Robert Niles: July 2010 archive
What skills do you need to succeed in your journalism career?
July 30, 2010
A generation ago, the skills you needed as a journalist were well-defined. If you were going to work in a print newsroom, you needed to know how to report and write. If you wanted to work in photojournalism, you needed to develop still photography and photo editing skills. Videographers needed to know how to shoot and edit video. Broadcast journalists needed to develop the ability to speak on-air with confidence and authority.Today?
Many journalists, including everyone working as journalist/entrepreneur, need to know all that - and much more. To aid me in planning coverage on OJR for the upcoming academic year, I'd love to hear from you which skills you feel you have mastered, and which ones you want additional help developing.
A few points, before we get to the vote: First, I'm just going to assume that everyone's got basic reporting, text writing and copy editing, so those aren't listed as options. Next, I do not wish to infer that everyone needs to develop all of these skills. Many journalists continue to work in newsrooms where they are expected to specialize. And even independent journalists often can rely on networks, contractors, vendors and open source solutions to cover many of their publishing needs. So if you don't want help with a particular skill, just leave the box next to it blank.
But the more skills you develop, the more freedom and flexibility you have as a journalist in the online publishing market. I know personally OJR readers who've mastered each of the skills listed below, so if you do want to add more to your journalism repertoire, your fellow readers have the capacity to help.
So let's see where we're at, shall we? I've split this into two votes. In the first, please mark the boxes next to each of the skills that you feel you've mastered at this point in your career. In the second, please mark the boxes next to the skills you'd like help developing. Leave those skills you don't care to develop, or don't feel you need help with, blank.
And please, forward today's article link to colleagues and friends in the industry, so that we can include their responses, as well.
If you'd like to clarify your response, or add thoughts about additional skills you'd like to discuss, please do so in the comments. Comments on OJR are moderated, so if you've not had a comment approved before, there will be a delay before your comment appears.
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Web Design
July 28, 2010
CHICAGO - I recently spent an afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, admiring, among many other works, the museum's famed "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," the impressionist masterpiece by Georges-Pierre Seurat.
What on Earth does this have to do with online journalism?, I hear you ask.
Plenty. For starters, Seurat's use of pointillism might be considered the intellectual catalyst behind the pixilation that makes all broadcast imagery, including Web pages, possible. Standing in front of this work forces the viewer to consider how countless multiple parts can come together to create a coherent whole.
And isn't that something a Web designer ought to be doing all the time? More...
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Kids and digital storytelling: Who will teach them?
July 22, 2010
As a former statistics major, I know that no one should read too much into a single example. But watching my 10-year-old son embrace video production is challenging some of my beliefs about the timing and content of journalism education.But it's not just my son. For many of his elementary school classmates, producing and distributing video has become as ubiquitous as writing and passing paper notes was to students of my generation. I've seen kids whip out Flip cameras and cellphones at school events and around the neighborhood, recording their conversations, performances and play.
Don't mistake this as the activity of a privileged few. These are children at a public school where more than half the students are receiving free or reduced-price lunches. Thanks to cheap cellphones and Flips, digital video technology has become so inexpensive that it's penetrated well beyond the middle class into poor segments of American society.
When I taught journalism in the university, I'd note with other instructors how the undergraduates typically knew much more about publishing online than the graduate students. And that high school students who'd come on campus during the summer could do more still. I'd joke that if we could just get some elementary students on campus, we'd could get moving with some really advanced online publishing work.
It's no joke. My son's grown better at video editing now than I am. My wife and I have given up shooting and editing video, and now assign all that work for our websites to our son. For a recent clip on my wife's website, our son set up a green screen background, shot the video, edited in a slow motion sequence and laid down a musical track he'd recorded of my wife performing, then uploaded his edited work to YouTube (using my wife's account - we won't let him lie about his age to set up a YouTube or Facebook account, although many of his friends have).
How on Earth did he learn how to do this video work? It wasn't through his school - most of the teachers there remain as flummoxed by this technology as I sometimes feel. Nor did he learn it from me, or from a textbook. He taught himself video production the same way that I taught myself Web publishing over 15 years ago - by reading about it online and then trying it for himself.
And that's what has me rethinking the direction that journalism education needs to be taking. It's not simply the accelerating pace at which younger students are accumulating digital production skills. We knew that was happening, and smart educators have been anticipating that, slowing shifting the emphasis of even introductory classes from teaching basic multimedia production skills to the application of those skills to producing more engaging news storytelling.
