Category: For educators

Posted on by — Leave a comment

#ONA17 Equips Educators with New Perspectives, Tools

This piece originally was published on the MediaShift.org website.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Journalism educators, striving to be nimble as news organizations evolve, learned about immersive storytelling, social media tools, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, news bots and more at the Online News Association conference last week.

Because tech has become an integral part of reporting, many journalism instructors are now pondering how programs and faculty can innovate — quickly.

“We define news based on models that do not exist anymore,” said CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Associate Dean and Professor Andrew Mendelson. “That has defined us, it still defines us and that’s a really important thing to overturn.”

A study released during the conference by the International Center for Journalists found reporters generally aren’t keeping up with tech trends. This and other studies have led to a renewed effort by journalism educators to embrace and teach new tech.

To be sure graduating students are qualified for emerging jobs such as social media director or community engagement editor, Mendelson and others at a meetup and brainstorming session said educators must continue to learn new things.

“My answer would be to find ways to encourage everyone, all the faculty, to learn something outside their own tent,” said Sue Newhook, an assistant journalism professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“That can mean new skills, ideas and approaches,” she said.

Getting familiar with new tech – and being comfortable enough to teach it – can seem daunting, several instructors said.

ONA 17 took place in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 5-7 this year. (Photo: Kate Nash Cunningham)

But the job can be made easier if journalism educators band together, said Eric Newton, innovation chief of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

“Probably the best thing a professor can do is let go of the idea that one must master something before teaching it to someone else,” he said in an interview with MediaShift.

“There are times when all the students need to know is the existence of new tools, and they can learn them themselves. And then once they’ve learned them, you have a wonderful class discussion about the best ways to use them for journalism, which is the value added that any good journalism educator can bring, even if they are not masters of those tools,” he said.

Newton, a long-time champion of journalism at the Knight Foundation, said educators can get started by connecting to resources such as the ONA Educator’s Facebook page.

As more resources become available, the community of educators using them, and ultimately teaching each other, grows.

“If the entire weight of media innovation falls upon your shoulders, it seems impossible,” he said. “But if a group of 1,500 educators on the ONA Educator’s (Facebook) group organizes itself, or if a class organizes itself or a school organizes itself to find ways to keep current…it’s not really hard.”

Professors also need to give themselves permission and time to experiment, he said.

“When the number of new concepts is so great, it’s a false choice to think that you have to start with any one of those new things,” he said. “The best thing to do is clear the space for a steady stream of new things.”

The conference, where journalists comprise a growing number of attendees, served as a spot for educators and other presenters to share resources and classroom success stories.

Here’s a look at a few of the highlights:

Getting Immersive in the Classroom with 360 Video

For a while, immersive reporting (think 360-degree video or augmented reality) was not a part of the mainstream journalism landscape.

That has changed.

Two of the people who spoke on a panel about 360 reporting are employees of two of the largest news outlets, the Associated Press and The New York Times. Both do extensive work with 360 video, which means it should be a part of j-school curricula soon.

Panelist Robert Hernandez, associate professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, said journalism educators can get started with small and inexpensive spherical cameras to introduce students to this type of reporting.

See more about his 360 journalism projects here. Read this for reviews of equipment.

Coincidentally, Hernandez and his students won an Online Journalism Association Pro-AM student award at the conference for their story on the Salton Sea, which makes heavy use of 360 video.

Knowing How to Search Social

Much of the public conversation about news happens on social media. That means journalists need to know how to search posts across many platforms in breaking news situations, and several parts of the conference focused on tools that make this job easy.

Crowdtangle, owned by and integrated with Facebook, has emerged as a powerhouse.

Those with a Crowdtangle dashboard in Facebook can join the “Crowdtangler” closed group. (Others with pending requests for access to Crowdtangle need to wait.) There’s also a Facebook Instagram Workshop for News and Publishers group for tips.

Crowdtangle allows users to show others the top social posts related to an event in real time. This can be handy for live TV broadcasts.

Integrating Web and Design Tools

Knowing some web and design skills are a must for graduating journalism students, even at print organizations. Three panelists (all educators) shared the tools and tech they use in classes aimed at getting students coding, creating news games and designing.

Here’s a link to resources shared by Mindy McAdams, digital journalism professor at the University of Florida; Juli James, a lecturer at the University of North Texas who teaches gaming; and Katherine Hepworth, an assistant professor of visual communication at the University of Reno-Nevada. The resources ranged from easy ways to teach font pairing to methods of showing students how to use JavaScript and think about game design.

