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journalism

This page will one day be replaced by interactive paper

The slides that accompanied the headlines lecture can be found over here.

I love Slideshare. It is free. You can find presentations about most anything there. You can always learn something or get a few great ideas over there. It isn’t quite the same because the person delivering the talk isn’t always there. Slideshare does let you upload audio or YouTube, though, so you can follow along easily. I didn’t have the need for that for a classroom, so I wrote a lot of words on a lot of slides. Hopefully even the student that tuned me out bothered to jot down a few of the words.

Later the students working on this week’s paper have this great idea of a cool way to do a great thing. But they can’t do this great thing in this cool way because it would be against the Rules and those are just there to force you to re-create things and find a solution to this problem in an entirely new way.

It took them about 20 minutes. Smart people.

The nice thing was that the problem came about because we had too many ads. Or so they thought. We have a full paper of ads this week, which we haven’t been able to say in a long time. Maybe this problem will happen again.

Things to read: PBS Mediashift is running a new series on new storytelling. Meanwhile Storify has storified items from ONA, curating a list of The latest online news tools and great connections.

Twitter is giving best practice advice to journalists, which would seem odd, but then you realize it is Mark Luckie, and you figure there’s probably something there.

Nola Media Group is buying iPads, among other things:

Nola Media Group announced it will fund a half-million dollars worth of initiatives to increase public access to digital media in New Orleans. New Orleans has one of the lowest rates of broadband access in the country.

Newsprint joins the internet of things, interactive paper:

The technology works with conductive inks that enable capacative touch, but full details are sketchy.

Project participants also say the technology can be used to print interactive advertisements. Interactive Newsprint collects click counts and engagement time for publishers and marketers to analyse.

Dundee University product design researcher Jon Rogers says: ”For pretty much the first time, in a scaleable and manufacturable way, we’re going to connect the internet to paper. When you start to connect that to news, we’re in a goldmine zone.”

So many applications. I want three of them, special delivered today.

journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
24
Sep 12

The happy headlines

This shot is from standing just off the quad on the Samford campus, which is probably humming with people throwing frisbees whenever you read this. It doesn’t really matter when you read this. Frisbees are being thrown.

Anyway, I’m lucky enough to go in this building to work every day:

My office is on the third floor, and off the left side of the photograph.

Or, if you’re reading it at night, there is a small chance that some of the students are trying their luck wading through one of the fountains without getting caught. There are differing opinions on the challenge involved with that.

Samford is a great place, a happy place. I think I’ve met one person there who was not smiling. This is my fifth year on campus. That’s a pretty good ratio.

Oh, I’m sure some students have less than happy moments. Most people don’t like tests, or last minute projects.

Which is why I’m working long and hard on tomorrow’s lecture topic: Headlines. Everybody loves them, until they have to write them.

Occasionally I take a break from writing this stuff and pulling examples, surfing some of the best newspaper design across the country that landed on doorsteps this morning. (It is difficult to provide a good example on question marks in headlines, for example.) When I do push back from this PowerPoint there are two or three other tasks demanding attention.

Emails to write, letters to compose, numbers to crunch.

Living the Monday dream, friends.

Sad to learn of Paul Davis’ death. He was one of those strong regional voices of journalism. He helped launch a lot of careers. And those careers served communities and inspired others.

He knew the value and he taught a lot of us about it too.

It is too bad we only really contemplate that connectedness at the end. In the end that connectedness is what we hold on to.

The second most important headline of the day: AP promises members it won’t break news on social media. Everyone else will.

There are different audiences here, of course. AP sells news to media companies who sell the news to the general public. But the public, of course, have ways of seeking out the information they want. They’re often using Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter for their own wires.

And, sometimes, with poorly written, unhappy headlines.

collarbone / journalism / links / Thursday / video — Comments Off
20
Sep 12

The evolving journalism pedagogy

“The ‘fundamentals’ of anything are challenging simply because so much else rests on their shoulders,” wrote professor Chris Arnold. It works nicely with the popular line “I don’t teach software, I teach skills.” Professor Mindy McAdams went a step further this week in a Nieman Lab essay, imploring readers to train young journalists to be lifelong learners:

Most of them chose journalism because they like to write. Anything that involves HTML, CSS, code, or programming makes many of them almost shut down, shrink away, move toward the door. We have all kinds of challenges in journalism education, but this one is front and center, right now. It’s not just students’ avoidance of things perceived to be somehow math-related. It’s also:

Reluctance to spend time exploring something that doesn’t have an explicit or immediate payoff

Skepticism or negative attitude toward any task that’s not spelled out in detail

The tendency to give up and say “I can’t” or “I don’t know how”

Preoccupation with a process, such as writing, instead of with stories

This applies to storytelling as much as to technology. Any time a student says “You didn’t tell us we had to do that” in a conversation about a poor grade on a story, you’re hearing evidence of this challenge. The more students insist on explicit instructions, the further they are from independence.

