Posts Tagged ‘ journalism 24/7 ’

Journalism 24/7: What we studied, Fall 2011

At the end of each semester, I like to reflect on what I learned from teaching Journalism 24/7, my course on the changing news industry. The material changes so fast that the world looks different every time I teach the class. This time – my 10th – at the request of journalism major Evan Livingston, I’m compiling an annotated list of the websites we examined. For any journalism program contemplating such a course – and all programs should be preparing their students to understand the business side of journalism along with its history, ethics and skills – this list offers a framework on which to build.

Given the wildly overpriced textbook market, it’s gratifying that this is such a low-cost course. I require only one book, “The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril,” by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, a widely available trade paperback that costs less than $15. Though published in 2003, much of it is essential background reading. The only truly outdated chapter is the one on network television news, so we skip that. Everything else we read is available for free online – appropriately, for a class in which a major theme is the loss of revenue in the movement of news to the web.

The annual State of the News Media report published by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is essential reading for instructors. This exhaustive compilation covers newspapers; magazines; online; local, national and cable television; audio journalism; and ethnic and alternative news media. For each sector, the authors analyze audience, economics, newsroom investment, ownership and digital trends. The 2011 report includes special sections on mobile platforms and community news. A report on the previous year is issued each spring. Sections of the report could be assigned in small doses, or for graduate students, but the whole is overwhelming. I assign the section on local television, which is where many of our students hope to find jobs. The material has proved invaluable in class discussions.

Another core text is the 2011 report by Bill Grueskin, Ana Seave and Lucas Graves of the Columbia University School of Journalism, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism.” Each of the 10 chapters – on journalism economics, audience, Continue reading →

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2011
12/21
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Journalism Students: We Like Paper! We Love Free.

What astounds me year after year with each new crop of journalism majors is how much they prefer ink on paper to electronic media. What kinds of jobs do they want? Newspaper reporter or magazine writer, many say. And most, all else being equal, say they would choose to read a book over a Kindle and a newspaper over a website. But all else isn’t equal, of course. They like paper, but they love free.

This spring in Journalism 24/7, the course I teach each semester that explores the changing news industry, The New York Times’ long-ballyhooed, carefully considered tiered paywall was a frequent topic of discussion. Overwhelmingly, the students dismissed the move as immaterial. There are a million ways to get around paywalls online, they said, proceeding to enlighten me with the methods they had used themselves.

As a final assignment, I asked the class to consider one of three questions: Two to three years from now, where will we get our news? Where will the money come from to support quality journalism? And how will the job of the journalist evolve?

Their answers showed clearly whether they had grasped the conundrum at the root of their own cognitive dissonance. Stephen Grotticelli, a quietly attentive student with a concise and expressive writing style, said that digital natives

will realize that an “app” should actually be an application, not just [a] bit of nomenclature. They will take full advantage of modern technology to offer rich, compelling multimedia, interactive and social experiences their print rivals will not be able to recreate offline. The content will be advertisement supported or, at most, available for a very modest fee from an app store.

But another student, whose name I won’t mention, argued that newspapers will survive because “people want to have the actual newspaper to keep when there’s a big news event, like Osama bin Laden getting killed.” Others, equally oblivious, said quality journalism will endure because people need to know what’s going on. Thanks, kids. That and $2.25 will get you on the subway.

2011
06/09
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Today’s journalism students must understand media policy and business

I began my previous post with a story about my first, feeble attempt to discuss net neutrality in Journalism 24/7, my course on the changing news industry,  planning to segue into a response to Nick Lemann’s recent “Dean’s Letter” in a Columbia J-school alumni publication. Lemann’s letter addressed the importance of teaching journalism students about media policy, but I never got to it. Instead, I wrote about how that teaching blooper (what students might call an epic fail) taught me an important lesson about pedagogy, one I’ve used to great advantage in the years since.

And now to Lemann’s letter. Lemann, Columbia’s dean since 2003, writes that his attitude toward teaching students about media policy has evolved. His letter begins: “For most of my life as a journalist, I was blissfully, even willfully, ignorant about media policy.” But, he continues, Continue reading →

2011
03/16
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Great moments in teaching: leveraging student participation

With just a month’s notice, I’d been assigned to a brand-new course, JRN 301: Journalism 24/7, in the second semester of the very existence of Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism. The course topic: the changing news industry. My idea for that day’s class: Discuss net neutrality.