Artificial intelligence: Taking News to a New Level

Amy Webb, left, speaks with ONA17 attendees during the conference in Washington, D.C. Webb’s Tech Trends report for 2017 was released to the public in conjunction with her session. (Photo: Kate Nash Cunningham)

Futurist Amy Webb, who gives an annual “Tech Trends in Journalism” talk at ONA, said as everybody is talking about the tech of the future, few news organizations are taking action.

“What’s about to happen is going to fundamentally alter journalism,” she said. “We’re going to wind up on the other side of this with a media landscape we don’t recognize.”

One example: We’ll be getting our news from post-smartphone services like Amazon’s Alexa and other technologies without any physical user interface. This could make it complicated for readers to understand where news is coming from.

Media companies that focus on technologies like artificial intelligence, however, will pull ahead. Her “trend clusters” this year relate to visual computing, voice interface and access to news.

Regarding journalism education, Webb suggested grounding students in news literacy. Professors could use recent examples of sloppy and inaccurate reporting as examples to talk about “the appropriate time to send out information given that we have a proliferation of news sources…we are now news organizations that publish on the wire that is Twitter,” she told MediaShift.

In terms of artificial intelligence, Webb said “it would be very wise for professors not to teach AI, but to talk through what is it, what is it not, what can it do, want can’t it do and a brief history of it.”

Read the 2018 tech trends for journalism and media and see her folders of related information including recommendations and readings for professors here.

Watch the video of her talk here.

Build a Bot in Your Classroom

During one session, journalism educators heard from Quartz’s John Keefe, who led a hands-on session in bot building.

One example of news bots is the Quartz app, where users interact with an interface that resembles a text-messaging service, delivering summaries of the day’s top stories in SMS-like chat bubbles.

To demonstrate how bot newcomers could create something similar, Keefe, a bot developer and project manager at the company, guided attendees through the basics in chatbot script writing during the RSVP-only “Build-a-Bot Workshop.”

Participants created a basic Facebook Messenger chatbot using Dexter — a free-to-use tool for simple experimentation.

The step-by-step walk-through outlined in the session can be found on Keefe’s Github page. After users complete Step 1 — registering for Dexter by clicking “Make Your First Bot” on the site’s homepage — they can learn bot syntax and see publishing options.

Keefe said using bots as a means of information delivery is in its early stages, but it makes sense to go where the users are.

“If people are using Facebook and Messenger to communicate with each other and access other forms of information, it’d be wise for us to figure out how to best be there, too,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out what that means for journalism and storytelling and to see how it will work.”

With so much new tech to teach, educators at the conference spoke of new classes to add to their programs – although many said they struggle with a glacial pace for adapting new courses.

As journalism continues to dramatically change, Newton, who is updating his landmark journalism education book “Searchlights and Sunglasses,” said evolving will just become part of what educators do.

“It’s not that the future is any one technology or one particular genre of technologies; the future is ever-changing technologies and the capacity to be comfortable with that,” Newton said.

Kate Nash Cunningham is the social media editor for MediaShift. She teaches digital journalism at the University of New Mexico. Additional reporting by Matt Veto, professor of practice at Lehigh University.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How to assign a Snapchat story in a journalism class

University of New Mexico students Savana Carollo, Arianna Sena and John Acosta created a Snapchat My Story on Feb. 11, 2016 as part of an assignment aimed at learning how to use the app as a storytelling platform.
University of New Mexico students Savana Carollo, Arianna Sena and John Acosta created a Snapchat My Story on Feb. 11, 2016 as part of an assignment aimed at learning how to use the app as a storytelling platform.

As journalism educators, we can’t ignore the emergence of Snapchat as a storytelling platform. With news outlets and Snapchat itself hiring reporters to cover major news like the presidential elections using the app, I feel compelled to talk with students about Snapchat’s potential to tell stories and connect with the audience. During a 300-level multimedia journalism class this semester, I tried an assignment where students worked on deadline to create a short story on campus.

When I mentioned the assignment at the start of the semester, students immediately were interested in how it might work in a news context. About half of them said they use the app on a regular basis.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a frequent user, although I do spend more and more time looking at how news organizations use the platform. So to prepare, I focused on the My Story function, where journalists can create stories of an event that can be shared for 24 hours (unlike Snap photos or video, which are shared with friends for up to 10 seconds and then disappear.)

