OJR: The Online Journalism Review
September 1, 2010
By Robert Niles
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Last week, news reports hit that the
University of Colorado at Boulder would close its journalism school. By the end of the afternoon, the story had morphed a bit - CU wouldn't be getting out of journalism education, but instead convening a commission to look at restructuring the school,
putting its future as a separate entity in question.
(By the way, does anyone have an explanation why several of the former Big Eight schools transpose their initials? How does the "University of Colorado" become CU? I digress....)
Colorado's earned harsh criticism for the way it handled this announcement. Students, alumni and community members can't rally around uncertainty. Yes, journalism education needs to evolve as the industry also must, in response to the economic disruption the Internet has brought to the field. But if Colorado administrators couldn't have offered a specific plan for the future of journalism education at their institution, I'd argue they'd have served their community better by opening up their decision-making process, instead of putting forth closing the school as their primary option. Why leave your students and faculty hanging like this, especially when none of them will be on the commission deciding the school's fate?
Still, every college and university that teaches journalism must be prepared to address some tough questions about the future of journalism education. For that, Colorado's not alone.
A personal note: I've had some experience with university restructuring, having served as one of five student members of a 23-member student/faculty/administration task force charged with revamping Northwestern University's undergraduate division back in 1988. Done right, this is tough work that stirs up conflict right away, but in the hope of securing long-term stability for an institution.
I see three huge challenges facing higher education today, challenges that aren't unique to any journalism school.
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More about: journalism education
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August 27, 2010
By Robert Niles
7 comments | Archive Link
AOL is
rolling out its Patch.com "hyperlocal" network around the country. Having watched similar efforts since Microsoft launched Sidewalk in the 1990s, I remain skeptical.
Look, we all agree by now that the Internet's changed the economics of the publishing business. One of the ways that's happened, however, makes it much more difficult to create a workable business model for a national network of local websites.
Why? Let's try this question for an example: How much money does Howard Owens at TheBatavian.com have to ship out at the end of the month to his national corporate bosses?
Of course, owner-operated sites like Howard's don't have to share any of their earnings with a national corporation. Nor do they have to pay for national and regional bureaucracies that oversee the network of local sites. Everything a local news website publisher earns goes right into that local news website.
That gives independent publishers a huge cost advantage over their corporate competition. So why did the newspaper industry evolve toward national corporate ownership?
Because of the economies of scale that used to exist in the newspaper business. A larger chain could get a better deal on syndication contracts. It could centralize design and IT work and share national bureaus, reducing duplication of effort. It could employ a national sales team, earning more income than individual, local papers could get on their own.
But the Internet's changed those opportunities.
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More about: AOL, entrepreneurial journalism, grassroots journalism
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August 24, 2010
By Brian McDermott
6 comments | Archive Link
The Ground Zero mosque does not exist.
There is, of course, the planned Park51 Muslim community center and mosque, which local authorities approved for construction on Park Place in lower Manhattan about two blocks, or about 600 feet, from Ground Zero.
And there is also, of course, a myth - the latest outrage brand- of a "Ground Zero mosque." Headlines from dozens of outlets have trumpeted that three-word shorthand, tempered at best by the flimsy embrace of quotation marks. Yet the phrase "Ground Zero mosque" violates the most basic tenets of journalism: be truthful and be accurate.
So what's false? Simple: the mosque in question will not be built at Ground Zero. To conflate the lingering psychological toll of the destroyed World Trade Center with a building 600 feet away is as absurd as calling the Lace Gentlemen's Club on 7th Avenue in Manhattan the "Fox News Strip Club" by virtue of its two-block proximity to Fox's headquarters.
Speaking to Michael Calderone at Yahoo News, AP New York assistant chief Chad Roedemeier said that the slug on the story has always been "Ground Zero mosque," and that phrase has often appeared in headlines. But he said the wire service has always said the mosque was "near" ground zero in stories. (I used to work as a freelance photographer with the AP in New York City.)
That distinction isn't good enough in an age of six-word iPhone headlines, warp speed online skimming, and well-financed PR and political hucksters trying to smoke-bomb plain languge. Whether it's birthers, Breitbart, or BP, there will always be cynical and reductive operators trying to exploit the uninformed in the age of too much information. The question is why responsible media doesn't fight as aggressively to reframe stories with the facts.
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More about: ethics, writing
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August 20, 2010
By Robert Niles
No comments | Archive Link
Students will be arriving (or returning) to journalism schools over the next month, providing me with a convenient excuse to offer students some beginning-of-the-year advice.
1. Don't believe that journalism school will help you prepare for your career. Why? Because your journalism career's already started. The moment you first posted a comment, photo or status update to the Web, you began your work as a journalist.
Doesn't that make just about everyone on the Internet a journalist, you might ask? Well, yes. Even if most folks never post anything newsworthy or of interest to anyone outside their immediate circle of family and friends, everyone who posts online has the potential do create journalism, should they happen to be in the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) place or hear the right thing at the right time and post it. Immediate access to a global publishing medium allows any source to become a breaking news reporter, if only for just a moment.
You're going to journalism school to help you improve the journalism career you've already begun, not to launch it.
2. Audience equals power for journalism job-seekers. This might be the most important lesson you learn in your journalism education, but most instructors aren't prepared to teach it to you. They began their careers under a different model, when reporters earned their first gigs based upon the work they did in the classroom, on the student newspaper (or radio/TV station) and, perhaps, during an internship.
They'll steer you toward those same options today, and there's much to learn there, still. But place yourself in the position of an editor, having to hire a recent graduate for his or her newsroom. Do you take the one with the great clips and enthusiastic recommendations? Or the one with the great clips, enthusiastic recommendations, and the 5,000 daily unique visitors to her video blog?
Given that traffic becomes your traffic one you hire her, you take the second student. Every single time. So be that second student. Start building your audience now.
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More about: Journalism education
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August 17, 2010
By Marc Cooper
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Marc Cooper co-coordinates USC Annenberg News21 with Prof. Patricia Dean. Marc is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice and Director of Annenberg Digital News, publisher of the online site Neon Tommy.If everyone who has a hammer sees a world made only of nails, do reporters who know Illustrator think the world is one big infographic?
Choosing the right tool to tell the right story is one of the greatest challenges we faced during this summer's round of Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowships at USC Annenberg. Our mandate, like that of any cutting-edge news crew, was to at once tell the most in-depth stories while being as innovative as possible. But sometimes these two principles can pull against each other.
New multimedia tools, now reproducing themselves exponentially, provide reporters and editors with sometimes awe-inspiring ways to tell our stories. Learning to master these tools and when to choose them, however, can be as important as which tool a surgeon requests for a certain procedure in the compressed atmosphere of an OR.
Selecting the wrong application for your need, or innovating for the sake of innovation itself, can be as big a mistake as ignoring these tools to better tell your story.
We made these decisions as best we could as our Annenberg News21 fellows spent 10 weeks this summer developing their reporting packages on California in Crisis.
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More about: journalism education, tools
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