It feels relevant: biological tactility in news media

September 18, 2006 by

Thanks to the Internet, we know a lot more about how news is used. Traffic records and data analysis give us the “what,” “where” and “how” consumers take information from a website; we also know “when” it’s accessed and somewhat less about for how long. The “why,” however, is still largely a mystery. Nor do we know much about how the senses absorb online news, how the brain sifts and orders it and how it affects the body, moods, emotions and decisions.

What happens when users receive news? More to the point, why do Internet users not consume what is traditionally defined as news? Why do millions head to YouTube, MySpace and online games, including serious ones? Why to Petopia, Second Life or video blogs like Crooks and Liars?

If online journalists knew the answer, they might be offering more attractive and informative news sites. Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists—only two of many disciplines that give us insights on how digital technology impacts the senses—have conducted recent research and crafted theories, many of them tentative, on how the brain reacts to information. (For a dated yet excellent overview, see “Nature’s Mind; The biological roots of thinking, emotions, sexuality, language and intelligence,” by Michael S. Gazzaniga, 1992.)

These findings can help us to understand how digital data is used—how the brain rejects or absorbs it, then meters it into the neural system. Researchers are looking at how online content can trigger emotions, including visceral ones, how the nervous and limbic systems, the reflexes, blood circulation and sexual organs all respond to the signs and icons of new media.

The latest research points to a general conclusion: online digital worlds like YouTube appeal to the whole body, from frontal lobe to the toes. This payoff from multimedia may be unique in communications history. The question is how can journalists put that understanding of a mind-body connection to good use.

But scientists have no monopoly on making sense of the rapid rise—the unprecedented global acceptance—of new media. A rich legacy of the study of theater, narrative and visual culture has already provided the groundwork for new media theory. An understanding of theories of art and art history and basic differences in presentation can help those who work in the digital world to know who they are and what traditions they draw from while engaging in the practice of digital convergence. In the words of one new media critic, Mark B. N Hansen at The University of Chicago, it enables us to grasp “the aesthetic newness” of digital media and “its resistance to capture by now dated, historical forms of art and media criticism.”

If a journalist deals with a 3D graphic, an immersive multimedia news environment or GIS mapping mash-p, he or she has reached fundamentally new territory. Hansen and others, drawing from scientific research, conclude that the way a person receives and absorbs mediated digital information is a mind-body process. And the online multimedia experience is more complete, more biologically compelling than previous forms of media, including cinema. As Hansen puts it, the new media experience is “qualitatively different from …the ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘illusion’ of the cinematic image.”

This also differentiates online news video from broadcast TV news practices, as journalists who work with online video photography have found through trial and error. This difference becomes more pronounced with the use of panoramic cameras and immersive perspectives.

But whiz-bang devices are only the experimental edge or mega-toys of the Internet. The medium’s unique tactile experience can easily be appreciated by clicking a mouse, tapping the keys or interacting with audio-visual displays. This is another world from turning pages or flipping through channels.

From a historical approach, the push to expand new media over the last decade to meet the demand of a voracious and adoptive audience can be looked at as the joining together of rival ways of creating illusions that have developed over many centuries.

For more detailed discussion of art and theater traditions, readers can go to the works of theorists such as Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin. These trailblazers have helped today’s media critics conceive of a multimedia family tree that has two main branches: One starts with Greek drama and wends through Tudor theater and the rich tradition of outdoor spectacles and illusions that invite audience participation. The second branches off from Baroque theater into increasingly sophisticated indoor presentations aimed at passive audiences.

Both Greek amphitheaters and the open-air Tudor theaters of the 1590s are believed to have offered an intense and pleasurable communal experience. London’s theaters at Shakespeare’s time are considered to have been the most popular form of entertainment of that era, drawing people of every class to form enthusiastic and often rowdy crowds of up to 2,500. The Shakespearean-era theater experience had multiple layers, from the cerebral to the hair-raising. The narrative was propelled by magical effects – trap doors and winches, painted canvases, fake hangings and beheadings, fireworks, thunder, drums, gunshots, hoof beats and lots of pigs’ blood.