I didn’t focus as much on the other features of Snapchat, including filters that are added to people’s faces. When I showed filters that put your city name on a photo based on your geolocation, a few students excitedly piped in and said I should try the “face filters.” Sure enough, you can take a photo and then add a filter that looks as if you are breathing fire. Or swimming underwater. Or have purple eyes. I wouldn’t use those in a news context of course, but that’s the interesting intersection we’re at with social platforms that can be used as journalism tools but that largely are used for more lighthearted topics. I made everyone laugh as I projected my fire-breathing selfie onto the large screen in the front of the room — a moment captured in a video Snap by a student. I am a little bummed that the student sent the video to her friends instead of saving it to her My Story, as that moment is gone forever. Of course, that’s part of what Snapchat is.

Screen Shot 2016-02-12 at 11.36.03 AM

To start the lecture, I talked about the history of Snapchat. I showed the first Snapchat resume and then went through the basics of using the app.

Students seemed well versed in the how tos of using the app to communicate with friends, so we also talked about the Discover section of Snapchat, where news organizations like CNN and the Wall Street Journal are presenting news. A quick survey in the room showed that students were equally interested in news topics as much as content from outlets like Cosmo and people like DJ Khaled.

My goal was for students to think about using a tool they already understand and enjoy as a platform for journalism. I wanted them to practice their interviewing skills using the video Snap option, and I wanted them to practice producing something on deadline. So I gave them about 30 minutes to do five interviews and five photos with at least two titles.

I tied their interviews into a project we have on campus where journalism students ask the public what they are curious about and then report on those questions. For this assignment, students were to ask people what they want to know about Albuquerque or New Mexico.

The results were pretty good. In their work, I saw my more shy students open up on camera. I saw my more visual students show their talents. And I saw the students who were newer to the app take an interest in how they could use it for reporting. Along the way, they produced a story that could be used to complement other reporting. They also seemed excited, and many of you know that getting students excited in the classroom can be a challenge.

One student tweeted:

I would try this assignment again for sure, maybe as a component to larger story that students are producing using more traditional multi-media approaches.

Here are my takeaways for other journalism educators considering a Snapchat assignment:

Assign groups and team captains.

Chances are, one-fourth of your students are experts in Snapchat and can show others. They also can help you during your demonstration if you aren’t a Snapchat pro.

Explain the limitations of the app.

For video, there’s a 10-second limit in Snapchat, so students had to prep their sources that their answers had to be succinct.

Have a specific content focus for the assignment.

Newer students will be focused on learning how to use the app, so directing them on the content side lets them focus on learning the tool.

Explain that there might be a disconnect between the tone of Snapchat and the subject of the story.

For example, students don’t want to be lighthearted and using all kinds of emoji if they are covering something serious.

Remind students that accuracy and good cutlines still matter.

I asked students to get the same kind of cutline information they would get if they were publishing a photo online or in a news outlet.

Journalism students at the University of New Mexico recently completed a Snapchat story as part of a class assignment aimed at having students explore the popular app's journalism potential.
Journalism students at the University of New Mexico recently completed a Snapchat story as part of a class assignment aimed at having students explore the popular app’s journalism potential.

Remember to have students save their My Stories so you can see them later on for grading and class critique.

If they don’t, you have nothing to see.

Have fun.

Many of my students this semester are in the middle of learning the technical aspects of professional video cameras and audio recorders, which are unfamiliar and can be complicated. Allowing them to try storytelling with something a little more familiar allowed them to relax a bit — which is what Snapchat is all about.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The most interesting 12 months of my career

Ever have the sense that you are so busy teaching students how to blog that you don’t have time to blog yourself?

I’m guilty. For about the past year, I have neglected my own writing about journalism and journalism education. But the things that have kept me busy are good ones. In short, this has been the best and most dynamic year of my teaching career. I’ve learned more in the past 12 months than during any other point in my time on this planet.

In July 2014, I was named as the editor of the New Mexico News Port, a student journalism lab at the University of New Mexico, where I teach journalism. The lab, first funded by the Online News Association and now by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, serves as a hub for journalism students to collaborate with local media partners including the public television and radio stations on campus as well as the independent student newspaper.

To date, we’ve done three theme-based projects, including covering the mid-term election; producing audience-based reporting based on the WBEZ Curious City model and crafting an in-depth look at New Mexico’s innovation economy. Our work has won several local and national awards.

