crowdsourcing, and the best iPhone apps for gathering and sharing information. The conference is sold...

• January 13, 2010
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Public MediaShift

How to Avoid Ethical Snags in Non-Profit Journalism

by Stephen Ward

The nature of non-profit journalism invites ethical dilemmas. Over the past few years, dozens of centers of investigative journalism and non-profit websites have been started using money from foundations, individual donors and membership fees. The latest trend is non-profit networks that share resources. Collaboration is a good thing, but it can lead to tensions among collaborators. How can such centers...

• January 4, 2010
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Thought Leader Q&A

Stanford Program Breaks Down Walls Between Business, Tech Journalism

by Mark Glaser

I am so used to hearing about innovation in journalism that when I first heard about the Innovation Journalism program at Stanford, I assumed that's what it focused on. Not exactly. The VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism actually focused on helping journalists cover the field of innovation. David Nordfors, a Swedish punk rocker-turned-molecular-physicist-turned-journalist, found that journalists were stuck in...

• December 10, 2009
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EducationShift

How Programmer/Journalists Craft Their Own Study Programs

by Megan Taylor

After writing about the skills a journalist/programmer might need, I thought it would be interesting to see what college students are learning. For the most part, journalism education has not caught up with the innovations taking place in the industry. Many programs don't offer more than an introduction to working with the web, so some students have to teach themselves....

• December 2, 2009
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NewspaperShift

In Search of the Perfect Skillset for a Programmer/Journalist

by Megan Taylor

In my first post about programmer/journalists, I wrote about the "how computer-assisted reporting (CAR) evolved into this new role. Although not all programmer/journalists started with CAR, that skillset is still the basis for any programmer/journalist. CAR skills start with obtaining data and public records. Knowing where to find this information, either online or by request, is the starting point for...

• September 8, 2009
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Media Usage

The Importance and Challenges of Universal Media Literacy Education

by Mark Hannah

Elizabeth Thoman, the godmother of the "media literacy" movement recently told me that the Internet has endowed her field with a sense of salience, if not urgency. "As long as media literacy education was about television, it was perceived to be fluff," she said. "But when the Internet came along, kids didn't know how to cite sources online, and they...

• August 27, 2009
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EducationShift

Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand

by Alfred Hermida

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,...

• August 19, 2009
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EducationShift

Why Do Some College Newspapers Still Have No Web Presence?

by Bryan Murley

Summer's almost over and college newspapers across the country will be cranking up to full speed soon. Likely, they'll be getting ready for further adventures in online journalism, expanding their online presence while attempting to keep the print product financially successful. But hard as it is to believe, there are still student newspapers around the country that have no online...

• August 11, 2009
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NewspaperShift

How Computer-Assisted Reporters Evolved into Programmer/Journalists

by Megan Taylor

It wasn't until half-way through my journalism degree that I realized I wasn't going to be a traditional reporter. I wasn't even going to be a multimedia reporter. I was going to be a programmer/journalist. Putting a slash in your title makes you more important. I haven't been able to track down the first use of the phrase, but the...

• August 7, 2009
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EducationShift

Revamped Journalist's Role More About Mindset Than Multimedia Tricks

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• July 23, 2009
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Social Media

Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter

by Julie Posetti

Twitter's role in the Iranian election aftermath leaves no doubt about its power as a global, real time, citizen-journalism style news wire service, along with a tool for facilitating dissent, while countering the view of Twitter as simply a zone for egotistical banality. But it also highlighted Twitter's role as a platform and content generator for traditional media outlets,...

• June 19, 2009
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EducationShift

Why is American University Becoming Center for New Journalism?

by Mark Glaser

I visited American University last month to try to answer a burning question for me: Why was the School of Communications there becoming such a hotbed for new forms of journalism? The Center for Social Media is there. The J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, moved to American from the University of Maryland. And Charles Lewis, the founder of...

