Transforming The Journalism Curriculum

Presentation by Mindy McAdams

University of Florida

2008

What we do well now

Teach students how to report and understand the professional norms of the field

Train them in a specialization (e.g., such as photojournalism, print editing, on-camera reporting for TV)

What we don’t do well now

Teach them how to survive and thrive in the field that journalism is becoming

Our challenges

Our current department structures are not designed to support cross-platform journalism

Our faculty are often not well-versed in multiple platforms, new technologies

Our students might resist, saying “I only want to …”

Our schools lack equipment and facilities, e.g., software, updated labs

Is it an optionto wait

and do nothing?

Possible solutions

Hire one versatile faculty member and set up “convergence” courses

Doesn’t this encourage the same silo mentalities among both students and educators?

Does this prepare the students to “think different”?

If we wantto train students

to think different, then we’ve got to do it

ourselves.

These reasons don’t cut it

“We don’t know how”

“We don’t have equipment”

“We don’t know what they’re doing in these newsrooms”

Video

Video

Example from the Toronto Star

Example from the San Jose Mercury News

Example from The Spokesman-Review

And some blogs to keep you well informed …

Angela Grant: News Videographer

Colin Mulvany: Mastering Multimedia

Cyndy Green: VideoJournalism

Richard Koci Hernandez: MultimediaShooter

Cade White: Digicade

Databases

Five things you can do now

Assign articles by or about Adrian Holovaty

Study EveryBlock

Discuss any New York Times data project

Assign a project to be built with Atlas

Use exercises from NICAR to teach Excel

“The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. 2. Distilling information. 3. Presenting information.

‘Doing journalism through computer programming’ is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.”

http://www.everyblock.com/

New York Times data projects

http://fmatlas.com/atlas2/

http://fmatlas.com/atlas2/

http://www.ire.org/resourcecenter/tipsheets.php

Graphics

Chicago Tribune

Another good use for Excel

Houston Chronicle

Newsweek: 2007 Wildfires

Photo

Two issues

Visual skills for all students—not just the photojournalism studentsCompositionRationalesEthics

Editing and formatting photo files for online

http://markhancock.blogspot.com/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3842331/

Magnum in Motion

Audio

Audio is easy and cheap

Microphone handling

Interview techniques

Digital editing (Audacity is free)

Save file as MP3

Use a free audio player to embed the MP3 directly on a Web page

HTML and CSS

Why teach HTML and CSS?

Dreamweaver is not necessarily as useful as HTML and (at least some) CSS

Facebook / MySpace will not help them in a journalism job

It’s a leg up

Ways to introduce HTML and CSS

One solution: Use blogs (covered in a later session)

Require students to build a simple Web page by hand with HTMLHeadingsLinks Images

Pssst! My own secret

I have usually learned technology that I teach in class less than one week before the first time I taught it!

You don’t need to be an expert; you just need to know a little more than the parts you will teach!

In conclusion

We all need to start now

We are all behind—but we can catch up!

Transforming The Journalism Curriculum

Presentation by Mindy McAdams

University of Florida