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June 30, 2009 • 1:04 pm 1

Essential reading online for journalism students

This blog is among a comprehensive list of the 100 best blogs for journalism students.

The list covers everything from general blogs on journalism such as PoynterOnline to those by educators such as Mindy McAdams to blogs by journalists such as Matthew Ingram.

One site absent from the list is the UK-based Journalism.co.uk.

It has created its own list blogs and sites also missing from the list which it considers as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students.

Filed under: academics, blogs, education, journalism

June 29, 2009 • 8:14 am 0

Michael Jackson’s death makes journalists of all of us

The Iranian protests and the death of Michael Jackson signal a shift in the flow of news and the role of the audience. In both cases, much of news and information trickled online in fragments, via Twitter, blogs, Flickr and YouTube.

In the past, only the journalist would have access to these fragments. Their role would be to contact sources, assess and verify the information, and put together a definite account of what happened to be delivered as a package to the audience, in print or in a broadcast. This process would take place over the course of a day.

In the age of the internet, the public is increasingly being asked to take on this role, and often at a much faster pace.

Take the death of Michael Jackson. There was an explosion of activity on Twitter, much of it commenting on the validity of reports from TMZ and the Los Angeles Times that the superstar had died.

People turned to mainstream media, both on TV and online, to try to verify what they were hearing.  In a sense, the public were acting like journalists, following up news tips and cross-checking sources in an attempt to verify the information they were getting.

The same process took place during the Iranian protests.  With increasing restrictions on journalists, information about rallies, arrests and deaths were coming out via social media, leaving both journalists and the public to sort through the often conflicting accounts.

As the New York Times noted, “essentially, the news tips that reporters have always relied upon are now being aired in public”.

This does not mean there is no longer a role for the professional journalist. If anything, the need for a professional who can authenticate and contextualise the news is greater than ever before.

But there is also a need for a media-literate public, who has the ability to decipher the wealth of information coming to them. When big news breaks, we are all taking on the mantle of the journalist.

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Filed under: internet, journalism, social media , ,

June 23, 2009 • 11:15 am 2

Innovative funding model to improve global news reporting

A documentary on the global traffic in e-waste produced by students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism airs on Frontline/World’s season finale on June 23.

Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground investigates the growing problems caused by the global trade in electronic waste.

Among the headline-grabbing findings, the students bought hard drive in Ghana which contained sensitive US Homeland data about military contracts.

The work was produced as part of an new course in International Reporting run by my colleague, Peter Klein.

But it was only possible due to an innovative funding approach that combines social entrepreneurship, journalism education and professional partnerships.

Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground came about thanks to a $1 million donation by Vancouver venture philanthropist Alison Lawton of Mindset Foundation to UBC’s Graduate School of Journalism.

The gift launched Canada’s first International Reporting course that sends students abroad to report on untold global stories.

Over the course of 10 years, the donation will enable 10 students to travel and produce international journalism for major media outlets focusing on broadcast and online.

But the donation is more than filling the gap left by news organisations as they close down foreign bureaus and cut back on spending.

A key part of the project is to prepare the next generation of journalists to report on an increasingly interconnected and complex world, examining existing practices and considering new ways to reflect on the world beyond our borders.

In the words of venture philanthropist Alison Lawton, who set up the Mindset Foundation:

My core philosophy has always been working with people, investing in human capital. This course will challenge students to look beyond the constraints of conventional mainstream media and examine the definition of conscientious reporting.

This is one potential model to consider as we seek to find ways of funding journalism. It invests in the journalists of tomorrow, while at the same time seeking to address under-reported stories and work in partnership with a major media outlet.

Filed under: academics, education, innovation, journalism , , ,

June 19, 2009 • 7:55 am 0

Why Digital Britain report should back hyperlocal news sites

The back of the BBC Birmingham headquarters in...
Image via Wikipedia

The proposal to take money from the BBC licence fee to partly ITV regional news services was one of the headlines of theUK government’s Digital Britain report.

According to the proposal, a small part of the expected £200m digital switchover surplus would fund three ITV regional news pilots in Scotland, Wales and one English region from now until 2013.

The pilots are a response to ITV’s decision to pull out of regional news which it sees as a financial burden. It is a far cry from when regional news was a money-spinner for ITV, with its early evening bulletins often attracting more more viewers than the BBC’s bulletins.

The idea to take about £130m a year from the licence fee to fund a series of independent consortia of local providers in place of ITV’s current regional news service seems a dated approach to the provision of local news.

At a time when audiences are getting their news by mixing and matching old and new technologies, a focus on TV bulletins is ill-advised.

The Digital Britain proposal is an attempt to prop up a system of local and regional news that suited a 20th century audience.

