OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Elizabeth Zwerling

Claremont, California

Formerly an award-winning newspaper reporter, currently an associate professor of journalism at the University of La Verne, I left the newsroom for the classroom in 2001. At ULV, I advise the Campus Times newspaper and teach Media Ethics, among other courses. And I continue to write, most recently for Ms. Magazine, Women's Enews, Pasadena Weekly and public radio among others.

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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

The University of Montana's online Rural News Network sustains community ties as newspapers close

August 25, 2009
DUTTON, MT – When Courtney Lowery flew to Seattle for surgery shortly after her college graduation, her hometown newspaper published a notice so community members knew where to drop off gifts. She awoke following that January 2003 surgery to find a suitcase full of teddy bears, candy and flowers from neighbors in the small farming community at her hospital bedside. Her thank-you note to the town also ran in the Dutton Dispatch – on the front page, alongside the news of the day.

Lowery, a journalist and currently editor of the Missoula-based NewWest.net, made a complete recovery. However, that thank-you-note issue of the Dispatch was one of the newspaper's last before the paper was permanently shuttered.

"These small-town papers – their value is huge," Lowery said, "They bring the community together [with] a sense of pride and identity. They're a tiny mark of ‘we were here' for prom, Arbor Day, Veteran's Day... You lose your paper; you lose your history."

It was partly from that sense of loss and a belief in the value of community journalism that Lowery and University of Montana photojournalism professor Keith Graham created the Rural News Network. For the RNR class at the University of Montana, journalism students travel to small towns that have lost their local paper or never had one, and involve residents in starting up local news websites with the goal of handing the sites' operation and upkeep to those community members at the projects' close. More...

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As newspapers die, journalism schools turn online to find new life

May 6, 2009
Sometime in the weeks between the shuttering of the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post Intelligencer newsrooms, it dawned on me that not having a Facebook account (or texting capabilities for that matter) might actually make me less credible as a journalism professor.

I realized I needed some self-examination, and our journalism program needed some updating.

At the University of La Verne in Los Angeles County, the journalism program for which I've taught the past eight years is part of a healthy department of communications, where we have had a decent record of readying graduates for the "real world."

Amid newspaper closures and projected closures, surveys showing dwindling newspaper readership, and the lousy economy, we – with journalism professors across the nation –are trying to figure out what to teach our students about the Fourth Estate and the news business, and how to retool with the hope of staying ahead of or at least in step with the mercurial news media market.
More...

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Rewriting history: Should editors delete or alter online content?

August 22, 2007
From college papers to The New York Times, sources clamor to "take it back," asking for old quotes and comments to be deleted from websites. Should they be?

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