Check out "A J-School Year"

With the start of classes, have been more involved in putting together syllabuses than in putting together posts.

In the process, colleague Ernie Wiggins and I have recruited a group of journalism school students to start the "A J-School Year" blog. From the "Welcome" message:

We hope that during the next year (nine months really), you'll stop in from time to time to get an idea of what goes on in a modern American journalism school from the students' perspective.

The idea for this blog started with a call from a major newspaper's recruiter wondering why more minorities did not go into copy editing. I could speculate, but realized that the best people to tell us were students themselves. Ernie Wiggins, a fellow former professional who also teaches at the University of South Carolina j-school, and I got to talking, and what emerged was the idea of using this blog to provide a broader insight on a lot of other things, too: How do you handle the demands of juggling reporting classes that require lots of time with other classes, working, and - yeah - a life? What do you do when you begin to have doubts that this is the career (with its long hours and low pay) that you want to pursue? Oh, and how do you get through Fisher's editing class?

So stop by and tell us what you think. There is some interesting stuff already, including a freshman who needs a "fix" of journalism courses and another who says its time for journalists to inject a little personal opinion into stories to keep reader interest up.