This is a tradition of outdoors public spectacle—a lineage of fairs, markets, freak shows, street performances and exhibitions, parades, bandstands, songfests, dances and sporting events. Opportunities for audience interaction expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries with panoramas representing famous battles, museum tableaux, expositions and world’s fairs. Viewer-run motion-picture and three-dimensional photographic inventions in the 19th Century required manual production of movement, such as spinning a stroboscope, flipping a flip book, or changing slides in a stereoscope – and debating among friends about which slide should go next. These pre-cinematic devices provided hands-on, shared, communal entertainment.
The rival tradition of the immobile audience began in the more politically correct indoor theaters of Europe’s 16th and 17th centuries where architectural controls divided performers from the audience. Histories of drama indicate that the use of intimate playing spaces on stage emphasized “actorly effects.” Political and social satire displaced the spectacular and magical. Illusion became tightly framed, emotional manipulation more structured and audiences consigned to immobility, if not censorship, both state- and self-imposed. (For an overview of that transition, see “The Theatrical World,” a forward to the plays in the Pelican Shakespeare Series.

It’s possible to see how these controlling practices led to the industry of the Silver Screen, Broadway producers, Big Media, and teams of screenwriters, studio vice presidents for creativity, ego-driven directors and superstar actors. (Not to mention a commercial cult of personality driven by advertising, marketing and public relations.)

The tradition of audience mobility went in another direction, leading to the development of the all-enveloping panorama in 18th Century England and its subsequent use at national exhibitions and for morale-boosting propaganda. Heads of state and entrepreneurs created large panoramic battle and other patriotic scenes and some were taken on tour in Europe and later in the United States.
Needless to say, the concept of outdoor illusions, life-like tableaux and thrill rides became the staple of 20th Century amusement parks and traveling carnivals. The middle of the century saw media corporations bend the free-wheeling, bordering on outlaw tradition of amusement parks and “carnie shows” back into branded commercial control with the advent of theme parks.

Technology—the use of electricity, applied engineering skills and lens developments—drove much of this growth in both traditions towards more sophisticated applications. But media theorists avoid notions of determinism. They observe that participants in websites like YouTube take over the technology and use it in ways that can’t be extrapolated or predicted. Computers empower the creation of online virtual spaces, which, by themselves, are not the medium of communication. Virtual environments like those proliferating now on the Internet, are “the context within which a variety of image and sound-based media operate,” says Vancouver media critic Ron Burnett.

At one level, this seems quite straight-forward: Build an electronic field of dreams and the videocam fanatics and their audience will show up. But the research indicates something much more profound is going on at the YouTubes and MySpaces.

New technology enables unique multimedia perspectives that, in turn, open up new possibilities for story telling and may even be changing the way that humans process information. Digital technology, Burnett says, enables humans to “create the foundations for different ways of thinking. … Technology is as much about cognitive change as it is about the invention and the creation of physical devices.” (102)
Virtual reality has a “hallucinatory” dimension, Hansen says, that “explains the capacity for the VR interface to couple our bodies with (almost) any arbitrary space, and not just spaces that are contiguous with the physical space we happen to occupy or even spaces that we typically occupy.”
According to recent research on perception, this capacity of computer imagery to “make it real” occurs at a deeper, more biologically based level of human experience, one in which, to use Hansen’s words, “the embodied mind actually creates what it sees.”

The history of visual culture and the new findings of neuroscience, when combined, help us gain a better understanding of consciousness when a viewer clicks on video or enters a 3D or panoramic environment. How do these electronic spaces function? What is the connection, if any, between the physical and virtual world?

Researchers who work with advanced digital interfaces like “fog screens” and 3D helmets or high-speed game displays say the participants exist in both spaces simultaneously – what Burnett calls a “third space.” Others, such as Luciano Floridi, define this space as a mental zone between past and future.

