Recently, MediaShift started running reports from “embeds” at various media outlets and educational institutions. This report comes from Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.
“Multidisciplined” and “flexible” were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying.
The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.
These are much-needed programs and go to the core issue in journalism education about what and how we should teach at J-schools. It is something that we have wrestled with at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. We are a small graduate school with around 50 students enrolled in a two-year Masters program.
When I joined in 2006 after 16 years at the BBC, we still had separate courses in news-writing, multimedia and research methods. Students learned key journalism skills such as strong reporting, as well as gaining a grounding in online writing or producing slideshows in Flash. But we found it provided a fragmented learning experience that didn't make enough of the connected way in which journalism is evolving.
This past academic year, we decided to combine these three disciplines (news-writing, multimedia and research) into an ambitious team-taught integrated journalism program. Over two days every week for the two semesters, students receive training in core journalism competences. They get to apply these skills through assignments that take them from covering social issues in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to tackling questions of diversity, with the work published in TheThunderbird.ca, an online magazine.
Questioning What Is News
The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.
But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred. As Andy Guess writes in InsideHigherEd:
bq. In today's landscape, defining 'the media' isn't nearly as clear-cut as it used to be. Big-name newspapers and networks mingle with cable channels, all-purpose websites and blogs in the minds of the average news consumer, and for good reason: They are, in many cases, converging, with widely read blogs run by newspapers and online web stories originating from cable networks.
We adopted a business school model, bringing together a core group of academics and media professionals with different areas of expertise, from places as diverse as the BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, CanWest Global, and “60 Minutes.” As journalism itself gets more complex, teaching in silos is no longer appropriate.
Fortunately we had buy-in from all team members — even from the ones who were self-professed digital newbies. Of course, there were different points of view but these took place in a collaborative environment without rancor. It probably helped that we are a small and relatively new J-school — just 10 years old — so there are no political empires to defend.
Getting such a project off the ground requires a high level of coordination. Much of our time over the summer of 2007 was devoted to devising a syllabus that coherently blended the different elements that make a great journalist. From a practical point of view, this involved breaking down who was teaching what and when, down to the hour of each day, and then making sure the syllabus ran on schedule.
Demands on Students
Part of our approach involved decoupling journalism from any particular medium, not just in the curriculum but also in the minds of students. On Day One at the school, we ask students where they see themselves working. For many, journalism is equated with a career in print, where it is simply about good writing. This is something that other J-schools face, what Jo Geary at the UK's Birmingham Post described in a discussion on the Online Journalism Blog on the role of J-schools as a “rather outdated, 'mono-medium' view of working in journalism.”
The hard part, though, is trying to do all of this in 24 weeks, even with two days of classes every week. Many students come in with little or no journalism experience. By the end of the first year, they have to learn to research, report and write accurately and fairly, acquiring a wide range of technical skills working in sound, vision and code.
If that were not enough, we also want students to gain a conceptual and critical understanding of what makes journalism, how it is changing, and to experiment in new forms of media such as blogs. The demands on today's students are much higher than when I went to J-school more than 20 years ago and reflect the complex industry they are entering.
After just one year, it is too soon to reach a conclusion. But the students landed some great internships over the summer from the Village Voice in New York to CBC London to Deutsche Welle in Washington, D.C., and three won scholarships to the student newsroom at the Online News Association annual conference in September.
This summer we are revisiting the course, seeing where there is room for improvement. As Emap's David Cushman observed in the discussion on the Online Journalism Blog, everything is in beta now and university courses should be no different.
Just as prospective journalists are asked to be flexible and multidisciplined, so should J-schools. Technology is enabling new forms of journalism and new news outlets that were unimaginable a generation ago. But journalism is too important to be left to the technologists alone. Journalism educators have a vital role to play in helping students gain the conceptual, critical and practical skills to flourish in today's newsrooms and the newsrooms yet to come.
Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.
Last week, I ran the first part of a special three-part series on fair use in online video. With the release of the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video, the question was how this Code might help video producers, remixers and mash-up artists use copyrighted works legally under “fair use” rules.
In the first part, the respondents in this email roundtable talked about what the Code means, how they might put it into practice, and some thoughts on the way artists work without thinking about the law. Now we turn to ways that people think the Code could be spread, and what role the video-sharing sites might play in that. While representatives of YouTube, Veoh and Blip.tv were informed of the discussion or watched the discussion play out over email, none of them have commented publicly about what they think of the Code.
Most people have said they like what the Code says, but how can it be spread into the world of video producers? Can sites such as YouTube and Veoh help educate video mixers and producers in some way?
Why not make an “Idiot's Guide to Fair Use and Best Practices” video, post it to YouTube, with YouTube featuring it on their homepage? It's sort of in their interest to do it, and as I said, I found the Best Practices very helpful. Sort of like knowing how to balance your checkbook, which I'm not very good at either.