Sometimes – less now than in years past, thankfully – but sometimes, like all teachers, I think, I fail to allot sufficient time to class preparation and suddenly it’s class time and I’m forced to wing it. This was one of those days. The term “net neutrality” had been showing up frequently in my online reading (read: cramming) as I struggled to get a handle on the turbulence of the news industry in the late 2000s.

I got to class and began talking, using the skimpy notes I’d thrown together. It wasn’t more than two minutes into my “lecture” that I realized I was hopelessly lost. Could not talk about net neutrality. Had no backup. An hour left of class! What to do? Continue reading →

2011
02/22
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Journalism students critique the changing news industry

As part of my Journalism 24/7 class at Stony Brook University, I require students to set up a blog on WordPress: [student’s name]247.wordpress.com. The blog is worth 15 percent of the course grade, and the blog grade is based on the frequency of posting, with two posts per week — 24 total — required for an A. (One post per week is a C, 1.5 a B, .5 a D, less than than an F, with pluses and minuses awarded for quality of thought and writing and sophistication of blog elements: embedded photos and videos, links and so on.) Why such weight for frequency? Because, as I’ve learned, the blog is a relentless taskmaster, and a big part of success in anything is just showing up, or in this case, just posting.

Topics are limited to what we discuss in class: the changing news industry. Students are to reflect on class discussions, readings, news. Another class requirement is that students follow industry news through the daily news feeds from mediabistro.com and freepress.net, and they’re welcome to blog about stories they find through those sources. One of the things I like best about this assignment is how often the students find things elsewhere and share them with the class.

Next semester, I’m also going to require that they have Twitter accounts. Twitter is no longer an optional tool for journalists — it’s become as necessary as a telephone. It’s getting to be time for journalism professors to incorporate the discipline of Twitter in their instruction.

The class has about 50 students. Those of you who teach are surely thinking, “How does she reead 100 posts a week, let alone follow all those Twitter feeds?” The answer is, I don’t, and that’s a problem. Even with the blogsurfer function on WordPress, which allows me to see recent posts from every WordPress blog I follow, I can’t keep up, which frustrates me as well as the students. I do read every post in a daylong session at the end of the semester, but that’s not ideal. Nevertheless, many students find the blogging worthwhile even without my steady feedback. During my end-of-term blog-reading marathon, I was pleased to see  a few posts from students who marveled at how much they had enjoyed blogging. They found it helped them to comprehend the material we covered in class.

For the fall, I’ve requested a graduate teaching assistant whose job will be to read and respond to the blogs each week, keep track of the posting frequency and bring notable posts to my attention. Haven’t figured out how the Twitter assessment will work — for the fall, it may have to be enough in and of itself, with some sort of end-of-term Twitter marathon replacing my blog marathon. Suggestions welcome.

I’d like to share some of the most thoughtful and creative blogs. Here are a few of the best:

http://mboyle247.wordpress.com/ — I’m delighted to see that Morgan Boyle has continued to post well past the end of the semester. I’ll keep reading as long as you keep writing, Morgan.

http://gerani247.wordpress.com/ — Amanda Gerani is a business major, concentrating in marketing, with a minor in journalism. (All Stony Brook business majors are required to have a minor.) I liked how Amanda used her blog to examine the news industry’s evolution from a marketing lens.

http://lew247.wordpress.com/ – Bryan Lew interprets the “industry” broadly and explores widely.

http://lcioffi247.wordpress.com/ — Lauren Cioffi uses her blog to help establish her “brand” — an idea espoused — proselytized, even — by most of the guest speakers who addressed the class this term: Joe Grimm, Paul Gillin and Chris Vaccaro especially.

http://fposillico247.wordpress.com/ — Frank Posillico is editor-in-chief of The Statesman, a campus newspaper for which he plans big changes in the fall, including a rebuilt website. He and other Statesman editors who have taken Journalism 24/7 plan to incorporate many ideas they developed in class, and I, for one, look forward to seeing what they do.

http://sdemezier247.wordpress.com/ — Sarah Demezier nicely incorporated her reflections on class speakers and discussions.

http://glowatz247.wordpress.com/ — Elana Glowatz is always whip-smart and often very funny.

http://dwhite247.wordpress.com/ — Domenic White, another business major/journalism minor, is a promising sports journalist. White, who is graduating in August, has been writing for professional sports websites since his sophomore year.

