But a study from Canada suggests more people prefer to get their news via their friends and acquaintances on social media, than from a journalist or news organization. And there are mixed signals as to whether audiences think journalists should be using Twitter in their professional work.

I was the lead author of the study, "Social Networks Transforming How Canadians Get the News," from the Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC). It gave further evidence of the impact social media is having on how people get the news and from whom. Social media services are turning into personalized news streams for Canadians of all ages, who rely on their digital circle of friends, family and acquaintances to alert them to interesting news and information.

The CMRC study is based on an online survey of a representative national sample of 1,682 adults conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion. The margin of error -- which measures sampling variability -- is +/- 2.5%, 19 times out of 20.

Keeping up with the news was one of the attractions of social networks for more than two-thirds of social media users. Every day, almost half of social media users in Canada get some of their news every day via links and recommendations from friends, family and colleagues who broadened their horizons, the study found.

A study by Pew Research last year found a similar trend taking place in the U.S., as news consumers increasingly shared links and recommendations in their social networks.

Your friend as your news editor

People have always shared the news, from discussing last night's news bulletin to sending a newspaper clipping. But social media is extending the ability of audiences to influence the distribution and reach of news.

The CMRC study points to the growing influence of users to decide what is seen and read, as newsrooms jump onto social media platforms as a new way to distribute content and reach a bigger audience.

The survey showed that Canadians were twice as likely to get news from friends on social networks than from journalists or official news accounts. Only one in five said they receive news from a media outlet on social networks. For Twitter, only one in ten get their news from tweeting journalists.

The figures signal that it is more important for a newsroom to get others to share and recommend content than to do it through an official account. The study suggests that the more than 18 million Canadians on Facebook and almost 5 million on Twitter are becoming the news editors for their social circles, deciding whether a story, video or other piece of content is interesting enough to recommend.

Should Journalists Tweet?

As journalists increasing use Twitter and tap into social media for reporting, networking and storytelling, the CMRC study strikes a note of caution. Canadians were evenly divided on whether news organizations should include information gleaned from social media into their reports.

There was a similar ambivalence when it came to whether journalists should even use Twitter to report the news. While 39 percent said yes, 34 percent said no and 26 percent were unsure. The ambiguous results suggest that Twitter may just be too new for audiences to decide whether it is a good or bad thing for the media.

Perhaps more significantly, younger Canadians were much more comfortable with a more social type of journalism, which is not surprising given how social media has become woven into the fabric of their lives.

The CMRC study found that a majority of under-34-year-olds in Canada use social media regularly, and that younger adults tended to be heavier users. Students, in particular, were much more comfortable with the idea of journalists integrating social media content into their reporting.

Similarly, just over half of students agreed that journalists should use Twitter to help report on trends and issues. The figures suggest a generational divide in attitudes toward social media and journalism.

For example, the study found that virtually no one over 55 follows journalists on Twitter. But kids who have grown up with the social web seem far more accepting of news organizations and journalists integrating these new services into their daily routines.

The conundrum for media organizations

Social media presents tremendous possibilities for journalists to reach audiences, expand their range of sources and engage with communities. The changing consumption patterns for news also raise questions for media organizations.

Sharing the news is becoming an important part of how people experience the news. The CMRC study found that 64 percent of news consumers value being able to easily share content, rising to 83 percent for those under the age of 34. But those "share" and "like" buttons tend to point users towards Facebook or Twitter, undermining existing mass media business models based on delivering large audiences to advertisers.

While social media creates new opportunities for the news industry to reach and engage audiences, particularly younger Canadians, it also represents competition for consumer attention and revenue. It further fragments the audience and potentially could signal a shift in reader loyalty from a news brand to their social circle.

Alfred Hermida is the lead author on the CMRC report on social media. He is an online news pioneer and digital media scholar. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

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.

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.

Led by associate professor Peter Klein, the students spoke to exploited Burmese migrant workers, documented devastated mangrove swamps, and visited labs where shrimp are tested for carcinogenic chemicals.

Their work was published recently in partnership with Canada's newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail, together with a companion micro-site to showcase the breadth and depth of the students' work.

"The Globe was preparing to do a series on global food, and we had just finished this reporting in Thailand, so we discussed with the editors the idea of a collaboration," said Klein, a former "60 Minutes" producer. "We shared transcripts of our interviews with one of their print reporters, and our students gave the reporter some advice on what we found in the field."

The project is an example of a growing trend of partnerships between major news organizations and universities, and it highlights the role of journalism schools as homes for investigative reporting projects.

This is the second project of UBC's International Reporting program. The first documentary, Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground, was produced in partnership with PBS Frontline/World and went on to win an Emmy Award in September for investigative reporting.

A Nuanced Story

The International Reporting program takes 10 journalism students abroad to cover under-reported international issues. The idea of looking at the real cost of those all-you-can-eat platters of cheap shrimp came out of a pitch by one of the students, Kate Allen.

She suggested a general story about seafood, the ocean and fisheries. As the students researched the topic, the issue of shrimp aquaculture started to take shape.

"There are environmental concerns, human rights issues, and even health issues that can affect us back home in North America and Europe, where most farmed shrimp ends up," said Klein.

For the investigation, the students visited several sites in Thailand. They interviewed exploited Burmese migrants who are paid a pittance for their labor, filmed the underwater effects of shrimp runoff on the country's reefs and reported on how the clear-cutting of mangrove swamps by shrimp farmers contributed to the effects of the 2004 tsunami.

"It's a nuanced story," said student Kerry Blackadar. "We went there expecting a black-and-white story about run-offs from shrimp farms impacting reefs and mangroves, but realized the complexities of the industry when we were in Thailand."

Allen, the student who suggested the topic that eventually became this project, said,
"By the end of our Thai trip, we were left with a palpable sense of how North America's raging appetite for one tiny species of crustacean had done serious harm to this beautiful country."

Multimedia Treatment

The students produced a web video project for the Globe that offers a snapshot of the impact of cheap shrimp. The journalism school also produced a micro-site that highlights different aspects of the story, drawing from more than 100 hours of footage shot in the field.

"This project was really well suited for a multimedia piece," said Klein. "There are several distinct themes we addressed, and in a linear TV piece we would have had to do awkward transitions between these themes. In this project, we were able to separate out the themes and address them as individual video clips."

The website was created using WordPress, which is the content management system we use for our student online publications. I was involved in supervising the site, which was developed by student Erin Empey.

"This worked well as a multimedia project because of its complexity," she said. "By using several multimedia tools and breaking the video into chapters, we were able to present the nuances of the story clearly."