• June 18, 2009
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EducationShift

Is University of Missouri's iPod Touch 'Requirement' Fair?

by Bryan Murley

The news out of the Missouri School of Journalism two weeks ago was a little confusing. The school announced it would be requiring all incoming freshmen journalism pre-majors to purchase an iPod Touch or iPhone. At least that was the lede in stories by the Columbia Missourian and The Maneater. But the "requirement" wasn't really a "requirement," if you read...

• May 20, 2009
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NewspaperShift

Should Newspapers Create Consortium for E-Readers?

by Mark Glaser

COLUMBIA, MO -- I am attending a half-day symposium here at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri's journalism school, this time a meeting of the "Digital Publishing Alliance," a group of newspapers and tech folks who are looking at how newspaper content might work on various e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. The timing of the meeting is...

• May 6, 2009
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Business

Live-Blogging RJI Symposium on New Tools, New Business Models

by Mark Glaser

COLUMBIA, MO -- I am at the new Reynolds Journalism Institute building on the campus of the University of Missouri, my alma mater. It's interesting to be in a new building looking out on a campus that is so familiar and so different now. The mission of the RJI is to "develop and test ways to improve journalism through...

• May 5, 2009
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EducationShift

Advice from the Pros to Journalism Graduates

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• May 1, 2009
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EducationShift

NYU J-School Students Unsure of Future in Changing Industry

by Alana Taylor

I have no idea what I will do when I graduate. I am majoring in journalism at New York University -- a fantastic university in an incredible city -- but my confidence in what career I will pursue after graduation remains unclear. Should I go after my passion for writing? Should I take a crack at my web video skills?...

• April 21, 2009
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EducationShift

How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail

by Roland Legrand

Journalism is changing rapidly due to social media, and these changes can be bewildering as people wonder how to keep up. I recently gave a social media workshop for journalism students, and I soon realized that many students were still unaware of social media other than Facebook. They were shocked to hear about feed readers, blogs, or micro-blogging and asked...

• April 14, 2009
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EducationShift

Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• April 13, 2009
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Business

College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis

by Bryan Murley

If you're like me, you know more about economics now than you ever thought you'd want to know. I can describe a Credit Default Swap (CDS), a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO), a Mortgage Backed Security (MBS), mark-to-market accounting, and the LIBOR index, not to mention the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP), U3 and U6, and the difference between a liquidity...

• April 10, 2009
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Embedded Report

Developing Social Media Workshops for Journalists

by Roland Legrand

For the last few weeks, my colleague Raphael and I have been organizing a series of social media workshops for our fellow journalists at the Belgian business newspapers and websites De Tijd and L'Echo. I'd like to open this up to reader suggestions, so let me tell you what we intend to cover in this course -- and I hope...

• March 4, 2009
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Business

Read for Free, Pay for Print or Stuff

by Michael Josefowicz

The discussion about micro-payments and "pay to read" goes round and round because it ignores a basic fact. Most people, most of the time, do not read newspapers. They view, scan and search newspapers. Selling words to viewers, scanners and searchers is hard, but since viewers and scanners are always background-searching for stuff they might need, selling them stuff is...

• February 25, 2009
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EducationShift

5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them

by Bryan Murley

When people talk about online innovation in college media, they tend to start big and stay there. And it's true that large circulation college newspapers (and big name journalism programs) have been doing some impressive things online, but the need to innovate extends to smaller journalism programs as well. And for them, the challenges can be daunting. So what are...

• February 18, 2009
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EducationShift

Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• February 10, 2009
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EducationShift

How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections

by Julie Posetti

The micro-blogging platform Twitter was the breakthrough social media tool for journalists in 2008. It became a pipeline for breaking news for both professional reporters and citizen journalists, with the massacre in Mumbai, the Hudson River plane crash and Obama's inauguration highlighting its effectiveness as a source of live, user-generated online content. Journalists increasingly used it to cross-promote their own...

• February 3, 2009
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AdvertisingShift

College Newspapers Finally Hit by Economic Downturn

by Bryan Murley

As the newspaper industry has struggled with declining revenue, some analysts predicted that college newspapers would weather the storms of the changing media environment better than their peers in the wider industry. (See also this Chronicle of Higher Education article.) Now the national economy indicates that the future might not be quite so rosy: The widespread economic pains in the...

