Student journalism, statehouse reporting and community news

A couple of interesting things today from the University of Vermont's Center for Community News for faculty involved in running or developing community news projects and especially  those trying to fill the loss of statehouse reporting.

Statehouse reporting report

The decline in statehouse reporting across the US has been well- documented. It's also been documented how damaging this is to public knowledge since it can be argued that what hapoens at state legislatures has far more impact on people than what happens in Congress or at City Hall.

University journalism journalism programs have in some cases stepped in to fill the gap. The University of Vermont's Center for Community News now counts about 20 such programs.

The center has put out a report taking a deep look at such programs. It's worth downloading.

https://www.uvm.edu/sites/default/files/Center-for-Community-News/pdfs/Final_Statehouse_Report_HK_3.31.2023.pdf

Resources for faculty

There are a couple of interesting community journalism conferences this month https://www.uvm.edu/ccn/events

One focuses on university-sponsored news operations covering statehouses Sept. 28-30 at Missouri.

The other (Sept. 8 online) is aimed at improving the faculty resources page put out by the Center for Community News. You can find the page here. 

 https://www.uvm.edu/ccn/faculty-resources

One Day on Earth

While I was digitally disconnected for most of the summer, this message came in from Joe Clarke Jr.. Looks like an interesting project:

I'm reaching out to Common Sense Journalism because I am specifically interested in reaching journalists around the world.  As your blog reaches a lot of aspiring journalists, I would love to introduce your readership to a global media project that I think they would support.

On Oct. 10, thousands of people from every nation around the world will film their perspective and contribute their voice to one of the largest participatory media events in history. The event will result in a feature documentary and online video archive that will showcase the diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that can occur in one day on earth. Our immediate goal is to expand interest in the project; the more people we have involved, the more accurate and comprehensive a record of the planet we can create.

We hope you will support our efforts by highlighting our event on Common Sense Journalism. Please consider promoting our call to action on Common Sense Journalism: Help Document the World’s Story on 10.10.10. 

You can learn more about One Day On Earth on our website: www.onedayonearth.org

Our trailer can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/11214910

Congrats to the Carolina Reporter

The Reporter, the modest little effort to come out of our practicum here at the University of South Carolina J-school, was a "national finalist" as best all-around non-daily student newspaper in SPJ's Mark of Excellence contest.

Congrats to the staffs - spring and fall 2008 - who deserve the honor.

Best All-Around Non-Daily Student Newspaper
(published less than 4 times per week)
• National Winner: Staff, Loyola Phoenix, Loyola University
• National Finalist: Staff, The Sentinel, North Idaho College
• National Finalist: Staff, The Carolina Reporter, University of South Carolina

The great media menace - Scottsdale edition

Apparently the great media menace has reared its ugly head in Scottsdale, Ariz. -- at least according to some members of the governing board of the local community college system.

You can read the note below and show your support, if you wish, in any way you deem appropriate.

But I do think a good underlying point is raised here -- we are coming to grips, hook or crook, with the reality that we are a multiracial society. In the case of the Cole cartoon, I can see the offense that could be taken. I don't think any was intended, but the drawing clearly could be interpreted as having monkey-like characteristics.

Before you start writing nasty comments and e-mails about the danger of "PC," I'm not suggesting we turn everything into milquetoast. But attention must be paid to the details -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

-----

*Subject: *College press rights threatened

Hello friends. I hope this email finds you well. I apologize in advance for the long note. Just wanted to give you the facts on what we are facing.

*We could use any support you can bring to bear to protect press freedoms for college journalists.
*
A cartoon that ran in our Scottsdale Chronicle Feb. 11 edition shows Obama climbing a small mountain to the presidency then facing a much larger one of expectations. It is called "The Ascent" by John Cole: http://community.thetimes-tribune.com/blogs/johncole/archive/2009/01/21/the-ascent.aspx. It was drawn in honor of the inauguration and ran in his paper, the Scranton Times-Tribune, without a complaint, we have been told. We pay a small fee to Cagle Cartoons to use their syndicated cartoonists after the cartoons run in their original newspapers. It wasn't until the NY Post cartoon came out a week after the Cole cartoon ran in our campus paper that we received an email complaint. The complainant then attached the NY Post cartoon (now referred to as the Chimp cartoon) to an email sent to all African-American faculty and staff districtwide, the local NAACP members, the local media and many members of other African-American Valley organizations inferring that we ran the NY Post cartoon. Because most of those who received the emails weren't on our campus and we don't carry the cartoons online due to copyright issues, It caused a lot of anger but no one contacted us directly so that we could straighten it out. Some people contacted the Governing Board to complain even though they had not seen the cartoon we really ran.