Here's one of the videos produced for the project:

Non-Profit Investigative Reporting

The website was the culmination of a year-long investigation that started back in September 2009, when the students embarked on the second year of a new course called International Reporting.

The course is an example of foundation-funded journalism. It was launched in 2008 thanks to a generous donation from Alison Lawton of the Mindset Foundation.

For the shrimp micro-site, the school also secured funding from the MITACS Accelerate internship program. The program provides federal and provincial funding to offer students the opportunity to apply their research to real-world issues.

Funding programs like these can help established media undertake innovative research and development projects. Last year, the UBC journalism school also received a grant from MITACS to partner with CBC Radio 3 to create a Canadian music wiki.

These kinds of partnerships are evolving as news outlets, foundations and journalism schools pool their resources, particularly at a time when established media are devoting fewer resources to investigative reporting

"This is classic investigative journalism, the kind of reporting that rarely gets done anymore on international topics," said Klein.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and digital media scholar. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

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.

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.

Editor's Note: This is the first in our special series at MediaShift, Beyond J-School where we will take an in-depth look at the state of journalism education and training in the digital age. Look out for more articles all this week and next.

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.

Students use social media in their daily lives, with Facebook an almost permanent fixture on the computer screen. Yet they tend not to think about social media as part of their professional toolkit as journalists.

If anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are resistant to adopting social media, seeing it as a personal activity, rather than as part of their work as a journalist. The pressure is on educators to demonstrate the professional value of social media.

The first step is working out what we mean by social media. After all, there has also been a social aspect to media, whether it was people discussing last night's TV in the office or clipping a newspaper article to send to a friend. But there is something new about services such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter that let people connect, create, share and mash-up media.

European researchers Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content."
In other words, digital technologies that empower users to interact with each other, and participate and collaborate in the making of media, rather than just consuming media.

Clearly there is more to social media in the classroom than technology. Central to teaching social media is providing an understanding of how these digital tools affect the way students actually do journalism. The issue for many journalism schools is incorporating social media into an established and packed curriculum, within an academic environment where the pace of change is slow.

Lessons in best practices

The question of how to teach social media in a way that enhances journalism reverberated at a meeting of hundreds of journalism educators from across North America. The annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Denver provided a platform to discuss ideas on social media in the classroom. In a sign of the growing recognition of social media, the AEJMC even organized a competition for educators to share some of their best practices for incorporating social media into the classroom. (Read MediaShift's previous coverage of the AEJMC conference here.)

One idea mentioned by several speakers at the AEJMC conference was the value of incorporating social media into beat reporting. There are various ways that this can be done. Students can use Twitter to monitor the community chatter on issues in their beats through hashtags. They can also identify and follow key people connected to their beat.

But students also need to understand how to assess the stream of information on social media. Real-time services such as Twitter have established themselves as primary sources for breaking news, so it is important to teach students to critically measure and check the validity of information.

Social media is one way of introducing students to the notion of journalism as a conversation. The key lesson here is that these tools are not just another channel to distribute the finished story. Social media can help journalists reach out to audiences, seeking ideas for stories and fresh perspectives on stories they are working on.

One of the challenges here is teaching the different norms and practices on different social media services. For example, just posting a message seeking information is frowned upon. Instead, students are encouraged to be active on social media, showing they are contributing to the conversation rather than just taking.

Reputation Management

Social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional, so another important lesson is how to build and manage your online identity. Serena Carpenter at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University has students use Google themselves to research their online identity. She has found students are encouraged to adopt social media when they see themselves appear high up on Google.

In a variation of this, I have students Google each other to find out something they didn't know about their peer. The aim of the exercise is to make students aware of how future employers might see them.

The next stage is teaching students how to manage their reputation and establish their credibility. Prof. Carpenter has students complete their bio on numerous sites such as LinkedIn and Google Profile using the same photo, credentials and web links.

Social media has also been used for student-centered learning, for example, to educate students about the strengths and weaknesses of online collaboration. Bob Britten of West Virginia University used Google Maps for students to work together to map retirement homes in the area.

Rather than lecture students on the credibility of Wikipedia, Gary Ritzenthaler, a PhD student at the University of Florida, created a wiki for students to collaborate on study notes for an upcoming test. By participating, the students learned about collaborative writing but also became aware of questions about the credibility of content produced by others.

Thinking About Social Media

Practicing social media is not enough in an academic environment. There has to be a place for student reflection on what they have learned, explaining their understanding of social media. Students should have set out their goals for the use of social media and demonstrate they can assess the most appropriate platforms and services.

Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.

Photo of AEJMC panel by Hunter Stevens via AEJMC News

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

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.

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.

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.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a journalist as "a person who writes for newspapers or magazines or prepares news or features to be broadcast on radio or television." The definition is less about what a journalist actually does and more about whom they work for. It reflects how the profession of journalism developed in a mass media system, based on the production of news by paid professionals who decided what the public needs to know, when it needs to know it and how it will know it.

The media industry is going through a profound transformation that is disrupting just about every aspect of the business. Journalists are at the center of a transformation that is challenging norms and routines that have remained, until now, highly consistent. It all amounts to, in the words of media scholar Mark Deuze, "one of the biggest challenges facing journalism studies and education in the 21st century."

The new journalist needs to learn and understand how news and information works in a digital world, instead of simply applying established norms and practices that may no longer be effective.

New Technologies, New Mindset

Studies show that journalists have been reluctant to give up their traditional gatekeeping role. BBC News executive Peter Horrocks has described this mindset as fortress journalism (PDF) -- seeing the profession as a practice to be defended. As a result, journalism as a profession largely considers the media environment to be the same as before, only now more technologized.

New media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing their old job. A newspaper online is not the same as a newspaper in print. On paper, the newspaper delivers a bundle of stories, ads and amusements, such as the crossword puzzle. On the web, the newspaper package is unbundled into individual fragments. The stable, hierarchy of information in the printed newspaper falls apart online.

Scholars Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel have researched what they describe as the shift from a physical-industrial mindset to a cyberspatial, post-industrial mindset. They write that "the world is being changed in some quite fundamental ways as a result of people imagining and exploring new ways of doing things and new ways of being that are made possible by new tools and techniques."

Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read and write. New literacies generally refer to new forms of literacy made possible by digital technologies, such as blogging, uploading photos or sharing videos. According to new literacies, media is collaborative, distributed, and participatory nature.