My work at the News Port includes story planning and editing with students in various classes in the department, overseeing a crew of student employees, and designing and developing our website.

Here’s a look at a student-produced video about our first year. The project continues to expand and grow as we reach out to new partners and help more students publish their work as they prepare for careers in journalism.

In the spring of 2015, I taught the first Mobile Reporting course at UNM. I created and pitched this class, which is cross listed as an elective in the Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media program and the Communication and Journalism Department here. To fund the iPad kits for students, I wrote my first grant.

In the class, students use an iPad mini to report and produce audio and video pieces that they publish to a group WordPress site. I will teach the class again in spring 2016, and the class has been chosen to be part of a new Innovation Academy at UNM.

Here’s some of the best work from the inaugural class.

Meanwhile, this summer, I started helping guide students at the New Mexico Daily Lobo from a daily print schedule into a twice-weekly, online-first approach. Part of my work with students as their writing coach involves helping them incorporate digital and social media into a new newsroom workflow and mentality. Next month, I will give a training on using Periscope to cover breaking news.

For the fall 2015 semester, I’m teaching a 200-level writing and editing for multimedia class. I was given the latitude and encouragement to shake up the syllabus a bit and run the course more as a newsroom than a classroom. I consider this my tiny corner of the teaching hospital model of journalism education. I believe students can only learn journalism from doing journalism and the sooner this starts in their college careers, the better.

As part of their work in my class, students write directly for the Daily Lobo as well as the News Port. So far, students have been excited to see their work in print and online. To ease students into the idea, I have a student editor in the classroom with me every other week to go over edits and workshop ideas. I think this helps the students feel more connected to the newsroom process.

As this semester progresses, I look forward to reporting back (more often) on this initiative and a few of the other projects I have underway. Stay here or follow my blog for updates.

Kate

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What grad school taught me about teaching journalism students

When students come to see me just before they graduate, they are often a bit afraid of what their job prospects look like. Each year, I tell them I can relate to their fears, especially about the journalism job market. Never has that been more true than this year. In May, I completed my master’s degree in digital journalism and design, and I know intimately what the market looks like, both for journalists and journalism professors. Right now, it’s bleak for students who don’t have advanced digital skills to go along with their solid journalism acumen. Jobs in traditional news outlets are tough to come by. But the news is mixed: while those legacy jobs may be shrinking, digital journalism and journalism-related jobs exist like never before. A 2014 Pew Research study found that 500 digital news outlets employ almost 5,000 full time employees. That tally suggests that opportunities abound for those who combine their news savvy with their computer skills.

‘Journalism-related jobs’
So what are journalism-related jobs? And what can journalism programs do to prepare students for them?

Having taught college journalism for almost four years and having worked as a reporter for almost 15 years, I have thought about those questions a great deal. I spend time pondering how journalism programs prepare journalism students. I teach undergraduates, but I also just finished a nearly brand new graduate program. In one role, at the University of New Mexico, I help students write cover letters and resumes for the entry level jobs they are seeking, among other things. In some cases, I look at job ads to see if my students are a match for open positions. In my other role as a graduate student at the University of South Florida, I took classes that taught me skills that the directors of the program considered pertinent to students wanting to work (or teach) in digital journalism, including web publishing, data journalism and entrepreneurial know-how. The two universities are pretty different, but the experiences have helped me come up with this list of skills I think are most important for future reporters to know.

First, think about the web editor, or the person building/designing/maintaining and promoting the website of your local newspaper. In many cases, that person is not a journalist in the way we traditionally describe the person who does original reporting and produces content. But, you bet that he or she is using journalism skills to make phone calls, investigate tips and write copy as part of his or her work. And journalism programs by and large do a great job of teaching those kinds of basics. But it’s the other part of the web designer/editor’s work that many programs are missing. Students interested in journalism but perhaps not being the city hall reporter need coding, design and multimedia skills to work in jobs such as web producer or manager.

Or, think about those cool interactive graphics you see on websites like the New York Times or the Guardian or a favorite of mine, La Nacion of Argentina. The folks on the teams at each paper that produce infographics, interactive graphics and more have solid journalism credentials. But they also have related skills that took them to where they are. Those skills include (again) coding and design, but they also involve critical thinking and analysis and firm understanding of data, something that isn’t commonly taught as part of journalism curricula. That is changing, as more schools realize the value of data journalism (and facility with data in general), a recent special series of articles on the PBS EducationShift blog showed.