We aren't making excuses for the Cole cartoon. Once people are told that the cartoon we ran makes Obama look like a monkey, then they see it and we understood how some could be offended, especially in light of the NY Post cartoon. Because of the NY Post cartoon, most media are now rethinking how to handle editorial cartoons about Obama, including the Chronicle. We have had great dialogs about the difficult topic of race portrayals in all of society on our campus because of this and have been trying to move forward --- until last night.

Our newspaper appeared on the MCCCD Governing Board agenda for last night (March 10) and two editors and I went. We were led to believe that it was probably just going to be a summation of action taken to dialog with those offended. Instead, all but one of the board members (Don Campbell) decided that all student newspapers in the district needed to allow the board to control content in the future. They didn't feel like the Chronicle had any kind of guidance and wondered if the other district student newspapers operate the same way. The board has trouble understanding the difference between "guidance/adviser" and "control." We were not allowed to speak during all of this. When the Chronicle was discussed, board member Debra Pearson went on a diatribe of how terrible today's media is and how they (the governing board) need to take control of all of the campus newspapers because we are all just a bunch of tabloid journalists. Board member Randolph Lumm kept talking about how there was no oversight for the college newspaper. The worst was when they asked Pete Kushibab, district counsel, if they had a right to take control of the newspaper content and he said they did but that most colleges in the nation choose not to do so. Pete didn't explain why and the board didn't ask. The board told all of the presidents that they are to report back to them on how much oversight and control they have over their campus newspapers. There wasn't a date set, but I suspect it will be on the next agenda, Tuesday, March 24.

So, if the newspaper control discussion ends up on the agenda for March 24, we are calling out all of the students, faculty, staff and media interested in standing up for the First Amendment to show up so that people are flowing out the doors of the building. This new governing board (two just took office this year) doesn't understand its limits. It was an incredibly frustrating night, but we have much support from our own administration and faculty. Dr. Jan Gehler, SCC's new president, has been a very strong defender of the newspaper. It's amazing what one person with a districtwide email system and the wrong cartoon can do to damage the press. We'd appreciate your support.

You can access the Governing Board agenda at http://www.maricopa.edu/gvbd/agenda.php. I'll also sent out a note when I hear.

If you would like to contact me, please feel free to do so through this email address, not my work email. I'd be glad to answer further questions. Our spring break is next week, unlike most of yours, so I won't be in the office.

Take care, Julie

Julie Knapp
SCC Chronicle Adviser, Scottsdale Community College Journalism Director
stpress@cox.net

Journalism education, part ...

I usually get a bit snarky about the debates over journalism education because they tend to deteriorate rather quickly to the intellectual snobs vs. anti-intellectual unwasheds stage.

Not so this excellent pair of posts.

Pat Thornton kicked it off with his ruminations on what a journalism education should be these days.

Mindy McAdams responded, not so much as a point-counterpoint, but as a fill-in-the-cracks and provide more insight post.

And the comments on each are delightful.

I could add something, because I've written a fair amount about j-ed and why it has its troubles in the university (click on the tag below), but it would be just so much noise here. So I'll sit back and partake of an excellent conversation and invite you to, too.

Copy Editors, the end is near & other quick hits

On the other side of the pond, British writer and sub editor Justin Williams predicts:

You have a window in which you can save your career in journalism. But that window is closing and will be tight shut within the next six to 12 months.

Your immediate boss is probably so deep down in the bunker that he or she is not going to help you with this. You’ve got to do something about it yourself.

His Survival Guide for Sub Editors and Other Curmudgenons has 12 things he thinks you should be doing right now if you are a copy editor. Among them:

• Accept the buyout if you're within seven years of retiring and don't have kids in college or a big mortgage. It can be "an enormously liberating thing."
• Learn the content management system and learn about search engine optimisation.
• "Stop fighting about working arrangements and get on with it."
• Stop pestering the communities editor for a blog and start generating some real content that might actually drive some traffic our way. Acquaint yourself with what (within the boundaries of taste and decency) plays well on the aggregators and then dive deep into the blogosphere to find the weird stuff that drives traffic.

