Online Journalism Blog

If you want to pick my brains on using various online tools to track breaking news and pursue stories, I’m going to be teaching a one day course on the topic next month. You can find more details and booking here.

This may be something I do more of, so if there are any areas you’d like to see me do a training course/open session on, let me know in the comments below.

As you have probably worked out, this year’s Online Journalism students have been building up towards launching an environmental news website. This week the site went public, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned so far…

The Background

The site is the final year project of two final year journalism degree students - Azeem Ahmad and Rachael Wilson. The decision was made to launch an environmental site because of the increase of investment in this area from a number of news organisations, and also because of a local connection - more of which later.

Azeem is responsible for the more technical side of the site, which he has built from scratch using the open source content management software Joomla.

Azeem has been blogging his progress with the software, including the frightening experience of having the site hacked into by the creator of a theme Azeem installed.

Rachael has the responsibility for editorial, which means writing for the site herself, but more importantly managing 14 second year students on the Online Journalism module as they try to build a news site on a subject most have never written about. She’s also been blogging her experiences.

Week One: Choosing a name, assigning beats, making connections

After some cheesy brainstorming, the very literal name ‘Environmental News Online‘ was chosen for the site for the simple reasons of search engine optimisation and domain name availability. The abbreviation ‘ENO’ lent it more character. [Read more]

This year I started my online journalism module with three things: Twitter, Del.icio.us, and RSS readers. I asked students to:

• socially bookmark useful webpages,
• subscribe to useful feeds through their RSS reader,
• use social recommendation and tags to discover new sources
• - and to twitter the whole process.

The results? Frankly, disappointing.

If you think 19- and 20-year-olds are au fait with Twitter, think again. Only one had used it before starting the class. And even afterwards, the journalism students I was teaching hardly hit the ground running. [Read more]

Last week I began the new class of Online Journalism. First task: getting students signed up to Twitter. Then, I asked half the class to ‘twitter’ my lecture on, er, what Twitter is. I then asked the other half to twitter me talking about the news diamond. While I gave the lecture I had my Twitter page on screen so that students could see the twitters coming in as I spoke. The result is shown below - start from the bottom and work upwards. Forgive the poor image quality - I reduced it to 8 colours to make the file size reasonable. [Read more]

In two weeks I begin teaching the 2008 class on Online Journalism. As a way of inviting ideas and being open source and all that, I thought I would post 2007’s classes online. The first lecture is below…

[slideshare id=238451&doc=online-journalism-week-1-why-1201105913554634-2&w=425]

…it’s very much one-word slides with me riffing off them, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what areas I covered. The idea here is to get students thinking about their own motivations before they begin, and for me to get an idea of why they’re doing this. [Read more]

This isn’t my question, it’s Rian Merrill’s - he posted it on LinkedIn, but the thread is now closed. I’d like to re-open it.

Here’s his question:

I recently had a discussion with a few people who had just graduated from journalism school about the importance of blogging. Most of them acknowledged being told to blog by professors, however, none of them actually blogged. This is contrary to my personal view of things, and was wondering what other professionals in the industry thought.

It’s an experience I share: students blog while they’re told to, but the majority stop once the teaching ends. It’s like someone saying they want to be a musician, but refusing to play any gigs until they sign a record deal.
Thanks to Kerim Satirli for the link 

Final year Birmingham City University journalism degree students Todd Nash and Neil Timms have launched a niche blog covering the build up to Christmas in Birmingham, complete with video - it’s called Turkey Brumstick. Todd explains:

“For our Professional Journalism module we were asked to produce between five and ten articles for publication. We decided it would be better to create all of them on the same topic and publicise them on a blog to try to get publicity so that it can actually be of use to people.

“We’re filling a gap in the market: the local paper doesn’t produce a lot of video content; then there are the likes of the council websites which tell you what’s going on but not if it’s any good.”

We’ve had an ‘Applicant Day’ in my department today - and I discovered that some people studying a HND in Media were not covering new media. My reaction?

• Television production companies are now required to submit ‘360-degree’ programme pitches that include a new media element. Often the budget for that is bigger than for the programme. Add to that red-button interactivity, streaming, mobile TV, and DVDs.
• Photographers routinely package their work on CDROM, or sell it online. A web portfolio is essential.
• Public Relations employees are required to understand viral ‘word of mouth’ technologies like social networking, blogging, promotional games, websites, and email.
• Radio has been going digital for some time now. Most radio stations are streamed online.
• The music industry has been transformed by the web. Some pointers for you: Napster; Kazaa; iPod; iTunes; mp3; MySpace; Last.fm; Radiohead.
• And there’s journalism… well. Just read every post, ever, on this blog. Ever.

What else did I say? Nag your tutors, and start swotting up in your spare time. Your college is doing you a disservice, but that shouldn’t stop you.

A student from Poland has emailed to ask if I know of any journalism courses (and particularly online journalism) that are run entirely online. Do you know of any?

One of France’s main journalism schools, the Centre de Formation des Journalistes, has just launched a revamped new media curriculum, where all students are now required to specialize in new media on top of their traditional skills.

The program was 2.0’d from the start, back in June, when Philippe Couve brought together the crème de la crème of the French blogosphere to outline what the 2009 journalist should look like. [Read more]