Participatory and Collaborative Journalism

Let's look at one of the ways this applies to journalism. Traditionally, journalism has been about producing finished products by designated individuals and teams, based on individual expertise and intelligence, operating in a shared physical space. However, new literacies research suggests that the changes taking place challenge fundamental norms, conventions, and routines of journalism.

One example is the ability of the audience to report and distribute the news in photographs, videos, and text, which undermines the monopoly on reporting that journalists traditionally enjoyed. Anyone can do an act of journalism, from sending a tweet about a G20 protest to uploading a photo of police and demonstrators.

Seen through the lens of new literacies research, digital media is more participatory, collaborative and distributed, and less finalized, individualized and author-centric than previous forms of media. The journalist still matters. But as Tom Rosenstiel has suggested, they shift from being the gatekeeper to being an authenticator of information, a sense-maker to derive meaning, a navigator to help orient audiences and a community leader to engage audiences.

Both those taking their first steps into journalism and those who have already followed a well-trodden path need to figure out where they fit in. The role of the journalist is being determined by the complex interplay between media technologies, professional practices, and societal factors.

Journalism developed as a relatively closed culture for the production of knowledge, based on a system of editorial control. Yet new media are characterized by their connected and collaborative nature. The challenge for journalism, and the journalist, is to find a place along the continuum between control and connection, and between a closed and a collaborative media culture.

This piece is adapted from a chapter appearing in The New Journalist: Roles, Skills, and Critical Thinking, a new textbook for journalism students.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

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.

One was a $1.1 billion buyout (in Canadian dollars) of Canada's largest newspaper chain, the Canwest newspapers, led by experienced news executive Paul Godfrey.

The other was the launch of a hyper-local, participatory news start-up called OpenFile.ca, backed by venture capital and led by former CBC, CTV and CNN journalist Wilf Dinnick.

Both are betting on the public appetite for local news, approaching it from two sides of the business spectrum, with each of them hoping to revitalize the media ecology in Canada.

As in the U.S., the news industry in Canada is in trouble. The sale of the newspaper chain was a result of some of these problems, brought about by the collapse of the Canwest media empire under a burden of debt.

Newspapers in Canada are seeing falls in circulation as readers turn to websites, blogs and social media for news. But print is not doing quite as badly as their counterparts across the border. Circulation is on a gentle decline, down by around 4 percent from 2008 to 2009.

Print is far from dead. According to the Canadian Newspaper Association, more than 4 million newspapers are sold every day and three-quarters of Canadians read a print edition every week. So there is still a market for the daily paper edition.

Digital Aspirations

The man leading the Canwest purchase, Paul Godfrey, brings to the deal a successful track record in print. In the 1990s, he transformed the Sun Media chain of tabloid newspapers into a business worth $1 billion.

Now he heads a group of Canwest creditors and investors who may want to see a return on their capital sooner, rather than later. In essence, they are looking to recoup costs by issuing public shares in the summer that, hopefully, will rise as the economy improves and the advertising market recovers.

The new company will own and run 46 daily and weekly publications across Canada, together with several related Internet properties such as Canada.com. Despite the challenges facing print, all but one of the newspapers, the National Post, are making money. In April, the publishing arm of the crumbling Canwest empire reported quarterly revenues of $254 million, down just 1 percent from a year earlier, with profits of $41 million

The challenge, as other newspapers have found, is navigating the transition from print to digital media, at a time when most of the revenue still comes from selling newspapers. Digital brings in less than 10 percent of revenue for the Canwest papers. Godfrey is looking to increase this to 25 percent

The new owner is making all the right noises, talking about keeping all the newspapers going, preserving newsroom job and benefits and adopting a digital-first strategy. In a note to Canwest staff, he wrote:

Our potent brands are composed of a pan-Canadian mix of major metro newspapers, the National Post, a wealth of superb digital properties and community newspapers.

What is less clear is how he is going to steer the legacy print business into this digital future. Newspapers are complicated beasts, involving layers of editorial, production, administration, circulation and sales, let alone capital costs of printing presses. The question is whether the new owners are ready to invest in the group to ensure its long-term viability or looking for a short-term return.

Open Source Journalism

By comparison, the new Toronto-based startup, OpenFile.ca, has none of these legacy issues. Launched on May 11, the site has a handful of journalists on staff, among them MediaShift managing editor Craig Silverman. It is based on a collaborative pro-am model, with journalists working with the community.

Readers are invited to submit ideas for stories, which are vetted by an editor and either assigned to a professional journalist or put up on the site for review by the community. Once a story is published, the community is invited to add their comments and content to the professionally produced content, as it says on the site:

OpenFile was designed to let the public decide what local news stories should be covered. You suggest, we report. You comment, we respond. You create, we publish. End result: A vibrant, ever-evolving local news conversation among newsmakers, news-gatherers and news readers.

For now, OpenFile is focusing on Toronto. It is hoping to replicate its model in other Canadian cities, and potentially also in to the U.S. The man behind OpenFile, Wilf Dinnick, enthusiastically described the launch as "one of the biggest media ventures in Canada since the launch of the National Post." He has reasons to be positive. The site is backed by several million dollars of venture capital for the first three years.

Dinnick has acknowledged that "our tough time is going to be in year three," once the initial funding comes to an end. So it is hoping to attract revenue from sponsors and advertisers eager to reach local audiences.

OpenFile's approach bears some similarities to Spot.us, where readers are asked for donations on specific pitches from journalists. The difference with the Canadian idea is turning to the local community for the story pitches. This has led to some skepticism about the quality of news tips from the public or that rival journalists may poach the best ideas.

Rethinking the story

OpenFile does not see itself as the traditional city paper. "We're not a newspaper. We don't expect to be a newspaper," Dinnick told The National Post. Rather it is rethinking journalism as a participatory and collaborative process with the public, where journalists involve the public in what was once the preserve of professionals.

The news article is not the final product, but rather part of an interaction with the community, who can add and develop the story. "We're calling it a 'file', because a story isn't just a single, static text document anymore. It has to be something that lives," Silverman told the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The success of OpenFile will largely depend on attracting a committed and engaged community of users. Aside from traditional media, Toronto already has lively local sites, among them BlogTO and Torontoist. A writer at Torontoist has argued that OpenFile's approach "isn't actually much different from the model currently in place at sites like BlogTO and here at Torontoist, where much of what gets covered is also prompted by openly acknowledged reader tips."

The buyout of the Canwest newspapers and the launch of OpenFile share one thing in common: No one can say whether or how either will dramatically change the face of the media industry in Canada.

Both bring a focus on local news and both stress the importance of digital. A mix of the old and the young, the established and the new, is to be welcomed as journalism tries to figure out its future.