Anyhow, you get the idea.

Some other things worth reading:

• Tony Curzon Price's The Blind Newsmaker has been out since January on Open Democracy, but I hadn't seen it till recently. He makes some good points, echoing some I've made here, about the value of "core" journalism in a digital age (hint, not a lot), and he suggests the optimism that digital alternatives will be able to replace the newspaper's role are misplaced.
• One thing I've noticed lately is a turn in all the discussion about business models. Where it used to be "if we keep working on it, someone will find it," now creeping in is a bit of doubt about whether a true business model for journalism will ever be found. Ryan Sholin begins wading into the question. Be sure to follow the links in the comments, especially to Seamus McCaulley who writes: Maybe the elephant in the room is a reluctance to even think of newspapers (or journalism or whatever you want to call it) in business terms. Because if we did, we wouldn't start with the premise "since we're definitely going to keep making journalism, how can we pay for it?" We'd already be thinking "is there enough of a market for journalism to keep doing it?" And nobody wants the answer to that question, because we kind of know already what it probably is. (Sort of bringing us back around to Price's essay and my earlier thoughts on this blog about journalism's value.)
• And Nicolas Kayser-Bril follows up with an online question in which 100 people in the Chicago area on Facebook chose what they most could not live without. Fast-food joints were at 31%, football players at 27% and high school teachers at 24%. Journalists came in fourth at 10 % and auto mechanics at 8%. There are so many ways to attack polls like this, despite Kayser-Bril's note that the results are "statistically significant," but it does give you some food for thought. It might be a fascinating poll to do with a rigorously sampled population.
• Speaking of online questions, back across the pond again, Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog poses the question: Should we be teaching students for a journalism industry that doesn't really seem to want them -- or as Paul puts it "isn't exactly splashing out on job ads at the moment." He posed the video question; the responses aren't very hopeful. I especially like Andy Dickenson's thoughts. Pat Thornton says he learned almost nothing in j-school that applied to what he is doing in the real world. (Thornton's post-school experience, it should be noted, has been largely that of Web editor and related posts; I still think a reporting position might have a different view. And though I agree with him that we silo too much by medium, I wonder sometimes if we unfairly lump any kind of writing and editing instruction into "print" when what we really are trying to teach are the exacting journalism skills that have been more closely associated with print but transcend it when executed well.)

I leave you with this quote from Kevin Anderson of The Guardian that I think says so much:

So many journalists think ‘If I’m a good writer, that’s all I need’. That’s bullshit. There is an arrogance among journalists about the craft of writing. Journalism students will need more than the ability to craft a good sentence.”

His post is so good, I'm embedding it below (you'll find his comment at 6 minutes in):

College papers might be saying: Et tu, Brute?

The uproar grows about word that College Media Network (nee College Publisher), now an arm of MTV, which is an arm of Viacom, which is controlled by ... well, you get the idea ... apparently is planning a series of sites customized by campus that would be competition with the campus papers that College Publisher hosts online.

Called Campus Daily Guide, these new sites apparently are designed to scrape material from the very papers College Publisher hosts. (By the way, for the moment don't bother clicking on that link. After the uproar started, the proprietors put up a password block.)

Like other online guides to local happenings — from Google Maps to Citysearch — the sites offer a calendar of events around campus, a directory of bars and restaurants that users can update and similar services. Two components clearly aimed at students include a “Rate My Professors” module for the college, integrated with the popular Web site, as well as links to the latest news ... direct from the college newspaper itself.

My former USC colleague Bryan Murley blew the whistle late last week, and today Inside Higher Ed has a big write-up. Murley says he's supposed to talk with a CMN representative to get more information, but Jackie Alexander, who spent a year as editor of The Daily Gamecock here at USC, says enough is enough! Alexander has a litany of complaints with CMN:

I am through with CMN. The site has repeatedly failed at key moments. The tech guys are unreliable and unhelpful. The new CP 5.0 has been delayed in coming forever. The ad placement control is stifling. CMN has held a stranglehold over the market because they offer the service for free and without as much worry.

It needs to stop. Now.

There are plenty of us incredibly talented and smart journalism and computer science students out there. It’s time to take our products back into our own hands.

She issues the battle cry for college media to harness the resources on their campuses and create there own sites. The Inside Higher Ed piece says the The Michigan Daily is doing that, but as one commenter pointed out, with the turnover at college papers, entrusting fragile code to a constantly changing staff could be a recipe for problems.