Media critic Brenda Laurel calls it a shared or common ground, “a space of mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs and mutual assumptions,” an alternative reality that gets updated or revised moment to moment: In other words, a “whole” experience that extends the physical world, gives individuals an identity and invites entry into online communities, including virtual newsrooms, if editors would permit.

Once we enter the common ground of YouTube, MySpace or Second Life, we are empowered to live in another dimension, a psychological plane created by a combination of the cognitive ingenuity of software, the quality of content and the participating audience. Deep levels of code and data and the converting algorithms create the illusion of “being there.”

But the next step that researchers in various disciplines and by phenomenologists such as Hansen take is a reversal of perspective of almost Copernican proportions, one that could have profound implications for journalists. Researchers are finding that the human brain does not take in digital imagery as if it were an external geometrical space. Instead, visual sense-making is located within the body. Various sensory processes “generate a ‘haptic spatiality,’ an internally grounded image independent of geometrical space,” as Timothy Lenoir at Stanford explains in a forward to Hansen’s latest book, “New Philosophy for New Media.”

This body-brain connection has profound implications for new media because it downplays “an abstracted sense of vision as the primary sense in favor of the internal bodily senses of touch and self-improvement.” Hansen calls it “haptic vision,” or vision that is engaged with the sense of touch. It accounts for the sensation of flying through 3D environments, diving into satellite-generated images, the belly laugh from a Flash graphic or arousal from the erotic. Some applications are well known (infamous); others have just emerged. Therapists, for example, are beginning to use this tactile dimension to help stroke victims regain mobility and speech functions.

Instead of separating us from our senses by projecting virtual worlds, computers forge an internal body-brain link. “The source of the virtual is thus not technological, but rather a biologically grounded adaptation to newly acquired technological extensions provided by new media,” says Lenoir.

The body-brain experience inspires the user to act, since he or she is now at the center of the universe, as opposed to sitting passively in an audience. Multimedia presentations, especially versions that display with panoramic perspectives or 3D devices such as HMDs, or head-mounted displays , PanoChambers or CAVE virtual reality systems, place the spectator in a single, coherent space. The virtual world continues the physical space surrounding the spectator.

This is the opposite of the Renaissance perspective, which came down to us through photography, cinema and television. While this tradition emphasizes the realism of what is observed, it also splits the viewer’s identity between the physical space and the space of representation. Both cinema and TV confine the viewer to seeing “reality” through a rectangular frame. This is efficient and, as media critic Lev Manovich at the University of California, San Diego, has noted, gives us images that “are easily processed by the brain.” But it also restricts mobility, confines perspective and eliminates the experience of touch.

Hansen identifies the tactile or haptic dimension as the distinguishing feature of new media, requiring more involvement on the part of the viewer than the representational tradition provides. The goal of new media technology is not just to make the image more believable but “to bring into play a supplementary element of bodily stimulation.” Recent physiological research, he notes, shows that tactile stimulation functions as “reality-conferring.” It is an essential element of presence, which Kwan Min Lee at the USC Annenberg School for Communication calls “a psychological state in which the virtuality of experience is unnoticed.”

This bodily activity can be as simple as passing a mouse over a Flash button or as crucial as wearing a “digital glove” to perform surgery. Flight simulators and arcade games have long provided tactile feedback. Whatever the level of engagement, the research indicates that this body-mind link allows the virtual world to be synchronized with the physical world in a way that is grounded in the biological potential of human beings.

Other areas of research—such as biological anthropology, neurophysiology and zoology—deal with building a factual floor under a developing theory called mimetics. A collection of disciplines looks at thoughts as being not necessarily self-generated within the brain but as being acquired through the thoughts of others.

This topic is perhaps best articulated in the pre-Internet work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1970s, and by the recent work of British psychologist Susan Blackmore (“The Meme Machine”) and anthropologist Robert Aunger (“The Electric Meme”). The word “meme” has been popularized by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins (“The Selfish Gene”) to mean a unit of information that plays a social role analogous to genes. Aunger argues that once inside us, “these thoughts (memes) then go to work for themselves, pursuing goals that may be in conflict with our best interests. These ideas have their own interests by virtue of having qualities that make them like biological viruses.”