Image of newstand courtesy of Flickr user mag3737

Alfred Hermida is an award-winning online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net

"Even though I had high hopes upon graduation to find my dream job in journalism, when I graduated the media job market was not in good condition for hiring anyone full-time," she recalled.

Lim did find work, though it was not the full-time position she'd been hoping for. Instead, she freelanced as a video editor for Global TV news in Toronto.

Her story will be familiar to journalism graduates in North America. The 2008 Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates found the lowest level of full-time employment reported by graduates in the U.S. for the past two decades.

Only six in 10 of graduates had full-time employment six to eight months after graduating in 2008. The report said "by almost all indications, the 2008 graduates of the nation's journalism and mass communications programs found themselves in a disastrous job market."

A year later, the State of the Media report for 2009 concluded that the collapsing economy in the U.S. aggravated an already weakened industry.

Across the border in Canada, the year was just as bleak, with hundreds of job losses, newspapers cutting back on publication days and one of the main media conglomerates, Canwest, seeking creditor protection.

Opportunity Knocks

The journalism graduates that are getting work find they have to be flexible when considering their options.

"Pickings were slim in the job market when I graduated but opportunities were, by no means, non-existent," said recent grad Allison Cross. "I say opportunities because full-time, permanent jobs were scarce, but there were plenty of contracts out there to do journalism, social media, communications or professional writing.

"In many cases, these opportunities did not resemble the ideal job I was looking for, but still seemed to provide opportunities for new journalists to get their names out, try new things and make a bit of money along the way," she said.

Cross took a different route after graduating from UBC in 2009. Attracted by the idea of reporting abroad, she spent five months in Sierra Leone freelancing and doing media development work for the Canadian non-profit organization, Journalists for Human Rights.

On her return, she landed a one-year contract as a reporter with Canwest News Service, a wire service for several major Canadian newspapers.

"I was most surprised by my new employer's enthusiasm for multimedia skills, and how desperately those skills are needed in the newsroom," she said.

Taking the job involved making a difficult decision -- leaving her native Vancouver.

"My biggest challenge was trying to find the right job in the city where I wanted to live," she said. "Ultimately, I had to sacrifice my city of choice and move across the country for a job."

Difficult Choices

UBC journalism grad Krysia Collyer also had to make compromises. She was awarded a prestigious Joan Donaldson scholarship with the CBC News Network, which she hoped would be the first step towards being a TV reporter.

"I won the Donaldson and as a result have had a lot easier time finding work," said Collyer. "CBC has approached me as opposed to me going out and applying for a job with them."

She is now an associate producer in Ottawa, switching between radio reporting and producing, though she hopes to move back into TV at some point.

Recent grads in the U.S. have faced a similar dilemma. The 2008 survey of journalism and communication students found job satisfaction down, with some grads saying they accepted a job because it was the only one available.

However, few students can hope to land their ideal job straight out of school. The challenge for grads is to marry their hopes and dreams with the realities of journalism today.

If anything, students are expected to be more entrepreneurial, though this is a relatively new area for journalism schools. Ironically, the 2008 job survey found that public relations students fared better because they were more entrepreneurial and less tied to traditional job definitions.

New Positions

New media is creating new types of opportunities. 2009 grad Dan Haves took on a new role as social media officer for the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education in Vancouver.

Fellow grad Cynthia Yoo is working for the citizen journalism website OhMyNews in Korea, as well as with the Korean blog network Tatter and Media, and a start-up based in California.

"I don't think you can plan out your career as journalists did in the past," said Yoo, who also teaches at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. "But there are many jobs and interesting projects out there, if you're flexible."

For Stephanie Lim, being flexible has meant coming back to Vancouver temporarily for the Winter Olympics. She is working as a producer's assistant for the Olympic Broadcasting Services Vancouver.

"The biggest challenge diving into the real world of journalism was the realization that this industry is unlike any other," said Lim. "A job is not just given to you on a silver platter just because you have a degree in journalism. Instead, you must work from the bottom of the ladder as an intern, perform, and earn respect from veterans in the field."

Her advice for journalism students who are apprehensive about graduation is simple.

"Know what area of journalism you want to get into, and strive for your goal. Don't give up, even if it may take you two years to find that dream job."

*Correction Jan. 20, 2010: This post originally and incorrectly said Stephanie Lim graduated from UBC in 2010. She of course graduated in 2009.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

But a growing body of research suggests that the advent of participatory journalism, or user-generated content (UGC), has done little to change the way the media works.
At the recent Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University, academics presented a series of studies that further illustrated how the mainstream media is trying to tame the phenomenon.

The research paints a global picture of how journalists are seeking to maintain their position of authority and power, rather than create a more open, transparent and accountable journalistic process that seeks to work with readers.

One of the studies looked at the BBC, which is considered a pioneer in the field of user-generated content. The BBC has 23 people working in its UGC hub, up from just three in 2005, and receives thousands of comments and emails every day along with hundreds of photos and videos.

Researchers Claire Wardle, Andrew Williams and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen interviewed BBC journalists in 2007. What they found was that BBC staff see UGC as a part of newsgathering operations; basically, it's a way of obtaining photos and video, eyewitness accounts or story tip.

The researchers concluded that UGC has become institutionalized at the BBC as a form of newsgathering, consolidating the existing relationship between journalists and the audience. They did find some examples of BBC journalists that view it as a way to collaborate on stories, or as a shift towards networked journalism. But these views existed at the edges.

This institutional approach towards UGC was reflected in the BBC course on the topic, entitled "Have They Got News for Us." This session at the conference focused on how to scour comments, pictures and video from the public in order to separate the wheat from the chaff, rather than on how to collaborate with the audience on stories.

No News in Comments

Finding newsworthy material in contributions from the public is a challenge. In his study about Dutch newspapers and UGC presented at the conference, Piet Bakker found that there was little news contained in comments on stories.

From the point of view of the traditional journalist, the amount of news in comments was minimal. Instead, comments were seen as a way to attract more visitors and increase loyalty, but these benefits were counterbalanced by problems with abusive comments, a lack of contributions, and the cost of moderation.

This ties in to another conference paper that looked at the attitudes of journalists in the U.K. when it comes to user-generated content. In interviews with local journalists working for the Johnston Press, Jane Singer found that most see the public as complementing, rather than replacing, the work of professionals. The journalists saw themselves as UGC gatekeepers, citing concerns about the quality of contributions and legal liabilities.