Of course, one could also say that college papers, more than a few of which have been a little lethargic in their online efforts as they were somewhat sheltered from the industry's woes, are finally getting a taste of the real world -- and the school of hard knocks.

Update, July 29:

Bryan has a set of questions and answers with Rusty Lewis, director of university relations for College Media Network. Lewis says there are plans for revenue sharing as part of all this.

Howard Owens looks for wired young journalists

And is mighty disappointed with what he sees in the print finalists of the SPJ's national Mark of Excellence awards.

UPDATE
Howard's blog is back on line. He has updated his post, including some corrections, as well as comments that supply more information. So I am deleting it here and urge you to go there to check out the updated information.

But his lament still holds -- too many young journalists don't have the kind of online savvy that newsrooms need or, if they are online, they've managed to keep themselves invisible.

Journalist-programmer conundrum

Rich Gordon posts a bit of a plaintive message on the Knight Ridder Idea Lab blog -- help us find programmers who want our year-long scholarships to learn about journalism so that they can bring their considerable talents to helping to develop new ideas that might help journalism not just survive but thrive. (OK, their pitch is a bit longer, but you get the idea.)

What got me to thinking, however, was one of the comments, by Joe Zekas, that followed:

Many good coders, in my experience, are profoundly anti-social people, although pleasant enough to be with. Going out and talking to strangers is something they religiously avoid.

The fundamental problem is that anyone who's any good at coding would be taking a year out of his / her life to earn, upon graduation, one-third to one-half of their previous salary with no realistic possibility of ever catching up to where they would have been in the coding world.

I suspect that studying journalism would also subject them to ridicule by their peers and friends, many of whom believe that the subect matter of jouranlism can be digested over a long weekend.

The Knight-funded program at Medill is a noble idea. With the paucity of journalists seemingly willing to learn higher-level coding, the thought was to see if it was possible to get some computer people interested in journalism.

What we may be learning -- and potentially as valuable -- is that the two cultures simply do not mix. It's the fear of big-J journalism that we have heard from people in connection with Hartsville Today and that others have heard as well. In short, "journalism" scares a lot of people, about as much as public speaking.

What has to happen to make this work is a delicate alchemy of personalities and skills. At heart, journalists and programmers are at opposite ends of the personality spectrum. Journalists tend to be outgoing, yet extremely cautious (try getting a new idea in a newsroom or even among a drinking circle of journalists), relying whenever possible on "old-fashioned, common wisdom -- whatever that i. They also tend to be peripatetic.

Programmers are more willing to take chances. They tend to be much more focused, shutting out the outside world until they get the dang thing to work. (My background gives me a bit of a foot in both camps -- I'm a focused peripatetic, which means I'm intensely antisocial for five minutes at a time. {grin})

The two generally don't mix. And Zekas is right that many people think journalism is something you can learn overnight when the reality is that it is as difficult to do well as any craft/profession, including programming (just ask programmers how much garbage vs. elegant code is out there; sort of the same ratio, I think, as journalism).

I see in Gordon's post and Zekas' response the personality of -- a copy editor. No, really. I have more than a few students terrified about going out and dealing with people who might not want to talk with them. Yet they still have the journalism mindset (including that sense of social justice). They also tend to have that more focused personality and in general a better grasp of math. Most want to be copy editors (it's a separate issue whether that's a good thing without some reporting experience, but let's let that go for now ...

Just wondering how we might encourage those among them for whom this might work. Many of our students, for instance, already take two basic comp sci courses. But they are so basic, and they never really hook back into the j-school curriculum. We can, and probably should , work on that. But for schools that have a foreign language requirement, how many offer computer language as an option? Showing a fluency in PHP, for instance, is every bit as tough as French, German, Russian or Spanish.

The second part of that equation is developing journalism courses where they can truly apply and use that knowledge. In most cases we are not asking them to develop the deep tools of programming, but to work with markup and scripting languages. That's a different animal from your average major college computer engineering department, where the focus often is on clean and better algorithms.

Certainly, don't stop trying to entice coders to come into the journalism fold -- we need all the help we can get. But maybe there are ways to address this within current the curriculum, too.

Blog of note

My colleague David Weintraub, who occupies the same nook as I do oh so far, far away from the main office, has been blogging for Black Star. Good stuff, especially if you are into teaching -- or learning -- visual communications.