You could do something by rote requirement of a class, but there’s no critical thinking there.

Students can thrive from learning how to evaluate which skills are best for any given story. (I’ve yet to have a sophomore intuitively understand how they might leverage the huge strength of their Facebook account for their journalism, for example.) They need to be encouraged to experiment with new tools. They must learn to overcome the fear of ruining sites or databases or equipment. (You aren’t inclined to tinker if tech intimidates you.) They have to learn how to discern which medium, methods and tools are the best for their particular story. When they do, you get independent thought and critical thinking.

None of these things involve just showing them what is useful here or there. Far better to help students realize those things themselves because a successful career requires a healthy curiosity to stay in the curve. The newsrooms from which they retire in 40 years won’t be anything like the first ones they’ll enter today, after all.

McAdams also mentions Ira Glass, who has some points worth digesting:

I try to encourage enthusiasm among students because it can carry over into their studies and work. Real education comes from understanding the joy of learning.

That’s pretty fundamental.

In other news I’m fighting muscle spasms around my shoulder again. I’ll be fully recovered in another month. And the pain will go away by Christmas, he said. I should have thought to ask the surgeon how long the spasms will last.

If you spend enough time on a heating pad you don’t have much to write about here. Go figure.

So this, a helpful cross section of the people representing us at the presidential conventions.

Clearly video and poking fun at them is the proper way to tell this story. Have a lovely evening.

iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
17
Sep 12

Know what today is?

We’re getting that autumn light. Bested only by the great relief of spring light — Winter is leaving! — that soft, golden orange of a fall evening is like receiving an invitation for an event you’ve never quite been able to attend. You’ve always wanted to go, but it has always been out of reach, or you’ve always been unavailable.

He said, ruining a perfectly fledgling analogy.

You can’t go to the sun because you’d burn up. So, really, you’ve now received this invitation but realized That’s lovely, though, I remember what happened to Daedalus’ son. I’ll keep my wings undamaged, thanks.

Another Monday, another day of nothing exciting to report. All of my Mondays feel the same: email, reading, making class notes and looking forward to Tuesday. And the sun, always the sun.

A few things elsewhere, then: Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams: Don’t just teach skills, train young journalists to be lifelong learners:

The ability to learn on your own and teach yourself new skills depends on your willingness to play, experiment, make mistakes, and stick with things that take much longer than you had expected.

This will actually come up in my class tomorrow, the joy of learning.

The 150th anniversary of the bloodiest day in U.S. history, Antietam. And there’s also a series of then-and-now photographs, using the same photographic techniques.

Finally, today is Constitution Day. Celebrate with a First Amendment quiz. If you make it all the way through and ace every answer you can call yourself a real party animal. And you will have also passed the bar in Maryland.

iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
13
Sep 12

High School Journalism Workshop

Each fall we host several hundred students from across the region for a day on the Samford campus. We bring in industry leaders, mix them with our faculty and try to give the high school students a day of fun and a little learning.

Here are a few pictures.

Dr. Dennis Jones talks about newspaper design:

Samford alumnae, and CBS 42 reporter, Kaitlin McCulley leads a large session on broadcast reporting:

Kyle Whitmire, who recently joined The Birmingham News and al.com, talks about online journalism to this group:

Samford’s senior photographer, Caroline Summers talks about digital photojournalism. (Naturally I take a shaky picture of this.)

Buddy Roberts of The Leeds News & St. Clair News-Aegis has a full house for his sports reporting session.

Birmingham News business reporter Marty Swant discusses intermediate reporting.

Finally, and joined in progress, here is Dr. Julie Williams, who leads a session on beginning writing. She illustrates her first point by making peanut butter sandwiches. The people in the session have to help her.

What you don’t see is their order to open the bread. She grabs the back and rips it apart, flinging the bread everywhere. They tell her to tear off a paper towel, and she pinches off a corner of one sheet.

I edited that on my phone, while walking from one building to the next. This technology still amazes me.

There were other sessions, but they were all opposite mine, so I could not visit them. I talked about building an organization, staffing the newsroom and the various challenges and successes you have in school newsrooms. It was so gripped my room stayed three extra minutes.