This approach is understandable at a time when the local press in the U.K. is in trouble. Journalists may feel under even more pressure to justify why amateurs cannot replace them, or offer meaningful contributions.

Singer found that local journalists saw a theoretical value in participatory journalism in that it's a way to promote democratic discourse. But another paper presented by Marina Vujnovic on behalf of an international group of researchers that included myself found that this ideal did not figure highly in the minds of the online editors of newspaper websites. They instead look to UGC to drive traffic, increase loyalty, and provide free content for their sites.

The Audience as Audience

These were just a few of the more than 100 papers presented in Cardiff. But they illustrate how the mainstream media is attempting to limit and control how much the public can contribute to its journalism. These studies suggest that as far as journalists and editors are concerned, the people formerly known as the audience is still known as the audience.

The space for the audience to participate in journalism is, by and large, clearly delineated. The public can send in their news tips, photos and videos, but the journalist retains a traditional gatekeeper role, deciding what is newsworthy and what isn't. There is little room for the public to be involved in the actual making of the news -- in deciding whom to interview, how to frame the story and how to produce it. Once the story is complete and published, the audience can freely comment on the final product.

An international study published in Journalism Practice concluded mainstream media is eager to open comments and post-publication discussion to the public, as this fits in with their definition of the audience as audience. But forms of pro-am or networked journalism are rare.

Online journalism is still in its infancy and it will take time for journalistic attitudes to change. But there are very few signs that news organizations are reinventing their relationship with the audience and tapping into the participatory potential of the web to reimagine journalism.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

This seemingly innocuous question acts as a trigger, sending students online to see if someone else with the same name has snatched up the web address. A lesson on online research methods turns into "how to buy a domain name," or more often, "what do I do if someone else has my domain name?"

This is no trivial matter. Having a website that reflects your professional identity is your digital calling card. Your online presence should show who you are, your interests and background, and showcase your best professional work. Or to put it another way, your personal brand as a journalist.

In the journalism of today, the personal brand is becoming increasingly central to the prospects of a young person starting out on a life of reporting. So it is important for students at journalism school, and those starting in the fall, to develop the professional brand that will set them apart come graduation.

Some reporters may bristle at the idea of thinking of themselves as a brand, considering it the equivalent of selling out. This overlooks the fact that a journalist's identity has always been a part of the job, otherwise why have bylines?

Journalism, it's personal

The shift toward the individual and away from journalistic institutions was identified as one of the major trends in journalism by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the Media Report for 2009. It found that:

Through search, email, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites...It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places.

With journalism shifting toward an era of the personal, rather than the institutional, brand, students need to consider how they are going to stand out as the expert in a knowledge-based economy.

At the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, we encourage students to design a course plan that reflects their interests. In addition to a set of core journalism courses, students can take a number of electives in other departments. This allows them to create a program of study focused on an academic area relevant to their backgrounds and interests.

By the end of the two-year Masters program, the students graduate with both professional journalistic skills and an in-depth understanding of areas ranging from the arts to health to the environment. As the world becomes ever more complex, it is imperative for a journalist to have the ability to be rigorous and knowledgeable in their reporting.

Be visible online

How you go about building up your personal brand online is up to each student. For some, the best way could be starting a blog on a specific topic to develop a reputation as an expert in this area. It might be by leaving informed comments on stories of interest. Or by simply following key people in your field on Twitter.

As Mindy McAdams points out in her 10 tips to building a personal brand, you have to be visible enough that you come up in the top results when your name is put into Google. But above all, you have to be yourself. The brand a journalism student develops online has to be authentic. Don't even think about trying to fake it -- there is nowhere to hide online.

A generation ago, a budding journalist could look forward to joining a major news organization and rising through the ranks before heading off into retirement with a solid pension and the fabled gold watch. Today's generation of aspiring journalists face a much more uncertain future, and not just due to the cuts in newsrooms and the precarious financial state of some news organizations.

In the ever-shifting sands of the media landscape of the 21st century, two things are self-evident: the evolution towards digital media and the knowledge economy. The new journalist needs to create and develop his or her niche in this new media ecosystem.

Oh, and don't forget to buy that domain name. Spending a few bucks on a dedicated web address is a sound investment even when, as a student, money is tight.

Related Reading at MediaShift: Personal Branding Becomes a Necessity in Digital Age

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

This came up during a panel at the Canadian Association of Journalists annual conference discussing the future of journalism, where I talked about the need to adopt a multimedia mindset and change the way we think about journalism, explaining our approach at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

During the Q&A part, a beat reporter spoke with clear angst about the increasing pressure she was facing. During the course of an average workday, she wrote two or three stories. In the past, she had tried her hand at blogging, video, Twitter and other multimedia efforts. What she wanted to know was: In addition to her existing job writing straight news stories, what was the one thing she should be doing?

Judging from the reaction in the room, this was a question on the mind of more than one journalist. But I am afraid that my answer may have disappointed. Instead of conjuring the magical one thing she should add to her journalistic bag of tricks, I suggested that this was the wrong question.

The question assumes that journalists can carry on with business as usual, and simply add an additional task to what they do. If only it were that simple. But there is no one digital trick to be added to a reporter's notebook. Rather, the social, cultural and economic changes brought about by the emergence of new digital forms of communication require a rethink in the mindset and culture of journalism.

Veteran journalist reborn

My answer to the beat reporter was that she should reassess what she does to figure out how she can best serve the audience. It could be that writing two or three stories a day is the answer. Or blogging may provide a way to develop a closer relationship with that audience. The digital revolution is less about adding multimedia tricks than it is about reinventing the role of the journalist.

Take BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, for example. I worked with Cellan-Jones at the BBC when he was a business TV correspondent. He has been with the BBC for 25 years but, over the past few years, he has been reborn as something more -- a journalist. Cellan-Jones no longer sees himself as just a TV reporter, but rather as a journalist with audiences on TV, radio and online.

Speaking on a panel organized by The Guardian's MediaTalk podcast, he described the impact of the reorganization of BBC News as a multimedia news operation, rather than in silos of TV, radio and online:

It has forced me to reinvent myself. I spent most of my career as a daily TV journalist serving big audiences on lunchtime news bulletins and having very little engagement with the audience. I've got a much more rewarding job now serving audiences online, on radio, on TV, at the same time, and having far more engagement through all these social networking tools.

Cellan-Jones now contributes to the BBC's technology blog and has experimented with mobile blogging. On Twitter, he has more than 10,000 followers and engages with them on anything from the latest hype in technology to his passion for cricket. And, of course, he reports for TV and radio. For him, the Internet is not an add-on to his broadcast job. Rather, he has reinvented his job to take account of the shifts in journalism and, as a result, has found it a far more fulfilling profession.