David is an accomplished photographer. His latest post (yeah, yeah, try not to look at the date, OK; I said I was behind) is a good recap of the joys, mostly, of teaching the beginning and advanced photography classes. Some good thoughts, I think, that apply far beyond just photo classes:

• Here's the take-away message for me from all this: given something fun and creative to do, students will figure out the technical challenges -- this is their reward for being so-called digital natives. They still need to be taught the broad concepts: developing a story arc, shooting sequences and details, editing for maximum impact, and using audio effectively. (David was talking about having them do slide shows.)
  
• The students themselves told me they need more training in basic photographic principles -- good old f-stops and shutter speeds, lighting ratios, depth of field, etc. I think I've succumbed to the "set it on auto" syndrome. ... The fact is, the current crop of auto-everything digital SLRs are so good that you can hardly go wrong by using the auto setting. But what I heard from my students was instructive: they weren't learning much from letting the camera do the thinking. They wanted to be in control and, if need be, learn from their mistakes. (That's something we all can remember as more and more of this stuff just becomes turning to a site on the Web, be it audio, video, slide shows, site creation, etc.)
• I've found that teaching is a delicate balancing act: sometimes you provide as much information as possible, and sometimes you stand back and get out of the students' way. Knowing when to do which is a challenge.

Also, read two of his previous posts:

• What do you tell students who want to be photographers in the age of everyone-can-do-it photography? (Hint, that they need to realize they are not just photographers, but visual problem solvers. And I like David's implicit endorsement for why many vis comm students should take my editing class: They may also be called upon to write captions, press releases, articles, and produce infographics.)
• A solid piece exploring the bounds of ethical practices in visual communication.

As I told David, my only quibble isn't with him, but with Black Star, which has the blog set up rather weirdly. There is no way I have found to click on a link and see all the posts David has written. No archive of past posts, no clickable link on his name. And if you go into the main blog, rising.blckstar.com, and click backward, I'll be danged if I see any of his posts. Unless I'm being exceedingly dense (highly likely), Black Star is running afoul of some key points of the blogging ethos. It's also making it hard to know when to go to the site to read Weintraub since the RSS feed is of the main blog only, not broken down by contributor.

On the other hand, Black Star is using Joomla, which brilliantly is one of the few content management systems that allows you to immediately download a PDF of a post (yes, it's not that hard to print to PDF these days, but this one is formatted correctly the first time -- ever run into the fun of printing some sites in a Mozilla browser? -- and is quick). Again, a small quibble that so few sites seem to get -- include a URL in that printout. Maybe I want to hand it off to someone else who wants to see the thing digitally or who wants to cite it down the road.

Munich-bound (nah, not me)

Don't I wish.

Two of my colleagues, Scott Farrand and Dick Moore, are about to embark on a two-week multimedia journey to Munich with 16 students. It's the second year we've done this.

See their blog, Multimedia Maymester in Munich.

They promise to raise a stein for me. Yeah, great. (I just get to be the blog jockey.)

Quick hits

Visit Wired Journalists


Ryan Sholin has formed Wired Journalists, a group on Ning designed to help journalists get more comfortable with the tools and opportunities of he wired world. It's partly an outgrowth of Howard Owens' recent post challenging journalists to set objectives for 2008 that include getting more familiar with the wired (and these days, wireless) world. I've joined and look forward to helping out any way I can.

Actually, one of the first and best lessons for newsroom types out of this might be how easy it is to form such social groups using Ning. Just imagine had this been used during Katrina ...

---

Meranda Watling writes about following local folks on Twitter. I admit to not using Twit much (I'm cheap - I don't pay for texting on my cell phone and I forget to log on at the office). But I am intrigued by its possibilities (and probably more interested now that a few people have "found" me). I think Watling has a point when we may need to figure out a way to monitor relevant traffic. Just one more newsroom input. (Think of it as listening to the police scanner.)

She also points to the New York Times article on Twitter's use by journalists on the campaign trail. I don't claim any great foresight here, but this is why for the past year and some one of the syllabus requirements in my advanced editing class has been to produce an SMS version of every story. Students quickly find out it isn't always easy, especially when the story really doesn't have any news. I'm putting together an "Effective SMS" guide for class and maybe to use at the ACES conference, so all thoughts welcome.

(Personally, I'm a big fan of Twittervision, which scampers around a world map showing you the latest tweets. If we'd only had this at 3 a.m. in college ...)