At the same time, there’s been a lot made of the importance of teaching journalism students journalism-related entrepreneurial skills. I’m mostly on board with that, although I think the number of journalists starting their own companies (vs. freelancing or working for a company) tends to be overestimated. Nonetheless, I believe it’s key for students to know what the economics are behind the news business. They should know what a new tablet or a nice DSLR camera costs, if only so they can be cognizant of how lucky they are when someone hands them new equipment — or of how many lattes they will have to skip to buy their own. Students also should understand the digital marketplace that can be key in determining who sees and buys their content.

Another theme I’ve seen at recent journalism education conferences is that students need to learn how to keep learning. That means many different things, but to me it means students must become comfortable enrolling and participating in online classes, whether the smaller for credit classes nearly all universities now offer, or the much larger Massive Open Online Courses offered by larger universities, often for a certificate instead of credit. Why? The technical savvy needed to operate (and troubleshoot) a learning management system is important, but so is the ability to communicate remotely, through live web cam video, virtual presentations and discussion boards. Doing that with ease is key for students who might work for a company that’s based in another city — or time zone. Along with the conversation of how students should learn what they need to learn (in person, online or a bit of both) comes the discussion of how we should teach. That’s an important part of what I’m outlining here, but I don’t think it’s the only discussion. If a student can learn basic coding for a news app at a school that doesn’t subscribe to the teaching hospital model for example, I think that’s great, even though I support the newer models of innovative teaching.

A separate set of skills that comes to mind as key for about-to-be graduates are those of the mobile journalist. I don’t consider those journalism related, however, I consider them the manifestation of journalism in its modern form. The dated definition of print journalists — those who simply wrote a story for the printed edition and went home — has been updated to mean reporters who write a story for the web, do some tweeting and then write a story for print. In the past five years, however, reporters’ workloads have increased again, with the expectation by top news outlets (print and broadcast) that students will report, produce, edit and publish from the field, and not with the help of a satellite truck or a even a laptop. Instead, many professionals use nothing bigger than an iPad (and often times smaller) to post complete video packages or live text updates to the web. That means students need to work independently to use, maintain and troubleshoot mobile equipment, apps, file storage and publication. And journalism students should learn about those in the setting of a journalism class, where context, privacy and accuracy are discussed in detail. This helps set trained reporters apart from everyone else in the world who can upload a photo, video or tweet to the web with a mobile phone or tablet. Along with mobile reporting, mobile design is a huge consideration for the world’s next journalists and those who work with them.

To wrap up, we must teach students more design and data. Along with that should come coding, and not just for web sites. Students who can design or build news apps are a step ahead of those with knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript and server-side languages. This strong need for technical know-how and computer science prowess as part of journalism education has become clear to me in recent years as not only increasingly important, but necessary for both students looking for work and for journalism departments looking for more students. Countless others, too, have advocated for adjustments to journalism programs, while others have conducted studies of what skills educators think are most important. Implementing such changes, of course, isn’t easy, but we need to continue the discussion about how we can best prepare journalism students not just for the jobs of the future, but for work that many of our students could do now.

P.S. Many of you have asked about my own plans now that I am done with grad school. Along with teaching news writing at UNM, I’ve got one big project lined up for this fall and next spring that I can’t wait to reveal. Check out my next blog post for details as soon as I can announce it.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Tips and tools from the Journalism Interactive 2014 conference

I’m just back from Journalism Interactive, a two-day conference at the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. In short: it rocked. In long: if you care about the intersection of journalism and technology, you have to go next year. Picture the country’s best journalists, technologists and educators all in one place. Add some caffeine and a good measure of geeky excitement about technology and that pretty much sums up the event.

There were so many high-caliber speakers with great tips and thoughts, I left with my brain stuffed with new ideas about what I can and should be teaching my students. These are my ten takeaways. (I could have written 100, but Dan Reimold already has that covered at College Media Matters.)

ONE: We need to teach students to create journalism that’s interactive. Not too long ago, creating interactive graphics was the domain of those who know code. Not anymore. Thinglink is a cool (free) little tool that allows students to place text and video over a still image to make them interactive. The possibilities are pretty much endless with this simple software.