• January 28, 2009
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EducationShift

UBC Begins Study Program of New Media and Society

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• January 22, 2009
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Business

Live Blog: RJI TalkFest on Serving Entrepreneurial Journalists

by Mark Glaser

I am virtually covering the all-day sessions at the RJI TalkFest today, held at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute. I will be watching in via Adobe Connect, where I can hear and see what's going on and chat in the chat room. The agenda includes sessions on community-building, advertising and marketing, news and information and mobile. The live-blogging...

• January 21, 2009
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Education

Experimentation (Not Stagnation) Should Flourish at J-Schools

by Julie Posetti

Some journalism academics may be even more scared of new technology and more resistant to change than the worst print "dinosaurs" working in media today. But Web 2.0 has made getting online so simple that there are no more excuses for being disconnected. While some reporters see journalism education as a potential refuge from the rapid pace of change in...

• January 16, 2009
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EducationShift

The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• December 22, 2008
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EducationShift

J-Students Take Multiplatform Approach to City Politics

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• December 1, 2008
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EducationShift

College Media Has Come A Long Way Online

by Bryan Murley

With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it's easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind. I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas,...

• November 19, 2008
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Embeds

NYU Local Blog Connects a School with No Campus

by Alana Taylor

The idea for NYU Local, the newest addition to New York University's list of publications, was born last year when founder and editor Cody Brown, 20, came up with the idea for a survey to be conducted by the Foundations of Journalism class. The survey question asked other NYU students: "Would you trade your right to vote for an iPod...

• November 5, 2008
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EducationShift

Learning How to Make Multimedia Story Decisions

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• October 27, 2008
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Legal Drama

Teacher Fired for Inappropriate Behavior on MySpace Page

by Jeffrey D. Neuburger

It's not just students who can get into difficulty for school-related blogging. In a recent case, a federal court rejected a challenge brought by a non-tenured teacher when the public school at which he taught decided not to renew his contract. The school had accused the teacher of overly familiar contacts with students via his MySpace page that were deemed...

• October 15, 2008
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EducationShift

J-Schools Use Geo-tagging, Wikis, iPhones to Teach

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• October 14, 2008
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Weblogs

Journalists Consider Risks, Conflicts of Running Personal Blogs

by Simon Owens

Implementing strategies developed by millions of office workers who have honed the practice of flipping from computer solitaire to spreadsheets at the first sign of a lurking supervisor, I hid my blog from my co-workers. I had been a blogger for nearly four years by the time I entered the newspaper industry in 2006, and when I later accepted a...

• October 7, 2008
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Digging Deeper

NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student

by Mark Glaser

After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn't take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting -- even though the class she...

• September 17, 2008
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Embedded Report

Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility

by Alfred Hermida

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...

• September 15, 2008
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Embedded Report

Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School

by Alana Taylor

"Nowadays it's essential for journalists to blog," says Professor Mary Quigley to a class of 16 NYU journalism students. The class is titled "Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers)," and it's one of the few NYU undergrad journalism classes that focuses on new media. I sit in Professor Quigley's class unsure of what to expect. As a member of Generation...

• September 5, 2008
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EducationShift

Journalism School Students Get Fewer Textbooks, Collaborate More

by Alfred Hermida

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.

• September 3, 2008
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EducationShift

Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism

by Alfred Hermida

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.

• August 15, 2008
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EducationShift

University of British Columbia Takes Integrated Approach to Teaching Journalism

by Alfred Hermida

"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.

• August 4, 2008
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Thought Leader Q&A

Young Newspaper Journalists Could Flee Because of Slow Pace of Change

by Mark Glaser

As the layoffs and buyouts pile up in U.S. the newspaper industry, and Romenesko becomes a daily wake, there is one other troubling problem: Young journalists are less willing to stay at newspapers because the papers are so slow to change their culture.

• July 23, 2008
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Digging Deeper

Who Killed the Online Journalism Review and Will It Live Again?

by Mark Glaser

For more than 10 years, the Online Journalism Review was published by the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California as a place to follow the struggles and triumphs in the nascent field of online journalism. But on June 16, editor Robert Niles posted a note to the site titled, Goodbye, explaining that USC was suspending publication of OJR and that he would be leaving the school.