2010
05/27
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‘Facebook is nothing more than a campfire’

That’s what Paul Gillin told the students in my Journalism 24/7 class when he visited a couple of weeks ago.

He’d given a pithy run-through of the reasons why the new industry must, in his words, “destroy the old to create the new,” and the students were asking probing questions about collateral damage.

“What’s going to happen to verification?” asked Lauren Cioffi, a junior who has interned at Newsday and written for The Statesman, one of our campus papers. (Links are to the blogs students write for my class.)

The emphasis on speed over accuracy is “scary,” said Ari Davanelos, one of two exceptionally computer-savvy students in the class. “Will we reach an equilibrium?”

“The jobs being lost in the old model — what about all the people who are being squeezed out?” asked David O’Connor, who wants to be a sportswriter. “Is that okay?”

“What’s the future of journalism schools?” Paloma Paultre, who hopes to be a news anchor, wanted to know.

Gillin’s answers had a common theme: What has changed are behaviors, not a value system. “The essential values of human trust have not been changing,” he said.

“Facebook is nothing more than a campfire,” he went on. “We get together at the end of the day, and we shoot the breeze.”

It’s a comforting thought — that despite the tumult and uncertainty enveloping the news industry, people ultimately want to know that they can trust the storytellers.

But “the next 10 years in journalism are going to be really ugly,” Gillin said. The democratization of publishing is “now destroying the institutions we have relied on since the Civil War to tell us what is true.”

“Big media was created to solve a problem: lack of information,” he told the students. “You’re going to enter a world where everyone is publishing.” Publishing “is cheap and easy. And that changes everything.”

“This is much bigger than just journalism,” he added. “When anyone can publish … then it’s much harder to hide.”

Gillin earns his daily bread by consulting with businesses that want to harness social media, and he noted that many companies — he cited the Coca-Cola Co. as one example — now encourage mid-level employees to blog, or to communicate in forums, or to use Twitter and Facebook. Like journalism, business in general will be “more participatory and more transparent.” Companies will be smaller and flatter with less need for middle managers, whose role traditionally has been to communicate up and down within organizations.

For media companies in particular, which in a largely digital future won’t need expensive real estate, presses, paper, ink, drivers, press operators or circulation departments, “the future is going to be in ‘small.'”

From a societal perspective, the whirlwind is destroying institutional knowledge, reducing journalism’s role as government watchdog, making it harder  to afflict the comfortable and eliminating “a common reference point for conversation.”

“That’s bad,” he said.

(A note to those who demean observers like Gillin, Michael Rosenblum and others who are delineating the new realities: These observers are not the enemy, and they are neither ignorant nor uncaring about the toll of the destruction. They are news people reporting a story.  Scratch their enthusiasm for the possibilities of the new order, and you’ll find a deep disquiet about the loss of many aspects of the old — just like the classic newspaper grouch whose cynicism masked a deep but often thwarted idealism.)

In Gillin’s view, the role of the journalist is expanding. Reporters will continue to write stories, but “our product is not a single story any more,” he said. “Our product is a flow of information … Curation is really, really important.”

And that’s where the conversation comes back to trust and basic human values. The digital journalist who becomes a trusted “brand,” for lack of a better word, leads readers (viewers, news consumers, news participants, whatever you call ’em) not only to his or her work but to the best of the work others produce. People who want to make sense of the world will follow those who can curate the most meaningful interpretations of events, issues and trends.

“The principles of journalism are very, very solid,” Gillin told Paloma, the student who had asked about the future of journalism schools. “And they’re not going to change.”

2010
04/12
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Reinventing J-School: We get the Gillin imprimatur

It’s nice when someone whose opinion you value tells you, “You’re doing the right things.”