Instead of throwing money at a handful of expensive TV news pilots, the UK government could instead set up a fund to support hundreds of low-cost, hyperlocal news sites.

Hyperlocal sites would address one of the weaknesses of regional TV news – the fact that often the coverage is not local enough.

These hyperlocal sites could pilot emerging pro-am models of journalism, seeking to involve local communties in covering issues of importance to them.

Using BBC money to kickstart a new wave of hyperlocal news sites would be an innovative and creative response to the challenges facing local news, and be more in keeping with the aim of fostering a truly digital Britain.

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Filed under: BBC, citizen journalism, internet, journalism , , ,

June 17, 2009 • 6:19 am 1

How Twitter creates social bonds with the Iranian protesters

Where is my vote? Iran election protest at UN ...
Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Social media is clearly playing a crucial role as a communication and networking platform in the protests in Iran over the election results.

Much of the media attention has focused on the role of Twitter, with even talk of a Twitter Revolution taking place in Iran.

There is no doubt that Twitter has emerged as a powerful tool, used by protesters to organise, report and share what is happening on the ground in Iran.  And it demonstrates how new technologies allow people to bypass censorship by authoritarian governments.

But Twitter is more than a way to transmit information.  As a form of social media, Twitter is also a way to connect.

In this case, the content of an individual tweet may be less important than the emotional and relational content being transmitted. Researchers describe this distinction as contents-oriented communication versus connectedness-oriented communication.

The stream of tweets from Iran are creating a loose relationships between the people sending out the messages and those following them.

The effect is to create social bonds between people inside and outside of Iran.  Perhaps the clearest sign of this is the appeal for people to switch their location on Twitter to Tehran and change their time stamp to Iranian time.

The raw, unfiltered and immediate nature of Twitter is engaging people in shared experiences, even if they are miles away from Tehran.

What is unknown is the strength of these social bonds and whether the sense of connectedness created by social media such as Twitter will have an impact on events on the ground.

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Filed under: internet, journalism, social media , , , , ,

June 11, 2009 • 11:53 am 4

How journalism school graduates are finding jobs

Reporter
Image by Giorgio____ via Flickr

Given the tidal wave of bad news about the journalism industry, a story with the headline, “Surprise! J-school grads are finding jobs“, is bound to attract attention.

Best of all, the headline is not link bait. Instead the Daily Finance story reports on how journalism school graduates in the US are thriving.

It found that two-thirds of recent grads from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism report having jobs or other post-school plans, such as internships, fellowships or continuing education.

CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism reported similar numbers, with 60 per cent of recent grads in full-time jobs in journalism. Another 15 per cent have quasi-full-time internships or freelance gigs.

I don’t have stats for the recent grads from the UBC Graduate School of Journalism where I teach. But they have found positions in places as diverse as CBC, the Globe and Mail and the Walrus.

Some may be surprised that there are are opportunties for journalism students. But they should not be.

The abundance of news online means there is a greater need than ever for professionally-trained journalists to navigate and make sense of this ocean of information.

There are other reasons. Students should graduate from j-school the skills to practice journalism across all media platforms as newsrooms are looking for journalists who are flexible and adaptable.

The Daily Finance story also speculates there is a less noble explanation:

My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It’s a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as “restructuring,” but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web — and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year.

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Filed under: academics, journalism , , , , ,

June 3, 2009 • 11:35 am 1

Jane Singer’s optimistic roadmap for journalism’s future

I am delighted that my friend and colleague Jane Singer has won a contest on the future of journalism held by the AEJMC.

Singer, from the University of Central Lancashire and University of Iowa was voted the winner for her entry, entitled, Bird’s-Eye View.

In her contribution, Singer is positive about the future of journalism, while acknowledging that shape of the industry is going through a period of upheaval and transformation.

She sees several emerging roles:

1) The incubating journalist: Undergraduate journalism education

In this stage, journalism students gain a university education that ideally develops abilities to learn, think, experiment, focus, socialize and grow, and prepares them for an entry-level job that includes training and practice in multiplatform content creation and maintenance, routine reporting, editing and self-editing, blogging and working with users.

2) The fledgling journalist: Entry-level employment

This is an entry-level journalist who tells stories across platforms with primary emphasis on maintaining the media organization’s website, including information gathering, posting stories, blogging and working with users.

3) Learning to fly: The newsroom apprenticeship

Singer sees this as the newsroom apprenticeship during which entry-level work expands over time to work on more sophisticated journalistic products.  This includes training and mentoring by more senior journalists, as well as working on more advanced forms of multimedia story-telling.

4) Taking wing: Senior journalists

These are the senior, more experienced journalists who, in Singer’s words, “produce the ‘value-added’ content, including most of the material that requires payment to access, either online or in the legacy product or both”. These are the journalists who provide analysis and commentary, or work on more in-depth multimedia specials, as well as mentoring younger journalists.