And Bryan Murley points to a student journalist at Ball State who is Twittering a trial.

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Everyblock is up and running in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. This is Adrian Holovaty's project to bring data to the masses. Crime reports, restaurant inspections, true confessions from the personals on Craigslist. Kind of gives a new dimension to the definition of "peeping Tom." It's a fascinating idea, but we'll wait and see if a bunch of raw data, even when presented in a relatively pleasing graphical way, can sustain interest. I predict it will if advertisers are comfortable with the audience churn (much as they had to learn to be at the advent of all-news radio, lo those many years ago). The project is funded by one of the Knight News Challenge grants.

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If you're a journalism student planning to graduate sometime soon, check out Mindy McAdams' resources page for what you should be doing online.

'Generation Intransigent'?

OK, Halloween is over, but this meme of posts from Paul Conley and Howard Owens is just plain frightening.

In 25 words or less, and playing off a recent speech by Rob Curley (he the self-titled "Internet punk" out of the Washington Post by way of Lawrence, Kan., and Naples, Fla.):

In newsrooms across the country we have Generation Intransigent -- 23-year-olds who despise online as "not real journalism" and see themselves as "writers," which roughly translates to "in the newspaper."

From Conley, reporting from the National College Media Convention: I met a lot of students at the convention. And I'm afraid I must say the next crop of entry-level journalists is about as close-minded as the present set. There were some exceptions, but they were few and far between. Most of the folks I met were similar to the "silo students" I've been complaining about for awhile now -- those inflexible seniors who become the close-minded 23-year olds in Rob's newsrooms.

From Owens: The kids right out of college, they’re the ones most likely to cling to a romanticism about being the crusading print reporter. When I talk about web-first publishing, they’re the ones most likely to say, “but won’t we scoop ourselves?” Or when handed a video camera, they say, “but I got in this business to be a writer.” I’ve heard from more than one fellow executive the tale of promising young reporters taking jobs in PR because that somehow seemed more palatable doing this online stuff.

(BTW: The comments to those posts, some of which name names, are worth your while, too.)

(Update: Some other links

• Chris O'Brien blogs about the same subject working off the Curley speech
• Bryan Murley takes it a little further with some observations of his own. Great comments, too.)
  

I'm sure that's out there. And, yes, I still see some of it among our students -- though those cases are more like "I want to report on nothing but ... (fill in the blank: music, sports, entertainment).

Maybe I'm lucky, but what I see among our students is a group of folks trying to "get it." Sure, they're struggling like many people. Remember, while they are the "digital generation," for many their love of journalism began on the high school paper. That's their frame. (Which, perhaps, is the start of another fruitful discussion of how this industry has got to get into the high schools and influence things there so students have a wider frame coming into college. It wouldn't hurt if we spelled out the realities of the business, too, that at its core it's not so much about writing but reporting; you can't write it if it isn't in the notebook. That's where I see more students have breakdowns ("You mean I have to go talk to people?" But I digress ...)

We are struggling, as are many schools, to figure out exactly what to teach and where in the curriculum and to do it within the constraints of the academy (see this post for an extended discussion on that). But by golly we are moving ahead where we can, and the students are not just following, they often are leading. This past week, for instance, seven students -- six from South Carolina -- died in a beach house fire. No, the coverage out of our practicum newsroom wasn't as extensive as that of the local paper or the campus paper, but take a look at our site. You'll see video. Our students weren't assigned to do this -- they pushed to do it and wanted to do more.

(And the campus paper, The Daily Gamecock, blasted out instant text messages to more than 13,000 people who have signed up.)

Scroll down a bit and you'll see video in connection with the Jena 6 demonstration. We sent reporters there. They moblogged back using Flickr. (No, our site is not great. We use World Now and can't do a lot of what we'd like. But we work around that.)

Go to this story and look at the slideshow in connection with a look at what happens when you get arrested -- and what can go wrong.

And every student who comes out of the Carolina Reporter is going to have spent some serious time with me reading and discussing what is happening in this business. Gannett's initiative, the AJC's -- and how they differ and which might be the more significant -- the move to tabloids overseas and what it might portend here, citizen journalism through the Hartsville Today project, search engine optimization and what it might mean, and the management challenges all this brings.

Every time they edit a story, they also have to create an SMS version (for practice; we don't have the means to text yet), and they have to provide at least three solid online links, which includes fashioning text that tells the reader why those links are important and credibility.

