Allan Richards
N. Miami, Florida 
Homepage: http://jmc.fiu.edu/
Allan Richards, M.A., chair, journalism and broadcasting, and assistant professor at Florida International University, has been a music critic and a feature writer focusing on environmental politics and health issues for numerous publications. His interviews and articles range from Jim Morrison and the Doors and Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber to Nobel Prize microbiologist Rene Dubos and R. Buckminster Fuller. In addition to his print writing, he has scripted more than a dozen documentaries that have aired on PBS and the Discovery Channel.
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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.
February 15, 2011
At the end of the spring 2010 semester, the chair of our journalism department at Florida International University in Miami asked me if I would teach the Introduction to Journalism course in summer. I was reluctant as I had inaugurated and been teaching the department's online journalism capstone course - our most advanced journalism skills class - since spring 2002.
For eight years I had challenged students (20 to a class) to produce theme-based online journalism projects, i.e. Miami's soaring HIV/AIDS rates or the local impact of hurricanes Wilma and Katrina. Students had to build and develop a site, write articles and integrate digital photos, graphics and videos into seamless multimedia packages—all in a three-month semester. (See: "Zero to Launch in Three Months," OJR, May, 2006.)
The idea of teaching the intro class, I thought, wouldn't make the best use of my skills as I was the school's senior-most multimedia journalism professor. It had also been a long time since I had taught a core course. I had never taught Intro to Journalism, and there was little time to put together a condensed six-week summer version. So I initially declined.
But as associate dean I am responsible for overseeing the school's curriculum, and the more I thought about it the more I started to think that this would give me a chance to review and assess what incoming students were being taught and whether that part of our program had evolved with the changes in the media.
Our Intro to Journalism course has traditionally been taught as a lecture course, with a cap of 90 students, built around a textbook that focused on the historical analysis of journalism and its impact on American society, a course that professors generally graded through quizzes, a mid-term and final. While that might have been appropriate 10 years ago, it seemed outdated. Today's Introduction to Journalism had to go far beyond a discussion of the historical evolution of our free press and the principles and values of journalism. The course had to include the digital age.
But more, I wondered, should an introductory course to journalism simply be a lecture course? As anyone who has taught online journalism knows, each semester's class potentially could be different from the last because of new software and emerging media. I had spent nearly a decade frenetically experimenting, merging digital advances with journalistic principles like a wild alchemist so that the distillate of each class would help keep journalism education current, and would prepare students for the evolving media.
The more I mulled this over, the more I saw this as a timely opportunity. It seemed to me that if citizen journalists, who are frequently untrained writers, are now contributing content to newspaper websites such as The Miami Herald and The Seattle Times, that journalism students' training and participation in journalism should begin sooner not later--and in an intro course. More...
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May 15, 2006
Student spotlight: Students at Florida International University sharpen their tech skills to create "Pulse Miami News," a new online newsmagazine.
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