Peter Jaszi law professor at American University and co-chair of the Code of Best Practices committee
I know that Blip.tv has alerted its users to the existence and value of the Code, and we hope that other sites will do likewise. Our experience with the Documentary Filmmakers' statement also suggests that — even in this day and age — it's important to get durable paper copies into the hands of as many makers as possible. And, of course, the Code itself and various related materials are available at the Center for Social Media website.
Soon, we'll be opening a space in which controversial examples will be posted to generate discussion around what's fair and what's not. Incidentally, I love the idea of a video illustrating fair use and the application of the Code. That's something we need to work on.
JD Lasica co-founder of Ourmedia media-sharing site, new media expert and videoblogger
That's a great idea, rx! Seriously. I could see a collaborative effort. Maybe a round-robin of participants talking about various aspects of the code for 30-60 seconds apiece, with someone stitching it all together. I'll take part, if others will.
I suspect we won't see the video hosting sites incorporate the Code into their upload process, for both user-interface and legal reasons. Anything that slows down the process is a barrier. Anything that offers a hint of legal advice worries the lawyers. But I hope we will see some sites either point to the Code from somewhere on their site — perhaps as part of a Learning Center or Community Forums or Customer Support — or summarize its chief points.
Too many sites are still wearing blinders and leaving their users to fend for themselves. Certainly, most users won't care — they want to produce videos, not read legal guidelines — but the Code can help inform those who want to dive deeper or those who want to know why their content was removed.
Owen Gallagher digital media entrepreneur; founder of TotalRecut, a network of fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups
I really like rx and JD's idea too, and I think it could be a great way to help expose the Code to the world of online video producers. Another thought could be to run a video remix challenge, similar to the one we're hosting on Total Recut at the moment (What is Remix Culture?), to get people thinking about what the Code and fair use itself really means to them and to help others better understand the concepts involved.
I do agree with rx's earlier point, however, that the last thing an artist is thinking about when creating art is the law. Sometimes the boundaries of the law need to be tested in order to create new industries and new ways of doing things. After all, and rather ironically, this is how Hollywood itself became established, right? Pirates using Edison's patented motion picture methods fled to the West Coast where it was more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents. And the rest, as they say, is history.
In terms of video hosting sites incorporating the Code, I feel that JD's instinct is right and most of the major sites would be unlikely to slow down their upload procedure or get involved in potential legal entanglements as long as they can avoid it. I do think, however, that some of the niche sites like RemixAmerica.org or our own TotalRecut.com are in a good position to adopt the code in a meaningful way and I would hope that we can effectively do so in the near future.
*****
Stay tuned for the final part of this email roundtable, which will cover the possibility of changing the copyright law so that remixers and other online video producers can better understand what they can use legally in their mash-ups.
Sure we all heard about hacking the feed count before, but only two ways that I knew about involved copying the Feedburner chicklet from another blog or manually creating fake emails account and subscribing to your own feed. The former was very easy to be detected, while the second was painfully time consuming (not that I tried…).
The guys from TheNextWeb though found a simple and efficient way to do the trick. You just need to create an OPML file with thousands of lines containing your blog RSS feed and then import it on NetVibes. For each line that you added your RSS feed URL NetVibes will consider 1 new subscriber, and Feedburner will display those numbers. Check out the video explanation.
Interesting huh? I hope Feedburner will fix this problem soon. Else you will start seeing blogs with a heck lot of NetVibes subscribers out there…
Monday, August 4th, 2008
Sometimes, we are so comfortable with some of the terms we use every day that we thought the whole world know what we are talking about. But nope, not everyone is born to be a webmaster or possess the skills. So, this is the basic, ‘guide to pagerank for the [...]
If you have been reading the blog for a while you probably know that I am Brazilian, and that currently I am living in Sao Paulo (I used to live in Italy, but moved back here around one year ago).
Anyway last week I was browsing through my RSS reader and came across a post mentioning that during August 7 and 8 we would have the SMX Sao Paulo event. If you are not familiar with it, SMX is the Search Marketing Expo conference organized in several cities around the world by Third Door Media, the company behind Search Engine Land.
This will be the first edition on Brazilian ground, and I think it will be pretty interesting. The speakers include:
Dr. Barney Pell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Powerset (a Microsoft company)
Susan Humphries, Head, Asia Pacific Latin America Sales Product Operations, Google
Melanie Mitchell, Ex-Vice President SEM/SEO, AOL
Bill Hunt, Director of Global Strategy, Neo@Ogilvy
It should be fun, I am pretty sure I will be there at least on Thursday. According to my traffic stats around 5% of our visitors are from Brazil (I wonder if I am the only one making that 5% since I visit the site very often…). So is anyone else going to attend the event? Let me know and we make sure to meet there.
New mama in town! I starts blogging since in college and love doing it. Here I write about product reviews, making money, blogging tips and anything that cross my mind. It is a blog of general niche.More about me in my blog
Last week, I ran 