The students coming out of our "print newsroom" at the University of South Carolina will not only talk the talk but walk the walk. (One recent grad is leading training on Sony Vegas for the North Carolina newsroom where he now works.)

Are they digital ninjas? No. But they're not Generation Intransigent either.

(Want to hire some? E-mail me or Beverly Dominick, longtime Gannett and Media General hiring specialist who's now our internship and employment coordinator.)

---

Update: John Robinson, editor at the Greensboro News & Record, checks in on his blog to say he has not found "Generation Intransigent" to be the case, either. That's good.

Over at PJNet, however, Len Witt gets it a little askew when he suggests my post is among those "which almost disparage young graduates who say they really only want to be writers." No, my post, in reaction to those who say they see students who only want to be "newspaper writers," is simply to say that while our students want to be great writers, too, they are not intransigent and are willing to dabble in these other areas if it improves their storytelling. Thought there needed to be a little clarification there. I like the comment by my former colleague Bryan Murley -- it's not so much we think they need to be both pitcher and catcher, but even the best big league pitcher is expected to lay down a sacrifice bunt from time to time.

Curley also responds to Witt.

More advice than a body can stand

And if you're a pending j-school graduate, all of it good and something to consider -- and much better than that 20-minute graduation speech you're going to have to sit through.

Mindy McAdams, dame de multimedia at the University of Florida, began this round of pre-graduation funsies (aka: how to scare the bejeezus out of pending j-school grads -- for their own good, mind you) with a post on "5 things to tell students." The first two:

1. You don’t have to be a programmer. But you need to have more than one skill. Another way to say that is, You need to have more than only print skills.
2. If you have not taken any online skills courses at all, and spring is your final semester, and the intro online course conflicts with one of your required courses that you waited until now to take — sign up for the online course, and delay your graduation. Do you want to graduate? Or do you want a job?

Ryan Sholin adds to the conversation with some good common-sense advice to a student wondering whether he has the skills, even with the multimedia training and internships he's had.

And Deborah Potter at the NewsLab has been on fire with some great posts that "broadcasters" need to pay attention to.

Try this one, for starters about the "Future of News Jobs":

At WLS-TV in Chicago, says producer Don Villar, writers are editing video. At the McClatchy News Service, journalists are programming robots to surf and gather news from sites that McClatchy has the rights to republish. Jane Scholtz of McClatchy says the company thought they’d have programmers do the job, but it turned out to be easier to teach journalists to program than to teach programmers about news. Jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost.com says he needs technical journalists who already know how to create maps and mash-ups, “people who can write code with a journalism perspective.”

The message for students may seem a little mixed. If you hope to work for USA Today and you’re a photographer, learn video, says Foster-Simeon. If you’re a designer, learn Flash. And you should have experience beyond just writing print stories. But what’s most important, he said, is potential. “We’re looking for teachability and openness, and and an understanding of how this this [the news business today] works.”

Or this one:

Michelle Hord, director of off-air recruiting for ABC News, says the answer to the question–where are the journalism jobs–is just one word: Digital. “We have new terms like predators, producers who can also shoot and edit,” she told the Future of Journalism Jobs conference at the University of Maryland. ” It’s all about being able to do everything.” ...

Holly Neilsen, director of video enterprises for Gannett, says “the jobs are going to be there but they’re going to be really different and you’re going to have to be trained differently to do those jobs.” At Gannett, everything is multimedia. “We are reformatting all of our newsrooms to be multimedia 24/7. Everyone is getting new titles. There won’t be line producers any more.” As for backpack journalism, she says, it isn’t new but it’s going to be a big deal. “It may be unpopular but it’s reality.”

And she points to this lovely little tidbit from one of the anchors at KARE-TV in Minneapolis:

Now TV journalists are faced with a new dilemma: punctuation. We really didn't need to worry about having perfect punctuation in our scripts for many years because no one ever saw them. But now we have to write web scripts, which means YOU get to see our punctuation. It's not always pretty. ...
I'll admit this can be a fast-paced business that forces us to write scripts in a matter of minutes. But that should be no excuse for incredibly poor grammar or punctuation.

See, wasn't that better than some speech?

J-education

If you're read my previous post on J-education but have not read the comments, I commend you to do so. I think there is a good exchange developinig.