• July 10, 2008
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Open Source Reporting

Educational Centers for Journalism Experiments

by Mark Glaser

Will print newspapers exist in 10 years? How will we fund investigative journalism in the future? How can journalists learn to do reporting, moderating communities, filtering content, building Google Maps and all the other technical and online duties they will need to know?

• June 23, 2008
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MobileShift

12 Lessons Learned from Locative Media Project at Medill

by Hilary Powell

Lojo Connect, our ten-week project that has explored ways that newsrooms can use location-based storytelling, including online interactive maps and GPS-driven stories, is coming to a close. You can read our previous posts on MediaShift to learn more about our project and limitations we encountered along the way.

• June 12, 2008
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NewspaperShift

Post-Mortem on the Multimedia Boot Camp

by Mark Glaser

For five and a half days, a group of mostly newspaper journalists (with a few broadcasters and non-profit folks thrown in) took an intensive boot camp multimedia training at UC Berkeley through the Knight Digital Media Center. The idea was to learn as much as possible about shooting and editing video, capturing and editing audio, building Flash animations, doing...

• May 27, 2008
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NewspaperShift

Flash Techniques, and the Participatory Push by Current TV

by Mark Glaser

BERKELEY, CALIF. -- The week-long training at UC Berkeley in multimedia has now moved to a new phase. After getting basic background on audio, video and photographic equipment, we went out into the field on our group's assignment. My group, Team Gecko, went to visit Professor Robert Full to learn about the work he's done in biomechanics. Full's lab...

• May 21, 2008
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NewspaperShift

Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso

by Mark Glaser

It's now Day 3 in the marathon week-long multimedia boot camp at UC Berkeley run by the Knight Digital Media Center. We have broken into groups to create various multimedia stories, and later today we'll go out to do our primary interviews and video shoots. My group will be meeting with Robert Full, a professor who studies robotics based on animal movements.

• May 20, 2008
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NewspaperShift

Hands-On Training with Videocameras and Shooting for the Web

by Mark Glaser

BERKELEY, CALIF. -- After our long storyboarding sessions, it's now time to move into more hands-on training and seminars on doing video shooting, audio recording, digital photography and using Macintosh computers. So far, there's been a good mix of lectures, discussions and collaborative work on storyboards for our projects. The group is very inquisitive, and the instructors have done...

• May 19, 2008
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NewspaperShift

Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job

by Mark Glaser

BERKELEY, CALIF. -- It's Day 2 at the Knight Digital Media Center's week-long boot camp for journalists learning to do multimedia reports. On the agenda for the day is learning about doing "storyboarding," or laying out how a multimedia report will work. And there will also be some basic tutorials on using videocameras and techniques in video shooting. (Some...

• May 19, 2008
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NewspaperShift

Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists

by Mark Glaser

BERKELEY, CALIF. -- With MediaShift, I've always had a plan to add video and audio along with all the text reports I do here. As I want to "walk my talk" about media outlets using multimedia, I felt it made sense to do them myself. This week, I'll be auditing a week-long boot camp in multimedia training at the...

• May 18, 2008
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MobileShift

Medill Students Use 'Locative Media' for Mobile Storytelling

by Amy Lee

If you've ever been on an audio tour of a museum or tooled around with an interactive map, you've experienced "locative media." Reliant on numerous emerging mobile and location-based technologies (from GPS-enabled mobile phones to Google Maps-based applications), locative storytelling provides multimedia content that enhances a user's connection to a given place.

• May 13, 2008
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EducationShift

The New Rules of Media

by Mark Glaser

Last week, I had the honor of giving a speech at Arkansas State University, as part of their Lecture & Concert series -- at least, once I made it through the mechanical mayhem of American Airlines cancelling dozens of flights the same day I flew out. I also got to address a few classes in the College of Communications...