Responding to the invitation I issued in one of my first posts on this blog, Paul Gillin, creator of the widely read Newspaper Death Watch blog, came to Stony Brook University last week to see for himself what we’re doing at our 4-year-old School of Journalism — how we’re reinventing j-school at a time of chaos (or challenge and opportunity, as my dean prefers to call it) — in the news industry. He liked what he saw.

“Journalism Educators Who Get It,” the title of his post about his time with us, was a nice change from “Misshaping Young Minds,” the post he wrote just before he arrived, or “J-Schools Get an F in Finance,” the post he wrote back in February that triggered my invitation to him.

He liked our News Literacy program. He liked our multiplatform worldview, our insistence that every student learn to write and edit text, to shoot digital photos, to shoot and edit video, to blog, to create interactive news elements. He liked the 18-credit interdisciplinary concentrations each of our journalism majors completes in addition to 47 credits in journalism. (A typical course is 3 credits.) Ditto our required senior project, in which students spend six weeks reporting a story and then tell it three ways: in text, in video or audio, and interactively. Ditto Journalism 24/7, the class I teach on the history, present and possible futures of the news business. Ditto that each student in the class reflects on what he or she is learning via twice-weekly blog post.

He had ideas for us, too, some that I liked a lot and others that I liked less. I liked his suggestion that we expand on the concept of our new Center for Communicating Science, which is about to have its first big event at Brookhaven National Lab, and provide a thread of courses teaching writing, blogging, audio and video skills to undergraduates from all disciplines. Scientists outside of the information-technology area lag in understanding how to use the power of the Internet, as my friend Denis Pelli, a psychology professor at New York University, showed poignantly when his timely panel on the subject drew a meager audience.

I liked his insight that Web sites will decline in importance as information consumption rolls inexorably onto mobile devices. This comment startled my colleague Wasim Ahmad, who cherishes good Web design and has made design central to his teaching philosophy. Food for thought: Original design won’t mean much when most people get to the Internet via the tiny screen of a smartphone.

I didn’t agree with Gillin’s print-is-dead pronouncements. Media history has shown that new platforms are built on the old while the old learn how to live with the new, processes definitively described in 1997 by Roger Fidler in his essential work, “Mediamorphosis: Understanding the New Media”: “Coevolution and coexistence, rather than sequential evolution and replacement, have been the norm.” People still hunger for print. The audience for print is shrinking but not vanishing. For j-schools, this means coevolution and coexistence in course offerings. Continue to teach writing and copy editing, layout and headline writing, but make room in the curriculum for all students to learn the other modes of communication, too.

That’s how you get to a 47-credit journalism major.

I’m still wrestling with the argument Gillin made, one made by many on the leading edge of journalistic entrepreneurialism, that the wall between editorial and business is not sacrosanct, that it is being eroded by journalists’ need for survival skills. Yes, journalists need to make money in an era of fewer staff jobs and click-driven metrics, but (to round up the relevant cliches and mix a metaphor or two), it’s a slippery slope, and you can’t serve two masters.  Of all that the faculty discussed with Gillin, this idea gave my colleagues the most trouble.

We are a forward-thinking group and we’re doing a lot that earns the praise of those who, like Paul Gillin, seem to see clearly where the news industry is going. But as a faculty, we have some old-school ideas about right and wrong.

My next post will report on Gillin’s visit to my classroom and how our students responded to his vision.

2010
03/31
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Curation is the new editing

I’ve been planning to discuss the idea of digital news “curation” with the students in my Journalism 24/7 class. This blog post by the ever-insightful Ken Doctor is just what I need to kick-start the conversation.

Ken writes:

“The idea of the FWIX’s and Outside.ins: provide a round-up of the best local news, by aggregating local news sources, big-time and small, blog, story and broadcast, professional and user-gen, applying some hierarchy of quality to it. Both efforts race for the same audiences and related advertising as the original content-creators, AOL’s newly expanding Patch and Examiner.com. In addition to those of course, the number of hyperlocal efforts increases by the day (and some of them are being rounded up by local dailies, witness the Seattle Times aggregation, for instance).”