TWO: Why Google it when you can Wolfram Alpha it? Amy Webb of Webbmedia gave a wonderful presentation on six tech trends and showed us the Wolfram Alpha search engine. I’ve seen it before, but never used it much. A few weeks ago, I watched a presentation from Stephen Wolfram, and now that I know Webb uses it, the site is high on my list to show students as not only a great search engine example, but what can be done some clever coding and math.

Webb’s whole presentation, which has many other goodies and is worth your time:

THREE: Speaking of coders, they are the most sharing people you’ll meet. Journalists need to get to know more of them. I had already gotten great advice from Michelle Minkoff’s blog before I got to meet her at a session on web scraping. She made the point several times that coders are more than willing to share what they know with others. If you are not the most techy journalist, coders are good people to know when you want to do that cool thing that’s going to take more than a Google spreadsheet to do.

Michelle Minkoff, an interactive producer for the Associated Press, helps Serena Carpenter with a question about web scraping during Journalism Interactive 2014.
Michelle Minkoff, an interactive producer for the Associated Press, helps Serena Carpenter with a question about web scraping during Journalism Interactive 2014.

FOUR: Wearables are here to stay, and students need to know about tools like Google Glass. Professor Jeremy Littau gave a presentation on teaching with Glass at the conference and his links are worth checking out, as is his presentation.

FIVE: Another interactive tool that students can easily use is Infogr.am. Students can create info graphics or charts without much hassle. It’s a low-tech way to build high-tech looking visuals. Another speaker, Richard Koci Hernandez of UC Berkeley, mentioned a bunch of other great storytelling tools and techniques. His presentations is worth watching here.

SIX: Robots are here to help journalists, says NPR data journalist Jeremy Bowers. They can automate the most tedious tasks that reporters have to do, like checking local seismic activity data or quickly editing stories for the web. When they notice changes in data, they can send you alerts or even write short stories. If you teach sports writers, remind them that much of what they write relates to data, and then show them the New York Time’s Fourth Down Bot. Check out the panel on data-driven journalism here.

4thdownbot

SEVEN: Computer science is inseparable from journalism. So get your kids (and by that I mean any preschooler you know and/or your college students) all the computer science exposure you can. Specific recommendations at the conference included Code Academy, School of Data and Coursera MOOCs. While many tools are out there like Infogr.am help students produce visuals without coding knowledge, students with coding skills will be the best prepared to create custom work that sets them apart. One way to help expose students to computer science is to team teach with other departments or have CS professors speak in your classes. Apart from code, students need to know about topics like anticipatory computing and algorithmic accountability.

EIGHT: Stay connected with likeminded others. Sounds more than obvious, right? But I can’t say enough about the virtual networking and groups that are a part of the journalism and tech community. There are hashtags to use throughout the year (#edshift, #wjchat, #jiconf, etc) and groups to join (Online News Association, NICAR, data journalism groups on Meetup.com, etc.) Apart from tip sharing and camaraderie, some of the groups, like ONA, have grants. Yes, money, for journalism! I’m part of a group at the University of New Mexico that won an ONA Challenge Fund grant, announced at the conference. (Follow @nmnewsport for more details on our project.)

Along with staying connected comes staying charged. And by that I mean your electronics. I learned two pro tips related to powering your smart phone. First, from someone in the back of the room whose name I didn’t catch: putting your iPhone on airplane mode charges it faster. Second, a nifty USB charger called Photive allows you to recharge without having to plug in to a wall.

NINE: Mobile reporting skills are key. Carl Corry of Newsday gave a presentation on mobile reporting technology. In short, reporting with phones and tablets is a key skill students are expected to have to work at any type of news organization. He mentioned the site of WTOP reporter Neal Augenstein, which has some great how-tos and insights on using the iPhone.

TEN: Keep learning. It’s up to us to keep our students on the cutting edge. That means attending conferences like this, but it also means homework when we can’t travel. Consider Amy Webb’s summer course for journalism instructors.

Here are more takes on the conference from others who attended.

American Journalism Review’s take.

Post by professor Katy Culver on PBS Education Shift.

Professor Tiffini Theisen’s blog

14 takeaways by teacher Aaron Manfull.

Storify curation by Professor Jeremy Littau

Posted on by — Leave a comment

I pitched a new journalism class, and it starts this fall

A set up similar to what students in my mobile reporting class will use this fall.
Students in my mobile reporting class will use a setup similar to this in the fall.

Even though we’re just past Spring Break at UNM, I’ve got my eye set on what I’ll be teaching this fall. One of the classes I’m most excited about is mobile reporting. We’ll be using smart phones and tablets to record, edit and publish news stories. This is the first time UNM will offer the class, and I’m way excited to be a pioneer.