Singer’s roadmap for journalists presents a clear progression of skills and responsibilities. But it would also require an investment in the people in the newsroom, setting aside time for training and development.

Unfortunately, this could be an optimistic assessment, coming at a time when newsrooms are cutting back on staff and the remaining journalists are asked to do more with less.

Journalists are the prime resource of the news industry. An investment in the people that are the lifeblood of journalism is in investment in the future of journalism itself.

Filed under: AEJMC, academics, internet, journalism , , ,

June 1, 2009 • 8:24 am 5

Orato.com turns its back on citizen journalism

Vancouver-based Orato.com used to describe itself as the “only news site in the world dedicated to First Person, citizen-authored journalism”.

Orato.com logoThe citizen journalism site is perhaps best known for assigning two former sex trade workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, convicted in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women whose remains were found on his farm.

The concept behind Orato was to allow people’s voices to emerge, with as little editorial interference as possible.

But it has now turned its back on the notion of a site filled with content from “citizen journalists”.  As part of a major editorial and design overhaul, Orato recognised that:

For the first 3 years of Orato’s existence, the previous management intentionally encouraged first-person stories rooted in an intimate and authentic perspective and deliberately offered very few editorial guidelines or oversight when it came to journalistic standards and Web 2.0 approaches to search.

Instead the focus is on “concrete and trustworthy information that is objective and under-reported”. The owner and founder of Orato, Sam Yehia, said the changes were made to “further professionalize the site, focus its newsworthy content, create and enforce a viable business model and keep pace with Web 2.0 standards”.

New editor-in-chief Joy Joy Gugeler has positioned the site as an outlet for freelance journalists seeking an additional source of income:

We will grow content and traffic to reward correspondents with both pay and profile. They post video, audio, photos and articles live; our editors review the material in 24 hours; readers learn at a glance, and our writers earn from the first ad click. We hope those in search of a value-added training will consider us a vital new client in the freelance marketplace.

This is a significant shift away from Orato’s origins as a citizen journalism website to the extent that it can no longer be considered as one.

And it does raise questions about the very viability of the phenomenon of “citizen journalism”. Similar sites have experienced problems with quality control.

There is no doubt that having more voices in the news can provide a rounder picture of the world. The problem may lie in the term “citizen journalism”.

As CEO of the participatory news network NowPublic.com, Len Brody, likes to say, “telling someone they’re going to be a citizen journalist is like telling people they’re going to be a citizen dentist.”

Filed under: citizen journalism, journalism, new media, online , ,

May 21, 2009 • 1:46 pm 3

Google won’t invest in the bundling of news in print

Eric Schmidt! WOW! Welcome Google to Argentina! =)
Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt encapsulated the challenge facing newspapers in an interview with the FT (only available to subscribers).

He highlighted that there was always an uncomfortable relationship between news gathering and the profitability model.  News, itself, did not produce revenue.  Profits came from the bundling of news with advertising and other services:

So the structure of newspapers that evolved, where the majority of the revenue came from classifieds and these big, untargeted print ads, the content was fascinating but they were not connected to… it was ultimately destined to be challenged by technology and that’s indeed what happened.

This great unbundling is the problem for the newspaper industry, as Nicholas Carr wrote last year:

A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product … The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

And this changes once the newspaper is on the internet:

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

Google has worked out how to make money from the atomisation of content and the fragmentation of the audience.  And while it considered investing the beleaguered newspaper industry, it concluded that ploughing money into the physical bundle of content called a newspaper was not the way forward.

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Filed under: journalism, newspapers, online

May 5, 2009 • 12:43 pm 0

Knight fellows at Stanford look to the future of journalism

There has been a sea change at the Knight Journalism Fellows program at Stanford University.

For the first time, the group of journalists have been chosen based on the program’s new focus on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

The list of US journalists just announced will focus on projects ranging from geographically-aware journalism, multiplatform publication and socially-networked foreign reporting while they study at Stanford during the 2009-10 academic year.

The 12 American fellows join eight international journalists who were announced in April.

The decision by the Knight fellowship to seek out and back innovation and entrepreneurship reflects the need for more research and development in journalism.

The Knight fellowships are a wonderful opportunity to step outside of the newsroom and the routine of news production. I was fortunately to be a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan and it was a life-changing experience.

The decision to invest in the future of journalism through programs like the Knight Fellowship comes at a time when this is needed more than ever.

There needs to be a space for news professionals to experiment and innovate, without fearing the consequences of failure, in a supportive and open environment.

Filed under: academics, education, journalism , ,

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Alfred Hermida
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