Later in the post, he notes:

“The new-fangled word for it is curation, rounding up lots of content, providing some hierarchy of value. Of course, it’s just good editing, bolstered by intelligent technology, and a growing flexibility to accept and work with a wider world of voices, styles and views. … Importantly, it also asserts that readers are smart: they can tell the difference between a New York Times (or Sarasota Herald) byline and that of a community contributor. That assertion is a Pro-Am gamble for the Times and all proud brands, but it’s one that should be made — and backed up with clear, prominent and never-ending disclosure.” (emphasis added)

I’ve quoted at such length from Ken’s post because, as we teach our students, you quote what you couldn’t say better yourself. Ken captures the key points that ally this new style of editing, the curation function, with solid journalistic practices. “Clear, prominent and never-ending disclosure” prevents the stupid mistakes that have felled reporters and bloggers in several recent, highly publicized incidents. Disclosure also protects news organizations that practice digital curation from problems erupting from the stories the curators link to.

Disclosure helps readers increase their news literacy.

I’m convinced that curation holds great promise for hard-pressed newsrooms that have closed bureaus and slashed reporting staffs. As Mike Masnick recently pointed out on techdirt, curation could free reporters from re-reporting run-of-the-mill stories and allow them to pursue folos or fresh angles or different stories. I’m not saying that re-reporting stories broken elsewhere is a worthless exercise; re-reporting can certainly correct or clarify flaws in the original piece. And assignment editors will have to make tough choices when they could link to another news outlet’s (or a reliable blogger’s) take on a mayoral press conference or a journo scrum on the courthouse steps instead of tying up one of their own for a day.

But tough times mean tough choices.

Beyond its necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention appeal, curation allows a news organization to expand the perspectives it offers its readers. It gives editors the power to guide readers who want to explore a topic or issue. A trusted news brand that curates successfully will keep curious readers from moving off its site to hunt around on Google and Wikipedia. Curation allows journalists to harness the power and multiplicity of the Web, adding breadth and depth. A reader’s good experience with an editor’s curation should deepen her trust in the site where she started her journey.

2010
03/19
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Mr. Gillin, come to Stony Brook

I’ve just read a post on a terrific blog by a longtime technology journalist turned media consultant named Paul Gillin, who sees the lay of the new media landscape as clearly as anyone.

His blog is called Newspaper Death Watch, and the post is entitled “J-Schools Get an F in Finance.”

Gilln spoke to a journalism class at a program he says is “considered one of the finest in the country.” His topic: “the state of the US media: Why it’s in a predicament, how the story is likely to play out and what it all means for aspiring journalists.”

That sounds a lot like the course that inspired this blog, Stony Brook’s JRN 301: Journalism 24/7.

Gillin was stunned by the students’ lack of awareness about the industry they were training for. The students “were aware that they’re stepping into an uncertain world but they didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of the media business,” he writes. “Looking at the journalism department’s website later, I could see why. The curriculum lists 29 courses in the journalism program, and not a single one is about the economics of publishing or how to sustain a career as a journalist.”

Paul, come talk to our students.

Journalism 24/7 is a required course for all our majors and minors. It examines the current chaos in the news industry, a chaos underlain by so many things: the astoundingly disruptive explosion of the World Wide Web, beginning with the migration of classified advertising from newspapers to job sites, Craigslist, eBay; the advent of a thousand distractions that didn’t exist 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago (take your pick: video games, movies on demand, mobile devices); the consolidation of national retail chains and the decline of the U.S. auto industry, which shrank the ranks of newspaper advertisers.

I teach Journalism 24/7 every semester, and every semester, it’s a different course. The industry’s rate of change–its delta–has been so steep that, after examining the old, blown-apart business models, we spend the rest of our time exploring the what’s new. We follow entrepreneurial projects like Dave Cohn’s Spot.us, we follow corporate hyperlocal initiatives like Aol’s Patch.com, we follow the raging debate over paywalls.

As a school, we haven’t yet incorporated any significant classes in entrepreneurship, but as a final project in Journalism 24/7, I ask my students to come up with a piece of the puzzle, something that could sustain quality journalism while making money. Some of the ideas have been terrific.

Paul, come talk to our students. They’re ready to listen.

2010
02/12
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