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Media Usage
The Importance and Challenges of Universal Media Literacy Education
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...
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EducationShift
Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand
As a journalism professor, I have found there is one thing guaranteed to set off a flurry of frenzied activity in the classroom. It has nothing to do with exams or story deadlines. Rather, it is prompted by a simple question to students: How many own your name as a domain name? This seemingly innocuous question acts as a trigger,...
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EducationShift
Why Do Some College Newspapers Still Have No Web Presence?
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...
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EducationShift
Revamped Journalist's Role More About Mindset Than Multimedia Tricks
With a new Web 2.0 service apparently springing up every week, it can be bewildering for a journalist trying to remain relevant in a digital age. Too often, new technology is seen as a burden that adds to an already packed workday. But while many journalists want to embrace new ways of reaching audiences, they flounder when it comes to...
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EducationShift
Why is American University Becoming Center for New Journalism?
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...
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EducationShift
Is University of Missouri's iPod Touch 'Requirement' Fair?
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...
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NewspaperShift
Should Newspapers Create Consortium for E-Readers?
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...
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Business
Live-Blogging RJI Symposium on New Tools, New Business Models
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...
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EducationShift
Advice from the Pros to Journalism Graduates
It's an anxious time to be graduating from journalism school. The economy is in the tank and newsrooms are being decimated. But yet, it is also a great time to be a journalist, with more news and information available than ever before and more ways than ever to reach audiences. At the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at...
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EducationShift
NYU J-School Students Unsure of Future in Changing Industry
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?...
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EducationShift
How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail
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...
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EducationShift
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front...
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Business
College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis
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...
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EducationShift
5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them
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...
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EducationShift
Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors
One of my students landed her first A1 story on Monday. Amanda Ash's story on auditions for the sequel to the teen vampire blockbuster "Twilight" was splashed across the front page of the Vancouver Sun. But she first alerted me, and her 130 other followers on Twitter, to the tears and tantrums at the event on Sunday evening when it...
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EducationShift
How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections
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...
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AdvertisingShift
College Newspapers Finally Hit by Economic Downturn
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...
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EducationShift
UBC Begins Study Program of New Media and Society
The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage with the world. But while today's students may blog...
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Education
Experimentation (Not Stagnation) Should Flourish at J-Schools
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...
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EducationShift
The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education
Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course...
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EducationShift
J-Students Take Multiplatform Approach to City Politics
Here's a recipe for how to cover local elections. Take a bunch of bright and eager journalism students. Give them two weeks to fan out across the city and come back with multiplatform stories on issues as diverse as creating bike-only roads, spending almost $30 million on a dog pound and treating Vancouver's sewage. This is what the first-year students...
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EducationShift
College Media Has Come A Long Way Online
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,...
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Embeds
NYU Local Blog Connects a School with No Campus
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...
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EducationShift
Learning How to Make Multimedia Story Decisions
Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism. We started by first asking...
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EducationShift
J-Schools Use Geo-tagging, Wikis, iPhones to Teach
Professors are commonly stereotyped as people who know more about books than technology. But as classrooms are now filled with a generation who grew up with computers, iPods and the Internet, more and more professors are starting to experiment with new digital learning tools. At last week's Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, academics...
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Digging Deeper
NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student
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...
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Embedded Report
Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility
At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow. At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs. The advice...
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Embedded Report
Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School
"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...
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EducationShift
Journalism School Students Get Fewer Textbooks, Collaborate More
With students flooding back into classrooms in universities across North America, the key to getting through this demanding first week of term is simple -- planning, planning and more planning. In practice, this means an August that becomes a hectic month of preparation, getting syllabi in order, ordering textbooks from the bookstore and making sure the technical gear and software is ready to go.
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EducationShift
Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism
Classic Hollywood movies tend to idealize the job of the reporter, from Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." All they needed was a pen and a notebook. Fast-forward to the 21st century and the picture changes dramatically. Not only would they need to have strong research, reporting and writing skills, the journalists would also be expected to file for the website, upload some photos, shoot video and, of course, write for next day's paper.
more »EducationShift
University of British Columbia Takes Integrated Approach to Teaching Journalism
"Multidisciplined" and "flexible" were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying. The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.
more »EducationShift
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...
more »Digging Deeper
In Digital Age, Journalism Students Need Business, Entrepreneurial Skills
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.
more »Philosophy
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."
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
'Open Universities' Try to Bring College to Masses
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...
more »Digging Deeper
New Media Literacy as Important for Educators as Students
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,...
more »EducationShift
Journalism Education Stuck in Same Oldthink Mode as Big Media
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,...
more »Digging Deeper
News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?
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.
more »Media Usage
'Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education'
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.
more »Media Usage
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.
more »Tags
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