• March 31, 2008
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Digging Deeper

In Digital Age, Journalism Students Need Business, Entrepreneurial Skills

by Mark Glaser

The traditional path of a journalism career has clearly shifted. In the past, a journalism student would learn about being a newspaper reporter, then take a job at a small-town paper, eventually moving up to a medium and then larger paper. Now, the reporter might launch a blog, an audio podcast or video reports as a one-person operation, handling editorial and business duties simultaneously.

• January 30, 2008
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Philosophy

The 14 Messages of New Media

by Robert K. Logan

New media have certainly changed the landscape of communications and education in an even more dramatic manner than electronic mass media did as was documented and analyzed by "Marshall McLuhan" in 1964. I had the good fortune to collaborate with Marshall back in the 1970s and have tried to carry on his tradition, as have others, by focusing on the impact of media independent of their content. McLuhan's pithy way of describing this approach was through the use of his one-liner "the medium is the message," which he made famous in his '64 book "Understanding Media."

• August 6, 2007
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Jennifer Woodard Maderazo

'Open Universities' Try to Bring College to Masses

by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo

A college education in the United States can be one of the most costly in the world. For many young people, college isn't an option because of the economic strain it represents for their families. And many older people who would like to attend classes must forego studies to make ends meet. But thanks to the power of voluntary...

• July 20, 2007
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Digging Deeper

New Media Literacy as Important for Educators as Students

by Mark Glaser

For so long, the focus of media literacy education has been on helping students understand the media they consume. What are the biases? Who owns what outlet? How are news reports produced? But with the rise of new media, perhaps the focus of media literacy education should shift to educating the educators -- and other adults -- about blogs,...

• June 6, 2007
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EducationShift

Journalism Education Stuck in Same Oldthink Mode as Big Media

by Mark Glaser

When I visited the campus of Ball State University recently, I was struck by the number of innovative programs the school had carried out, from a live interactive TV local broadcast to its converged newsroom. Ball State is also home to the well endowed Center for Media Design, which conducted one of the most comprehensive (and expensive) usage studies,...

• April 9, 2007
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Your Take

Should bloggers avoid conflicts of interest as journalists do?

by Mark Glaser

With so many journalists now blogging -- thanks to so many mainstream media websites adding journalist blogs -- the question is whether this new wave of bloggers will bring a different ethos to blogging. Say what you will about mainstream media's various foibles and biases, but professional journalists often keep the interest of their readers -- instead of their own self-interests -- paramount. The journalist's code of ethics requires that a reporter should "avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived." But in the blogosphere, the rules are a bit fuzzier.

• November 17, 2006
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Digging Deeper

News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?

by Mark Glaser

In May 2005, you could almost hear the flourish of trumpets when the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation joined with five prominent journalism graduate schools in pledging $6 million over three years to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

• August 30, 2006
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Digging Deeper

Mark Cuban's Sharesleuth Takes Business Reporting to Ethical Edge

by Mark Glaser

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has one of the best named weblogs, Blog Maverick, because he is nothing if not a maverick in the technology, sports and online worlds. He shepherded his Broadcast.com streaming multimedia company through a successful initial public offering in 1998 and sold it to Yahoo in 1999 for more than $5 billion. Cuban used the proceeds to start high-definition TV networks, HDNet, buy Landmark Movie theaters and buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA team. He's probably the only major team owner who asks fans to email him feedback.

• August 22, 2006
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Media Usage

'Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education'

by Henry Jenkins

Some years ago, my wife, my son, and I came to a parting of the ways with the Sommerville Public School System. We felt the schooling process was failing our son. The science teacher conducted no experiments but simply had students write answers to study questions while he worked crossword puzzles in front of the class. The literature instructor had managed to walk them paragraph by paragraph through a single, not particularly challenging novel for the entire school year. And the history class had not progressed much past the American Revolution after 9 months.

• July 14, 2006
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Media Usage

Learning By Remixing

by Henry Jenkins

According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 57 percent of American teens who use the internet could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study, a media creator was defined as someone who "created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations." Most American teens online have done two or more of these activities. 33 percent of teens share what they create online with others. 19 percent create new works by remixing content they appropriated from another source.

• July 13, 2006
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