Here’s a piece I wrote for PBS Media Shift about the process I went through to set up the class and hopefully get funding. I find out in April if my grant proposal is approved, so think good thoughts.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What journalism students know — and want to know — about the role of social media in news coverage

In an introduction to media writing class I teach at the University of New Mexico, we had the chance to talk Tuesday morning about the role of social media in the coverage of the Boston bombings.

Following up on a lecture I gave two weeks ago about how journalists use social media, I touched on how Twitter, Facebook and Storify played major roles in how people learned about Monday’s tragedy. 

I asked students if any of them had waited to read about the bombings in this morning’s paper. No hands went up.

Had anyone waited until the 5, 6 or 10 o’clock news to learn of the events? A few hands.

Did anyone hear about it on social media? Many more hands. Students mentioned Facebook and Twitter as their sources of information.

I showed examples of Storify curations about the explosions done by papers small and large, and I displayed my Tweetdeck column with the updates to the Boston Marathon hashtag flying by.

I pulled up a Vine video of the moment of one of the bombings that had gone viral, so students could see how anybody with a cell phone could become a “journalist” in a moment’s notice. I pointed out a Youtube channel of videos of all kinds — from all kinds of people — from the event.

As a grad student in the Digital Journalism and Design program at the University of South Florida, I find all of this very interesting, on so many levels. That’s a whole other blog post.

But what I found even more interesting were the questions my students had about all of this. These mostly freshman journalism students just starting their study of reporting asked questions about digital tools that journalism education leaders need to know.

(I think I answered all of them, but I mentioned that a few of the topics didn’t always have clear answers and could be the subject of whole semesters of study.)

Some of the questions were about the proper or ethical use of social media information posted by others. 
One student wanted to know if the media or just anyone can take a social media post — whether it be text, photo or video — and reuse it?

Another wanted to know if retweeting something libelous could get the individual passing on the bad info in legal trouble.

A few questions had to do with the mechanics of using social media. Who creates or chooses a hashtag for a big event? Can just anyone do that?

Another asked about who manages curations like those on Storify. Does anyone edit that work?

A tangential topic had to do with how television news was presented, and a student asked why an NBC reporter mentioned the nationality of a person of interest in the case. A discussion ensued about needing to fill up air time in a 24-hour news cycle — a topic for another day.

The bombings also made me think about what skills journalism and media students need to know to get a job and stay employed these days. Yes, it’s (deadline) writing and reporting and critical thinking. Yes, it’s photography and videography and audio. And it’s how to make graphs, maps and charts.

But the role of digital tools and social media can’t be overlooked.

Students need to know the basics of social media hashtags to be able to join in a conversation about an event, or at least read and learn from it. They need to understand how to sort through social media posts for true information and leads for other information.

Students need to know how to shoot decent photos and videos with a smart phone. They must be able to edit and upload them  from the scene. Knowledge of other equipment such as DSLRs, video and audio equipment is even better, but many students these days will only ever use a cell phone as a reporting tool.

Students need to understand other technology used in a major event like this, such as the Google people finder that was set up to connect runners with family members, or alternative blog sites that were set up when the Boston Globe site went down.

It also might help students who are interested in the developer side of news to understand the advantages and the limitations of mobile information. During our discussion on how students got the news, one asked about designing a mobile news website vs a native phone app — a key distinction to think about for big stories that have large photo galleries or video files.

As they learn information gathering skills, students need to figure out what to do with all the reporting they gather on their mobile phones in case cell phone service slows to a crawl or is cut off. That’s where the old fashioned approaches to journalism come in as handy as ever.

I could add more skills to this list, such as creating heat maps with Twitter data of the locations of most of the tweets about the marathon. Other data visualization and informational graphics abilities are also a plus.

Along with other lessons from the event, I hope the Boston bombings help journalism professors rethink how we teach journalism students to prepare to be the reporters on the scene of the next big news event. 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Thoughts on coordinating a journalism education conference

photo-12As part of my work as the New Mexico Daily Lobo writing coach, I coordinate a yearly journalism education bootcamp for local student journalists. This year’s #lobocamp just finished up, and I had a few thoughts and a Storify curation I wanted to share.