Aunger warns that the existence of memes remains to be established, like theorized subatomic particles or unseen planets. The concept also faces opposition from other disciplines, such as sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, who tend to equate memes with mysticism. From a journalists’ perspective, for now, it’s worth noting that some rather bright scientists believe that the transmission of news may function like computer viruses. The messages or memes—for example, “Islamofascists,” “NASCAR,” urban legends or Microsoft chimes—may replicate and move from one brain to another by means of signals or icons that initiate “the reconstruction of the relevant meme from materials located there.”

Note that this still-nascent theory seems to fit well with the work of Burnett, Hansen and other new media theorists. Mimetics and related disciplines may help identify how news engages the brain, becomes shared online and how it might influence public discourse, as well as subsequent voting behavior. If Aunger and others are right, daily news conferences, duplicated in thousands of newsrooms each day worldwide, may be acting like Petri dishes, assembling and unleashing digital signals over the Internet that can then replicate in billions of brains, sometimes almost instantaneously. Many is the virus that would envy this infection rate. (For a discussion of the “technology of memory” and how the memory functions in bodies, see “Tangled Memories” by Marita Sturken.)

Equally intriguing is the study of how a large percentage of incoming signals get rejected or filtered by the brain. The sensory input often fails to find an instant fit with an individual’s meme-building materials, such as stored memories, competitive instincts, survival strategies and the potential for empathy. If journalists understood that process better, they might be in a position to offer stronger news that is both intellectually and biologically relevant.

Online newsroom wisdom argues for more interactivity, rich local databases, concierge-like services, blog columns and user-generated content. But that may not be what’s called for. Often, a superficial fix substitutes for fundamental reform, such as arming notebook-carrying print journalists and SLR-equipped photography staffs with video cameras, or setting up a 24-hour rewrite desk run by people who can both write text and edit audio and video content rapidly as it is sent from reporters in the field.

The audience demand for both instant news and deeper forms of interactivity on websites can be seen in the online gaming world, with its forays into online competition, inexpensive pay-per-download services, low-resolution online games that owners can upgrade, personalized karaoke and controllers like batons that allow the user to lead an orchestra or ones shaped like tennis rackets.

Participants demand the tools for interaction, more controls and the ability to assemble forms of reality that matter to them. But Web traffic and extensive use of e-mail indicates that they want access to, and the ability to share, the reality of trained, experienced journalists who do the hard digging, ask the tough questions and shoot professional video, sometimes under hazardous circumstances.

No doubt, the more convincing forms of “presence” and body-mind involvement open new possibilities for telling news in compelling ways. Combining 3D immersive technology with GIS mapping techniques, for example, would offer content to compete with and draw audiences from the YouTubes and MySpaces.

Manovich says that the language of digitization is in an early stage, where cinema was 100 years ago. “We don’t know what the final result will be, or even if it will ever stabilize. … We are witnessing the emergence of a new metalanguage, something that will be at least as significant as the printed word and cinema before it.”

Larry Pryor is an Associate Professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. He’s currently researching the haptics and epistemology of digital news media.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Teaching the future of journalism

February 12, 2006 by

Convergence? It’s dead. No, it’s alive. No, it lurches through the battlements like the Ghost of Hamlet, joined by other media visions: Community, Authenticity, Diversity, Objectivity, even (“most horrible”) Who Is A Journalist.

We struggle to capture these phantasms, to define them and straighten them up to do good things for us. Bloggers besieging the gates tell us to not even try. To define is to destroy, they say. Meanwhile, corporate media strategies tend to kill innovation and revert to established practices in deference to “limited resources,” tradition-grounded careers and returns on investment — not first and foremost to share knowledge and foster discourse through new media.

If the critics are right, if “convergence” is better left undefined and free to roam, where does that leave journalism educators — and all those who have a stake in seeing that journalism schools adopt “best practices”? How can we tell where the media industry is going and what should we be doing in response?