Beyond fortress journalism

The basic qualities of a good journalist -- curiosity, passion, accuracy, serving the public interest -- still matter. To thrive today, journalists need to figure out how they can best apply those qualities in a multimedia, networked news environment. This requires journalists to look beyond the walls of their institutional practices, beyond what the BBC's Peter Horrocks labeled "fortress journalism" in a chapter for a book by the BBC College of Journalism entitled The Future of Journalism, available online for free as a PDF file.

Horrocks led the integration of the BBC's TV, radio and online news into one multimedia newsroom from 2005-2009. In his chapter, he outlined his vision of the role of the journalist:

Journalists will need changed culture, changed organization and an improved understanding of the modern tools of journalism -- audience insights, blogging, Twitter, multimedia production. It sounds like being pretty challenging. It's certainly more complex than the old fortress world -- of riding out to fight the enemy to the death every day. But I suspect that the public may well appreciate a journalism that puts serving their information needs at its heart, rather than one which is about organizing the world in the way that journalists prefer.

Wholesale rethinking on this scale is much harder than adding a new skill to an existing arsenal of journalistic weapons. It involves breaking down the mental walls of silo journalism that have developed over decades. But it can be done, and should be done, to deliver a journalism that serves the public in a digital age.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

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 the University of Texas at Austin, I asked a range of professionals what advice they had for journalism graduates entering the job market.

There was broad agreement that students should leave journalism school being able to work across print, broadcast and online. At the very least, they should understand the new tools available to reporters and be continually learning.

As one professional said, school is just the beginning of learning. At the core is good writing and reporting, regardless of the medium. But to stand out from the crowd, journalism graduates should follow their passions, develop an area of specialization and master that area.

Students should build on what they have learned at J-school by networking with professionals. And now it is easier than ever before to link up with people through networks like Twitter. Someone you connect with on Twitter might end up offering you a job.

When it comes to jobs, students should be open-minded and take every opportunity as you never know where it may lead. That first job may be with a start-up that isn't specifically in journalism, but the skills you learn may serve you well later.

Advice from the Pros

Beth Frerking, assistant managing editor of Politico.com

Paul Brannan, editor of emerging platforms at the BBC

Rachel Nixon, global news director at NowPublic.com

Sewell Chan, reporter at The New York Times who runs the metro blog, City Room

Janine Warner, digital alchemist at Artisan Media

Jonathan Dube, vice-president of ABCNews.com and president of the Online News Association

Photo courtesy of The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

(Since the interviews were completed, Rachel Nixon has been appointed as the director for digital media for CBC, starting in June.)

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997. He blogs at Reportr.net.

There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto.

Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.

From a lecture to a conversation

Live-blogging and lecturing might sound like an odd combination, but I recently brought the two together in a new undergraduate foundation concentration in New Media and Society at the University of British Columbia.

As I teach the journalism component of the concentration, it seemed only right to bring some of the ideas from new media into the classroom. And the right time seemed to be the week when we were looking at the concept of participatory journalism, with guest speaker Michael Tippett, one of the founders of citizen journalism site NowPublic.com, based in Vancouver.

For the experiment, I set up a class discussion page using CoveritLive. The page was projected onto a screen in the lecture hall so that students could see the conversation unfold. Tippett's presentation was projected on a second screen.

As he addressed the students, they were able to submit comments and ask questions via CoveritLive -- these comments then appeared on screen. I did some comment moderation, but I tried to give students as much freedom as possible to ask or say anything. Although we asked students to use their names in the comments, some still preferred the anonymity of the "guest" handle.

The result was a mix of the insightful, the impish and the inane -- from "who has the right to call himself a journalist?" to "this almost feels like telepathy! lol" to "stop blowing ur nose it's annoying."

The very first question was completely unrelated to anything about the class or the even course. Instead a student asked Tippett if he had ever been in the Mondo Spider, a walking mechanical spider partly created by his brother Jonathan.

Mindcasting in the classroom

The class turned into a living example of what happens when we use new forms of media. Whenever we start using new tools of communication, such as the cell phone or Twitter, we spend much of our time working out how we should be using them. This is exactly what happened during the lecture.

Many of the initial exchanges on CoveritLive discussed whether an online chat during a lecture was more distracting or less disruptive than asking verbal questions. In a sense, the students were negotiating the social practices around this type of participatory lesson.

"It's like being on Facebook chat and writing a paper at the same time. We're good at multi-tasking," commented one student, while another noted that "people that don't normally talk in class are talking here...wow."

But for some, it was "very distracting." One student found that "it is kind of difficult to split my attention like this, but I imagine I could get used to it pretty easily. New media is changing how we think."

There is no doubt, however, that the CoveritLive format was somewhat distracting for the speaker, with Tippett trying to talk while at the same time keep track of the chatter going on about his words.

The classroom experiment opened up the lesson in a unique way, providing a live insight into what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls mindcasting. Rosen used the term to describe how Twitter offers a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of people. In a sense, this is what our use of CoveritLive did, although in a much more limited way.

I only tried out this experiment once over the course of the semester but am looking forward to trying it again. It won't work for every topic or with every speaker, but it seemed to work in a class about participatory journalism and in the wider context of a course on how new media is changing the way we study, work and play.

The lesson offered a new media twist on the notion of community-centered education, where students are expected to participate as they take responsibility for their own learning. Rather than simply being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, the students had collaborated on distilling and creating the knowledge.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

Amanda is among a handful of journalism students at the j-school at the University of British Columbia who have taken Twitter as part of their journalist's toolkit. Her tweets mix the personal and the professional, discussing whom she is interviewing or asking where to watch the Grammy awards ceremony online. Another student, Dawn Paley, who contributes to a grassroots news co-operative, recently joined the micro-blogging service. In her Twitter stream, she shares her experiences as part of a media co-op and highlights alternative stories missing in the mainstream media. They are taking part in the world of social media.

Twitter is just one example of the new social media avenues available to student journalists to build up a profile while they are preparing to enter the profession. When I did my journalism degree at City University in London 20 years ago, I would send out my CV and cuttings to prospective employees and hope to get noticed. Today's students should be building up their professional persona online through social media, creating a digital identity as an ambitious, engaged and curious reporter.

Selling social media to students

Social media platforms such as Twitter enable budding reporters to be part of a more open journalistic culture. Traditionally, the work of journalism has been hidden behind the walls of the newsroom. Through social media, journalists can be more open about their work, offering insights into the process of news, and connect with audiences in a way that simply wasn't possible a generation ago.

