What’s the BBC’s approach to training for online journalism? Alex Lockwood spoke to Nick Shackleton-Jones, the BBC’s Manager for Online & Informal Learning and lead behind the BBC College of Journalism.
What is it you do, and what’s the BBC’s approach to multimedia training, development and learning? Continue reading
Innovative online journalism educators (particularly those under 25) may be interested in MacArthur’s $2 million of awards in its second Digital Media & Learning Competition. Awards “to innovators shaping the field of digital media and learning” will be given in two categories: Continue reading
Being the sort of person who puts all their work online, I thought it might be useful to put the agenda for next week’s one-day training course up, along with useful hyperlinks. As always, contributions welcomed. Here’s what I’ll be covering: Continue reading
UPDATE (Aug 7 ’08): The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates suggests employment opportunities and salaries are not affected.
J-schools are generally set up to prepare students for the mainstream news industry: print and broadcasting, with a growing focus on those industries’ online arms. There’s just one small problem. That industry isn’t exactly splashing out on job ads at the moment…
The LA Times is cutting 150 editorial jobs and reducing pages by 15%; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cutting nearly 200 jobs; the Wall Street Journal cutting 50 jobs; Thomson Reuters axing 140 jobs; in the UK Newsquest is outsourcing prepress work to India, while also cutting jobs in York and Brighton; Reed Business Information, Trinity Mirror and IPC are all putting a freeze on recruitment, with Trinity Mirror also cancelling its graduate training scheme and cutting subbing jobs. In the past two months almost 4,000 jobs have vanished at US newspapers (Mark Potts has this breakdown of June’s 1000 US redundancies). In the past ten years the number of journalists in the US is said to have gone down by 25%.
Given these depressing stats I’ve been conducting a form of open ‘panel discussion’ format via Seesmic with a number of journalists and academics, asking whether journalism schools ought to revisit their assumptions about graduate destinations – and therefore what they teach. The main thread is below.
The responses are worth browsing through. Here’s my attempt at a digest: Continue reading
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 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.
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. Continue reading
This year I started my online journalism module with three things: Twitter, Del.icio.us, and RSS readers. I asked students to:
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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…
…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. Continue reading
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
Online Journalism Blog 