What intrigues me, though, is the way that many younger students, even elementary-age children, are embracing the Internet for self-instruction. This seems to me an emerging opportunity for post-secondary educators. Why leave what was previously our work to others? If students have the passion to pursue, at an early age, something that we teach at an advanced level, why shouldn't we draw a path between where they are now and where we can lead them? More...
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Diversity 2.0: Recruiting a new, tech-savvy, generation of journalism students
July 16, 2010
I don't need to explain to journalism educators the importance of recruiting and admitting a diverse student body. Journalism educators realized, more than a generation ago, that graduating few other than white, middle-to-upper-income students would not well serve the economically and racially diverse, internationally-flavored communities that journalists are called to report upon and serve.But as journalism continues to respond to the second decade of the Internet revolution, it should be apparent to all in our field that ethnic, racial and economic diversity isn't enough any longer. Journalism education needs to accommodate, and welcome, students whose skills sets and interests range far beyond the stereotype of math-phobic storytellers.
With the Internet enabling so many new ways to connect the public with information relevant to their lives, the news industry needs to bring more people with entrepreneurial initiative, community organizing skills and computer programming experience into our journalism schools. Notice that I used "the news industry" as the subject of my previous sentence. We cannot afford to leave this task to universities alone - industry, foundations and even individual news entrepreneurs must support the effort to further diversify the population of students studying journalism.
Fortunately, some visionary journalism educators are showing us the way to bring students with more sophisticated technical backgrounds into the news business. Earlier this year I spoke with Northwestern University's Rich Gordon about the effort at the Medill School of Journalism to recruit and develop programmer/journalists. More...
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Online, news archives never die, nor do they fade away
July 13, 2010
Two state judges in Pennsylvania recently ordered newspapers to take down online stories about criminal cases after charges against the defendants were expunged. The newspapers refused, citing the First Amendment's prohibition against the government restricting the freedom of the press. Last week, the judges relented, and the papers were allowed to keep the stories online in their public archives.Do not for a moment believe, however, that this was a victory for journalism.
Courts routinely expunge the indictment records of defendants, especially for relatively minor offenses by first-time defendants who stay out of trouble for a specific period of time after their arrest. Prosecutors also can decide to withdraw charges before a case completes trial. However, in some communities, the local newspaper runs stories or notices about those arrests when they happen. One of the duties in my first newspaper job was to compile the nightly "police beat," collecting and writing up arrest reports from the city, campus and state police in Bloomington, Indiana.
In the past, when old newspapers went into the local landfill and newspapers' archives were available only through at trip to the paper's headquarters (or maybe the local library), few people ever ran across these old arrest reports. If you wanted to run a criminal check on someone, say a job applicant or potential tenant, you called up the court and got the arrest and conviction records from there. If a record had been expunged, there'd be no report; the person would come through clean and there'd be no problem.
Today, with newspaper and many court records ubiquitous online, many employers, lenders and landlords skip the potentially expensive court records and go straight to free search engines such as Google to get the background on an applicant. And that's where some folks are finding those old arrest stories, now often published online. A defense lawyer in one of the Pennsylvania cases told an Associated Press reporter that he'd taken calls from two people who'd complained that an employer or potential employer had discovered notices on the Internet about criminal records that had been expunged. [Link above]
It's easy for newspapers to dismiss this problem by saying "Hey, the story was accurate when we published it." But online, publication isn't a finite action. It's an ongoing status. Stories that were "published" in the old media sense years ago are "published" anew again each time a new reader calls it up in his or her Web browser.
So a story about an old arrest is not accurate when it is published to a new reader if that story fails to note that the charges have been dismissed and expunged. This is just one more way in which the Internet has changed the environment within which the news business operates. More...
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More on writing high-earning evergreen topic pages for news websites
July 2, 2010
I wanted to address some questions and reactions to my piece last week about optimizing news websites for maximum AdSense revenue.The questions focused on my final recommendation: "Create sharply focused evergreen topic pages"
Since this is the most important of my recommendations, I felt it deserved some extra attention, especially since some folks appear to be having a tough time wrapping their heads around it. If you follow all the rest of my advice but fail to create evergreen topic pages on your website, you might notice an improvement in AdSense earnings, but you won't earn lucrative CMPs without them. More...
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