Yet as other journalism profs have discovered, some students hesitate to adopt the tools of social media. Paul Bradshaw uses Twitter in his online journalism module at Birmingham City University and gets his students to set up accounts, but still admits that it's often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter. This is more than just about Twitter. Andy Dickinson who teaches at the University of Central Lancashire summed it up in one of his New Year resolutions:

I'm convinced that if you are journalist who isn't curious about the web then you may find yourself seriously limited as the industry shifts or worse still, not being a journalist for very long.

In social media, a budding journalist has an incredible platform to demonstrate their talents and engage with others in a way that just wasn't possible when I was in journalism school. At the very least, students should have a website that contains everything they produce, better still if they have a blog which invites comments and discussions.

Your blog as your business card

Quite a few students are doing this now. Brent Wittmeier, Jesse Kline and Rosemary Keevil-Fairburn are just three who run comprehensive sites where they blog and showcase their professional and academic work.

They were smart and snatched up their names as web addresses. This is one of the first things I asked new students to do at the start of the term in September. It usually sets off a flurry of activity in the classroom as they race online to see if someone else has already grabbed this important chunk of online real estate.

It seems like an obvious point, but I am surprised by how few students realize the importance of establishing your digital identity, starting with your domain name, at a time when the website is the business card of the 21st century.

Running a blog has additional benefits. Not only does writing on a regular schedule make you smarter, it also shows spirit and attitude and a thirst for learning and sharing. Just about every news editor I talked to now expects a journalism student to have blogged.

Understandably, some students may be wary about exposing their writing while they are still learning the profession. But a blog can show how their writing and ideas have improved over time, providing a living example of the evolution of a student's skills. And it almost goes without saying that it is a way to show passion and knowledge about a particular topic, such as Sarah Berman's blog on music, art and culture in Canada's poorest zip code.

Blogging can also help open doors. One enterprising student turned a class blog assignment into a gig blogging for Canada's newsweekly magazine, Macleans.ca. Josh DeHaas pitched his class blog idea on the cost of a university education to the Maclean's On Campus editor and was taken on as a student blogger. It's a wonderful opportunity for DeHaas, who hopes to join Macleans when he graduates. It also means that he can add his voice as a student to the debate in Canada over how to pay for a university education.

Being active online, sharing experiences and engaging with audiences is fundamental for students looking to enter journalism. It is even more important at a time when journalism students are uneasy about their job prospects. Budding journalists have always had to work hard to get themselves established. But the emergence of social media, through platforms such as Twitter, has added a new dimension to this, one that the reporters of tomorrow cannot afford to ignore.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

But while today's students may blog and Twitter their way through class, many are unaware of how that same technology is fundamentally changing the way they live, play and learn.

This is the rationale for a new undergraduate foundation concentration at the University of British Columbia in New Media and Society, bringing together professors from Sociology, English and Journalism. It aims to equip students with the critical skills to engage in the emergent digital media landscape and understand what it means to be literate in an interconnected planet.

I am teaching the journalism component of the course. Over the course of two semesters, first-year students are introduced to the development and impact of new media in a challenging and enriching learning environment. It is part of UBC's Co-ordinated Arts Program that offers several thematic streams for new students with broad interests in the social sciences and humanities.

The New Media stream came partly out of feedback from recruiting visits with high school students. Visiting UBC profs found that prospective students were interested in courses examining new media and digital communication.

After all, these young people live in a brave new digital world, keeping in touch via Facebook, watching videos on YouTube and laughing at the latest LOLcats. Yet many may not appreciate that something like LOLcats was simply not possible before the Internet or that anyone creating a funny cat snapshot is contributing to the phenomenon of user-generated content.

Defining new media

This is not a course designed to teach students to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. Rather, it is about providing students with the knowledge and critical appreciation of our evolving media-saturated world. Over the coming weeks, we'll be looking at radical transformation taking place in journalism, the changing role of the journalist, the impact of participatory media and the rise of social media, as well as issues of privacy and ethics.

For the course's first couple weeks, we've been setting the scene to analyze how the media is changing. For starters, we've been grappling with what exactly we mean by "new media." Everyone knows what you mean when you say new media -- it's a generic term for digital communication made possible through the use of computer technology. But "new" is also a loaded term, as it has connotations of social progress through technology. In any case, at some stage all media was new. It is debatable whether what my generation calls "new media" is new to today's students. To them, it is just media.

Similarly, the Internet is not an alien system to these students, it is just there. In the past, I have asked students to go offline for eight hours and journal their experience. To many, it is a revelation. To make the point in class, I played a clip from the "South Park" episode Over-Logging, where the citizens of this fine mountain town wake up to a world without the Internet. It is a reminder that there was a world before Google.

New platforms, new practices

To help the students make sense of what is happening in journalism, I draw from the work of historian Lisa Gitelman. She offers a model of media that works on two levels: It is a technology that allows communication, as well as a set of protocols that have developed around that technology.

This helps to separate our understanding of media as a delivery system from our understanding of media as a set of social and cultural practices. Clive Thompson writes about this process, discussing how the Net is changing video in the January issue of Wired magazine.

Thompson writes about a short video by YouTube user MadV of a scrawled message on his hand and the huge response that provoked, with others offering their own message to the world. Thompson's point is that even after 100 years of moving pictures, people are finding new uses for video, thanks to the Internet -- in this case as a forum for mass-distributed conversation.

As new platforms and devices emerge, how we use and relate to media undergoes a process of transformation and reinvention. Even though this is not a theory course, it is important for students to have a conceptual framework for analyzing the shifting sands of journalism today. By April, the students should leave with an awareness of the historical context of computer-based communication, an understanding of the impact of digital technologies and a critical appreciation for new media.

If journalism's role is to help citizens make informed decisions, then it is important for tomorrow's citizens to have the skills to be able to navigate the seas of digital information.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

For several weeks starting in January, my graduate students will be required to maintain a blog with twice-per-week entries. The aim of this assignment is to introduce students to the notion of blogging as a form of journalism. Just because this is a blog, it doesn't mean the students can write about anything.

The blog has to have a specific focus. Ideally, it should cover an area where the student has some personal expertise that they can bring to bear. This is perhaps one of the most important decisions as the best blogs are those where the author brings their own personal experience and expertise to the table.

