Online Journalism Blog

In week two of my Online Journalism module I introduced students to the principles of blogging. After the lecture I asked the students to brainstorm ideas for blogs on an environmental issue theme, based on what they’d just heard.

To inject some extra ideas I brought in star Birmingham blogger Pete Ashton.

The results were some of the best blog ideas I’ve heard from journalism students - and certainly more imaginative than most newspaper thinking around the blog platform.

• Emma wanted to look at supermarket waste - Pete suggested getting “behind the scenes of what happens at a supermarket”; I added the possibility of a Flickr account/photoblog.
• Hayley wanted to do something about energy efficiency - Pete suggested they drill down very specifically to something like a blog purely about issues around energy saving lightbulbs.
• Natalie has recently learned to drive - she suggested blogging about her experiences of a ‘return to public transport’
• Laura wanted to look at the topical issue of chickens and supermarkets and mentioned the fact that you could access data on declining sales - I suggested a blog monitoring sales of chicken at supermarkets; Pete suggested tapping into the online organic farming community.
• Stephanie thought of a challenge-based blog following her as she tries to get an environmental story from every country in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Alice was thinking of a blog following attempts to get a whole street to go eco-friendly. I suggested a group blog.
• Kat wanted to follow her student house doing something similar with ‘downshifting’. Pete pointed out the dangers of blogging about other people without their knowledge/editorial approval. I advised her to broaden her mind beyond students.
• Kasper wanted to pick a community, e.g. fishermen, then look at their perspectives on water pollution country-by-country. I suggested turning it round to pick one country and use the blog to post on different communities’ perspectives and experiences on/of water pollution, e.g. fishermen, people who live by rivers; shipping companies; water suppliers.
• Tuuli wanted to pick a name (e.g. “Adam”) and get one person with that name from every state in America to write a post about what they do related to the environment. Pete suggested that there will be spin-offs from those, like follow-ups on what contributors are up to.

They also set up their own blogs during the lesson - more on these in future posts.

On Friday I wrote about my frustrations with teaching student journalists to Twitter - which generated some very helpful debate. Having dwelt on my experiences I’ve come up with the following idea for integrating Twitter into newsrooms:

Make it an internal tool first.

What I mean is: employ Twitter as a way of keeping journalists in touch with other members of their team, and their editors, via their mobile phones.

Here’s how it would work: [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]

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.”

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]

I’m looking for help with the Online Journalism Blog. Things have exploded since the ‘News Diamond’ and the blog is at the point now where it needs to step up a gear. I’m looking for a volunteer worker to do a bit of research and information management, and possible interviews and articles, so that a) I can focus on the analysis side of things and do more postings of the ’21st century newsroom’ type; and b) we can maybe do some interesting experiments with online journalism that have been on the ‘To Do’ list for far too long. You don’t have to live in the same town, city, country or time zone as me. You just have to be interested in the news industry and the online environment, have an email address - and you’ve got to want to actually do the job.

This is probably a weekly thing — or an hour every other day, say — and it comes with no pay. There is no reason why you might want to do this, except perhaps as a work experience exercise or to put down on your CV or as a way to develop your contacts and knowledge. Or perhaps you have some ideas that the OJB will help you achieve.

I can promise that it’ll be interesting (or at least, it’s all about stuff that I find interesting anyway, so if you’re reading this, chances are that’d be true for you too).

As you might guess, this is part of an overall project to ‘build a team’, and if the past year is any guide, that may help open some doors for you.

I imagine this is going to suit someone young and enthusiastic with decent written communication skills, maybe tech skills, and a pre-existing interest in this blog. If you’re an academic, you might want to pass this on to your journalism students.

If there’s a reason you think you’d be right to do this, drop me an email: paul.bradshaw@bcu.ac.uk

PS: Idea and much of the text stolen shamelessly from my colleague Andrew Dubber. He knows what I’ve done and where I live.

Last week I wrote a post entitled ‘How to be a journalism student‘. The response was generous, with many people adding their own tips on separate blogs or pointing out areas for clarification or addition. A wiki is an ideal place to both collate those contributions and enable corrections/clarifications to the original list - so that’s what I’ve created. The wiki is at http://howtobeajournalismstudent.pbwiki.com/ - please add, remove, change and correct as much as you like (just click ‘Edit page’).

The password, by the way, is ‘howto‘

A colleague of mine once wrote a hugely entertaining blog post entitled ‘How to go to uni‘. As the new term begins, here’s my supplement: How to be a journalism student. (Note: there is now a wiki if you want to add extra tips/corrections/clarifications). Also available in Polish.

1. Read the news. Amazingly, some journalism students don’t read newspapers. I don’t know why they want to write news, but chances are they won’t if they don’t read it. And yes, that means newspapers, in print or online. For the most part newspapers dictate the news agenda that broadcast news and magazines then follow. But yes, watch television news and listen to radio news as well, and read magazines. And do all of this often, and do it critically. [Read more]