We had about 60 students from the University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College, which is a good portion of the local journalism majors. I knew I wanted the best speakers New Mexico had to offer, so I started coordinating last August. It worked. Thirty one print, TV and online reporters and photographers committed to the event. I wish I had started letting students know back then, as I think a few more would have attended, but I really plugged the event once I had it lined up, in early December.

A few thoughts on content: way more students were interested in a panel on data journalism than I thought. Given the choice between that and learning WordPress, more chose to learn about using databases to tell stories. On feedback forms, the students also said the panel they were most interested in was about breaking news, followed by a talk about the latest tools journalists use. Students said they were least interested in a panel on surviving as a freelancer and working with editors.

One big lesson this year was that if you ask students to tweet about an event, they will. Students who were not on Twitter at the start of the conference were using it by Sunday. Our #lobocamp hashtag didn’t trend on Twitter, but probably got close. It also got the attention of other reporters and student journalist educators around the country. A former U.S. representative from New Mexico even got in on the hashtag, during a trip in Tunisia. So once the event started, I didn’t have to worry about creating any more buzz. (The trick with Twitter, as you probably know, is that students will tweet anything during the event with your hashtag, related or not.) But overall, they did a great job of synthesizing the information presented to them and describing what they were learning. I see the use of Twitter during a live event as a skill that fits in with deadline and breaking news writing — the tweets have to be accurate and fast.

The challenge for me now is to harness the enthusiasm and energy the students have coming off two days of intense learning. If anyone has ideas on that, please send them my way.

Here are two curations, one from each day, of the best tweets and pics from the event.

[View the story “2013 Daily Lobo Journalism Bootcamp” on Storify]

[View the story “Day two of the 2013 Daily Lobo Journalism Bootcamp” on Storify]

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What college grads can’t do — and how journalism education can help

Much has been made of what journalism education should focus on these days. Should it involve all the latest social media reporting tools? What about video? How about just basic writing and editing? What skills should journalism students should have when they leave college and perhaps venture into other careers?

A recent report out from the Project Information Literacy group made me think more about the skills I want my students to know, and how they will use those skills after school.

The study found that recent college grads who are considered digital natives struggled with “traditional methods” of information gathering (like using the telephone or looking at databases.) That means students are good at, say, Twitter, but probably not so quick with Excel.

At the same time, in a blog post about the study on journalistresource.org, Chrissie Long points out that “obtaining and processing information” are among the top five skills that job recruiters look for in a candidate.

It seems that there’s a pretty large gap between those two ideas. Students can provide an answer nearly immediately, but analyzing that answer appears to be a little more difficult.

That’s where I believe journalism education comes in. Yes, journalists do sometimes use email for interviews instead of calling a source during dinner. But the best journalism instructors will insist students use the phone — or visit a source in person. While it may seem second nature for reporters in particular to use the phone, that’s a skill many students have to be taught. And, chances are that few classes outside journalism and communication departments actually teach the art of working the phone.

At the same time, journalists routinely use Google for quick answers — something the study found can be detrimental if speed is valued above accuracy — but good reporters turn to other online tools as well. Journalism professors should and do require students to document that their searches for information to be used in reporting go beyond the 0.55 seconds it takes Google to pull up reams of info, some of which may be true. To say that research skills aren’t taught outside J-schools would be false, of course, but journalism education perhaps focuses more on verifying information before publication more than other schools.

The study by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, done along with the Berkman Center of Internet and Society at Harvard University, also found that the new graduates often turned to a colleague for help with an answer when stumped. Again, that’s a choice some reporters will use, but those with experience will go beyond a check of the folks in the office for the answer to their question. Journalism instructors are used to asking students for more sources or for outside input before publishing something. That’s something that also might set journalism instruction apart from other parts of academia.

The survey of 23 employers and 33 recent college grads also found that many employers are looking for job seekers who can synthesize information they’ve collected through both online and traditional methods. Information synthesis, of course, is central to what reporters do, and what journalism instructors teach.

There’s an adage knowing how to write well isn’t just a great thing for a journalism career — it’s a great thing for many related (and not so related) careers. I still think that’s true. And, as some journalism school registration and graduation numbers shrink, I think journalism educators have a bigger role than in the past.

As fewer students are interested in traditional journalism careers but still sign up for journalism degrees, the Harvard study is a great reminder that journalism educators are training students for jobs beyond the usual journalism outlets. If we can teach students the so-called traditional methods of dealing with information, for example, we play a greater role inside and outside of our communication and journalism departments.