This is more than just choosing a topic like politics or arts. Students need to focus on a specific aspect within these overarching topics. In the past, students have chosen to write about marketing, consumer culture and money in sports. These blogs worked as the students chose topics they were passionate about and then approached it from a particular angle, taking a strand from events in the news and unraveling it to provide a fresh perspective.

A place for reflection

The challenge becomes explaining that the blog is not a platform for students to pontificate about what they think about a particular issue. Rather, it is to provide a critical perspective on issues in the news within a student's specific area of expertise. In some ways, the blog is similar to op-ed writing. The value of blogging in a journalism course is as a tool for reflection and critical thinking about events in the headlines.

The blog has emerged as a powerful platform for journalists to provide context, analysis and interpretation, often including behind-the-scenes information that does not fit into the structure of a traditional news story. It has also provided journalists with a way to communicate with readers in a more conversational and informal tone, rather than in an abstract voice of authority.

Even though blogging has been around for more than a decade, there is still an unease about blogging among some professional journalists, often encapsulated in the phrase, "blogging isn't journalism." This is a tired argument that mistakes form for content.

Blogs, just like magazines, radio or television, can contain journalism, but they may not. The content, rather than the platform, defines whether or not it is a work of journalism.

However, the form does affect the content. The technology and history of blogging has lent the medium some generic qualities. Blogs are expected to be written in a personal and conversational tone, often in short posts, with links to related sites and reader comments.

Live to the web

In some cases, blogging can be seen as a new form of real-time reporting that does not have the filtering or editing associated with established journalistic practices.

This can be somewhat of a challenge to the students when they first hear of the blogging assignment. During the fall semester, their stories routinely went through various editing stages and rewrites. Come January, they will be publishing live to their blogs, without having passed the copy by one of their professors first.

The notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated can appear at odds with established journalistic norms and practices. But it provides a valuable learning tool as it makes the students directly responsible for what they write.

The students are not only graded on the quality of the content and writing, but also on the links they provide. The more specific a link, the more value it has to a reader. This is intended to encourage students to look online for new and interesting material from other sources. In other words, it recognizes that a student blog is part of a web of information, part of a network of journalism.

Some students have found that having written a blog as part of a journalism course can make a difference when it comes to applying for internships. One student who kept a blog about The New Yorker went on to intern at CBC Vancouver. He worked on a summer series on climate change and ran the show's blog, which unfortunately is no longer online.

Blogs and new media have undoubtedly changed the landscape of journalism. In terms of its form, journalism as a whole has become more conversational, and iterative, as readers seek to contribute to the story, and journalists open more of their processes to public view. Blogging has played a role in this process and warrants a place on the curriculum at journalism schools.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

This is what the first-year students at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia did for their final big assignment of the semester. The stories were published a few days ahead of Vancouver's local elections on November 15 on our student publication, TheThunderbird.ca.

Following the Election

Election news is one of the main staples of journalism, so having a vote on our own doorstep provided a great learning opportunity for the class. For this assignment, the students each had to find, research, report and produce a news story.

But they also have to come up with a sidebar that would complement their main piece, and consider what format this should take. This reflects our multiplatform approach in training graduate students to work across different media while at the same time maintaining quality content. We all know what a challenge that can be, even in the newsroom.

Many of the students are comfortable with technology and eager to experiment. But this is not just about adding video or audio to a story because you can. Students are taught to consider how using multimedia can enhance their journalism, making critical decisions about why one form of media works better than another to tell a particular story.

When student Alexis Stoymenoff wrote about the mayoral candidates singing at an event, she also posted short clips of the performances. The videos enhanced the written piece by allowing readers to see what the story was all about.

Another, Brandi Cowen, looked at how students new to the city were excluded from the local poll, producing a map showing different voting rules across Canada. This provided an easy and intuitive way to examine what could have been a rather dry written piece.

Unraveling City Politics

Despite all the new ways to inform readers about civic issues, some basics remain. Students can't forget that, no matter what tools you use to tell a story, the most important thing is to do the legwork to make sure that the underlying story is accurate. The students still had to research the local political scene, a task especially daunting given that many of them are from outside Vancouver and have only been living in the city for a few months.

Getting a grounding in local politics was key to this assignment, as this West Coast city has its own peculiarities. National parties aren't represented on a local level. Instead there are Vancouver-only parties. And local councilors are not elected according to city district. Rather, the ten candidates with the most votes overall are elected.

Therefore it was important to have faculty on hand who could help guide the students. Fortunately, our Canwest Visiting Professor for this semester is Vancouver Sun columnist Miro Cernetig. As a regular commentator on city politics, he brought considerable knowledge and connections to the classroom.

He was instrumental in persuading the premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, to talk to the students about the political issues in the province.

Still, it proved hard for students to gain, in just a few weeks, the sort of understanding of local politics that a city reporter develops over years. Our advice was simple: Keep asking questions. Sometimes the hardest part of being a journalist is admitting that they don't know something, or don't quite understand it.

As budding reporters, it is understandable that a student might be concerned about appearing ignorant. But there is nothing wrong in pressing for a clearer explanation and asking for more details. Curiosity and perseverance pay off in the end.

Less is More

In the end, the students learned that not every story needed a multiplatform approach. Learning how to use multimedia to successfully tell a story sometimes involves learning when not to use multimedia. It's not about adding audio or video just because you can.

One challenge the students faced was working on stories that were not going to be published for a couple of weeks. Many started their newsgathering by attending debates between candidates or election-related events in communities. But the spot news generated by these events would be woefully out of date by our publication deadline. Instead, we urged the students to look at the issues that can come out of these events, and find the stories that brought the topic to life in a topical and relevant fashion.

Our aim was for the students to produce local stories on issues that were largely absent from the day-to-day coverage of the campaign in the mainstream media.

As a result, we ended up with a wealth of content. For example, at one of the mayoral debates, neither candidate was willing to commit funds to the Outgames due to be held in Vancouver in 2011, at a time when the city was spending millions on the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Student Magally Zelaya used that as the starting point to look at the reaction from Vancouver's gay community, which prides itself on its economic and cultural significance to the city. For this story, we decided that the most effective way to enhance the main story was a Q&A on the Outgames, rather than try to use multimedia just for the sake of it.

Another, Brent Wittmeier, reported on the debate over building homes in church parking lots and also chose text for the sidebar. Even in a multimedia medium like the web, sometimes plain old text may be the best way to enhance a story.

For the students, the local elections offered an opportunity to take their skills out of the classroom and apply them in a professional setting. It gave them a grounding in the politics of the city and a way to showcase their multiplatform journalism. But it was also about making decisions about using multimedia and thinking critically about how best to tell the story.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.