I reported on this topic for OJR a year ago, and it’s helpful to look at how much issues involving convergence in the classroom have changed in 12 months. In the past year, newsrooms have begun to treat convergence differently, to see it as a solar system of loosely connected functions, rather than a hard-wired fusion of media. As bloggers and independent niche online publishers attract fast-growing audiences, media executives feel pressed to invest in experimentation. They seem more aware that prizes go to the swift, the nimble and the daring.

As in the OJR article last year, the focus in this story comes from an annual three-day seminar held at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., titled “Convergence Journalism for College Educators.” Al Tompkins, the institute’s group leader for broadcast/online, and Howard Finberg, interactive learning director/news, led 24 educators in discussions from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1. I was on the visiting faculty, joined by Victoria Lim, who each day spans WFLA-TV/Tampa Tribune/tbo.com with her consumer coverage, and Rob Curley, the director of new media at the Naples Daily News and the creative maverick of convergence.

The educators, most of them experienced journalists, described the place of online journalism in their schools’ curricula, how they saw convergence as an impetus for change, how their schools were responding to the need for new courses, and what they felt their schools lacked. There was a wide variety of questions raised — about coursework and faculty staffing, technology and facilities, and the direction of the journalism profession in general. Participants also wanted to make sure students continued to learn the basics of grammar, newswriting and storytelling while experimenting with new technologies.

If the group had a common plea, it could be this statement: “I want to come back with an answer that works. I want to bring everyone out from the dark corners of the campus, a community effort that will involve everyone.”

These are big questions, but the good news from the seminar is that, since last year, the concerns have changed. In February 2005, questions were more tentative, the unknowns were more daunting and the proposed solutions were often unconvincing. A year ago, wary faculty members and cost-conscious top administrators were reported to be offering stiff resistance to both journalism curriculum changes and investment in new media facilities.

Several participants said their deans, provosts and college presidents were now pushing them to teach new media topics, were offering to build facilities and were willing to consider interdisciplinary approaches. Perhaps the heavy enrollments in journalism and communications on their campuses helped sway the decision makers. Whatever the motives, the choices in this seminar were more about “what,” “how” and “how soon,” rather than “whether” or “why.” And most of the good ideas this year came from the educators. Clearly, a lot had been learned. If this seminar is representative, we in academia are much further down the road toward solutions for out-of-date instruction.

Questions and concerns expressed at the seminar covered a lot of ground, but they fell into identifiable categories that raised issues with specific implications for how we teach journalism. Here are the main concerns, many of them new revelations about convergence, with discussion points that were raised, and at least guidance, if not answers, suggested as paths that educators could pursue:

1. Online video is not TV news.

Online video requires different tools than broadcast news and has a different purpose for the audience. Authentic images have become dominant in the online world, superseding both text and traditional TV news presentation. A new medium or “voice” is emerging, Howard Finberg said, one that we should recognize in our classrooms.

  • Broadcast TV news works well on websites and blogs as short segments, cut to illustrate a point or highlight a conflict or outrageous behavior, or to cover a fast-breaking event. On a routine basis, full streaming of news casts, the video equivalent of print shovelware, may be a tough sell.
  • The user chooses online video elements to verify or amplify an event described or showcased by text, often “real” or “raw” images taken by eyewitnesses with video recorders or cell phones. Sources for “reality video” can be Web cams, surveillance cameras, police video, official websites (NASA’s or the Pentagon’s) or global niche sites, such as Islamic online news outlets. Images can range from photos posted on a blog by a U.S. Marine in Iraq to a video taken by insurgents who are shooting at Marines. Propaganda and ideological visuals have value when identified and used in a neutral context (e.g. the many videos available on the horrific power of roadside bombs).
  • The work of online photojournalists has a “raw,” over-the-shoulder viewpoint that may seem chaotic but can help to place the viewer into the scene. As Al Tompkins put it, this natural technique allows the user “to experience information and they will remember what they feel longer than what they know.”
  • This approach stresses accuracy and authenticity over traditional production values. It creates a sense of presence and participation in the scene.
  • The online editor or photojournalist can create multimedia collages, presentations that put control over non-linear narratives and visual perspectives in the hands of the user.