J-school education: Confused and concerned

I just spent a week at the annual confab for we journalism educators, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and I came away with as many questions as answers. The conference tended to spark other blog posts, such as this one: J-schools must teach multimedia and a good post on Inside Higher Education (pay special attention to the comments)

Some quick observations:

• Good to see the education establishment finally embrace the wide range of questions and issues raised by the digital shift. Previous meetings have kind of stuck a toe in the water, but found it a little chilly. This conference was studded with good panels and papers.
• Having said that, I detect the first signs of panic among some of my colleagues, akin to the panic that has hit may newspaper newsrooms. In short: We know we have to do something, but we aren't sure what to do. So let's throw a bunch of Jell-o against the wall and see what sticks. If you listened closely in the sessions and the halls (and exclude the evangelists), there is a begrudging acceptance but still some serious doubt.
• That doubt is aggravated by some serious traditional and institutional factors that work against any quick transition. Not the least of these are the lead times needed for course changes and technology purchases. And then there are tenure and promotion guidelines, often at odds with the quick morphing that appear necessary to survive and thrive in this phase of things. Especially of note: The insistence on Ph.D.'s when many of the cutting-edge skills are not being learned in graduate school but in the school of hard knocks. Add to that:
  
• The too-often (but not always, please) disconnect between the demands of research and those of teaching.
  
• And the industry's anti-intellectual bent that helps to devalue the research it says it wants and needs inside academic institutions in favor of the esoterica the industry then uses to say j-school education can irrelevant, etc.

(That entire last thread on institutional and industry factors could be a lengthy series of posts on its own, so please allow me the short but admittedly inadequate treatment here.)

One of the things that struck me as I came away from the conference and a session at API going over the Newspaper Next report was an uneasiness that our standard is shifting in the journalism business to "good enough."

Sure, we're always known we were doing good enough -- you don't get a paper out the door if you do only perfection. But I get this sense that before, while we shot for perfection and settled for good enough, now we are willing to shoot for good enough and settle for ...

I fear we are taking Clayton Christensen's explication of "good enough" as disruptive technology and using it as a de facto standard, instead of understanding what he really means.

And when I view all the newspapers' separate online sites for entertainment, and busy mommies and sports teams, I come away going, "So what is the connection to the ideal of a free press in promoting democracy?" (When I asked that question at API, I got the verbal equivalent of a blank stare.) On none of those sites I saw do you find, say, a small box that might point users, for instance, to recent stories about child-care tax credits, etc. -- the kinds of policy things that if they are not talked about tend to make people wake up one day and go "why didn't you tell us?"

In the process, of course, those things might get people to click back to the main news site where they might find some other stuff of interest (you know,that old serendipity thing). Instead, we seem to be running away from the "newspaper" (a term I use because we don't have a better one right now for the evolving large newsroom). I think there has to be a happy medium somewhere.

Lots to think about and work through. Will probably turn it into a column down the road soon and cross-post here. Meantime, input appreciated.

No, not a loss for student journalism

Inside Higher Ed has this poorly conceived headline on a story about a court case by some Kansas Sate journalism students being dismissed:

Loss for the student press

The gist: The K-State students sued to try to overturn the reassignment of a popular journalism professor and adviser to the Kansas State Collegian newspaper by claiming their First Amendment rights were violated. An appeals court ruled that once the students graduated, their complaint was moot because they could suffer no further harm (and no monetary or other damages were requested for any alleged past harm).

It's a poor hed because it plays into the Chicken Little mentality that tends to pervade cases such as this -- thus diluting the argument for when the impact really is wide-ranging and important.

At the appeals level, this was a narrow case. The students had asked for an injunction, a type of legal remedy used to stop the potential for continuing harm to someone or something. Because the potential to harm them ended when they graduated, end of case. (Those suing said a content analysis of the paper that included its coverage of diversity issues was part of a plan to make unconstitutional content-based decisions on the paper's direction. A federal district judge said it was an overall analysis that showed the paper was inferior to similar papers at other campuses.)

I don't see an assault on the First Amendment here, as the students and adviser claimed. Unless the students are being graded on their efforts (nothing in the story indicates they are), they can keep on going and doing what they want, at least if the claims that student editors remain in charge are to be believed. However, that ability is never unfettered, and what I do see, is a good lesson that periodically listening to your audience and your stakeholders -- and doing a frank, systematic review of your publication before the administration does -- might be good ideas.

The erudite comments that follow the Inside Higher Ed story explain why in greater detail.