The Message: Because online video is different, a convergence curriculum that stresses conventional broadcast production, the use of high-end equipment, news teams and text-heavy websites may not be doing students any favors. Not that print and broadcast writing and reporting should be scrap-heaped. More emphasis on “the basics” is badly needed, employers tell us. But all students should be at least exposed to new methods of video and audio storytelling. They may never know when they will need this experience.

2. New tools, new possibilities

The online journalist is now free to make use of the medium’s full digital potential, now that broadband capacity has kicked in and content can be aimed at high-speed users. This includes Flash animation, panoramic video and 3-D imagery.

  • News Websites have experimented with “gaming the news” and developing interactive discourse on policy issues with some success. The Washington Post’s “Debate Referee” and MSNBC’s airport baggage search game would be examples. Other news sites have designed interactive tax legislation calculators, “Sims”-like planning options for major public projects and imaginative uses of databases and search functions keyed to news topics.
  • Software makes public policy exercises, “what if” scenarios, more possible for journalists and more compelling for the audience. It is a promising — and growing — area of new media that is being exploited by forward-looking news organizations.
  • Data can now be presented through graphic organizers and concept maps. These are new ways to see relationships that could only be enabled by high-speed connections.

The Message: All students need to understand the importance of immersive environments, “serious” interactive news games and the power of relational databases. Those who plan to go into online operations will have to know Flash, Photoshop and video editing tools as a second digital language.

3. Trust the audience

Multimedia storytelling requires the journalist to have a mindset that rejects the authoritarian, hierarchical and simplistic attitudes towards audiences that infect the lamest newsrooms. It calls for a high level of trust that the public is smart and can make reasoned choices about what is important. Successful bloggers and niche websites aim high and assume much in the way of intelligence. In Dan Gillmor’s immortal words: “My readers know more than I do.”

  • The role of the journalist as verifier includes being a guide and advisor to the user. Engineers have a term for this: domain expert. For example, multimedia presentations allow journalists to advise the user that a “raw visual” included in a package of choices is violent and comes from a terrorist website, but that it also carries a truth or perspective that users might not get through mass media. Or, to use another example, a text block might declare the intent of a graphic: “This Flash graphic depicts the number and location of deaths of U.S. military in Iraq; it is not meant as a statement for or against the war; it is neutral information.”
  • Digital software allows news to be faked with ease.

The Message: Classroom discussions of ethics and threats to credibility may be more necessary than ever, now that viewers have so much control — and so many choices. Instructors have to stay on top of fresh case examples and be able to detect fraud and sleaze. Students need to learn what to look for and how to inform audiences to stay on guard.

4. Audio directions

Online audio has singular properties, distinct from radio news, that are taking journalism in new directions, podcasting being the most recent example.

  • News sites, such as Rob Curley’s operation in Naples, are enthusiastically adapting podcasting, cell phones and personal digital assistants to perform both news collection and distribution by means of video and audio. As he puts it, “We try a lot of new stuff. Just in case it does work, we don’t want to suck at it.” This is understatement. As he showed us, new forms of mobile audio and video do work, and his staff of online editors is very good at it.
  • Spontaneous, user-generated audio has similar values to “raw” video by being timely, compact, relevant and authentic.

The Message: MP3 technology is ripping through all of media. We have to cope with that in the classroom, especially with this generation of students who seem to be born with little white objects in their hands and wires in their ears. But the suite of software and new technology that instructors are expected to be good at keeps expanding. Schools have an obligation to give faculty members time to learn it, or give them the option of bringing in guest instructors, coaches, team teachers — whatever works.

5. The basics still matter

Digital tools have limits. Text is still the preferred medium of knowledge transfer for many topics and genres and remains an essential part of the multimedia news package. “Shell packages” of mixed content and collage formats require organization, navigation design, clear presentation and distribution, and appropriate platforms.

  • Students, once reluctant to deal with sophisticated technology, now take to it much more easily — too easily, several educators at the seminar noted. As one put it: “We tell them they still have to care about telling a story, but they think technology will take care of it.”

The Message: Let’s not surrender too much territory. The basics, including grammar and story construction, still count and employers still put job applicants through traditional skills tests as a condition of hire. Convergence now means that photographers are getting writing tests, print writers are asked to show they can write a radio or podcast script and online applicants have to prove their creativity with images and their grasp of design. All are quizzed about their work ethic and self-motivation. In today’s competitive job environment, the journalism applicant with both a depth and a breadth of skills and a willingness to work at engaging the audience has the edge.

6. The 24-hour news cycle requires greater creativity and depth

The Internet puts a greater responsibility on news organizations to operate 24/7 and to expand the criteria of story coverage to topics not dealt with in newspapers and on TV. 24/7 does not have to correlate with vapid news.

  • This approach might be seen as inviting the reader into the newsroom. As Rob Curley describes it: “We give our readers access to the people we have access to,” which includes the timely data that many sources now control. Precinct results in local elections, he said, can be e-mailed to subscribers over night or sent by SMS to cell phones. High school sports scores can be updated by SMS every quarter or half or with the final result, whatever the user prefers.
  • A timely and perhaps controversial video clip can be put on a message board, creating an instant discussion with sharp focus.
  • New topics — or versions of standard ones — can attract a substantial niche audience. Curley said he makes a point of including video of high school marching bands in coverage of sports events. “Our traffic shot up. They never got covered on local TV,” he said. Usage climbed again when his site focused on local entries in the statewide band contest.
  • Many topics lend themselves to creative use of database software. Curley covered a drought by taking a feed from a county computer that monitored well levels. A program turned the data into graphics that operated in real time.
  • Having all news organization employees equipped with video phones gives a 24/7 extension to the newsroom. “We use cell phones a lot,” Curley said. Image quality might suffer but the loss is more than made up by speed and relevance to the audience.
  • Curley constantly experiments with new services on cell phones — wake-up calls, up-to-the-minute alerts on traffic, weather and tides.
  • Curley’s staff sent out questionnaires to every restaurant in the area, 22 questions that allowed creation of a database. “You (the user) can ask questions like, ‘show me the restaurants that are serving sushi right now,'” he said. The database also compiles reports, reviews and comments submitted by the audience. (“A good restaurant, but if your waitress’s name is Brenda, move to another table.”) Curley said restaurant managers often called in with responses, updates and offers to correct flaws.
  • The same approach can be taken when covering city hall, matching up elected officials with searchable databases containing their votes and campaign contributors — or citizen reviews of council actions and imaginative news games. (While in Lawrence, Kan., Curley turned council elections into a form of “Survivor,” a gambit that won him national notice.)
  • Curley believes that local sports coverage can be done in a professional manner right down to T-ball and Little League, including video coverage of games. “It’s awesome when you hear an 8-year-old talking about how he’s ‘seeing the ball better this season.'”

The Message: Beat coverage is still important — and the traditional beats can’t be ignored. But it doesn’t take much extra time or effort to expand beats into new territory, especially going into more depth. Staying with shallow definitions of news and always going back to the same sources no longer works, especially with 24/7 news on multiple platforms. Timeliness and local topics still come first in news.

Conclusion

One more word about what we have done at the Annenberg School of Journalism to cope with new visions of convergence. We stress the basics of writing and reporting and production in print and broadcast over three semesters of a Core Curriculum for incoming students and graduate students. We have postponed dealing with online and multimedia journalism until a required survey course for all undergraduate journalism students in the third year. We are now creating upper-level and capstone courses with an emphasis on graphics and technology for those who want to be online journalists.

No one answer fits. All schools are finding a distinct path. But when it comes to teaching convergence, it’s no longer “if” but “how.”

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , ,

A converged curriculum: One school's hard-won lessons

February 23, 2005 by

This article was adapted from a talk that Larry Pryor gave on February 14, 2005 at a session on “Convergence Journalism for College Educators” hosted by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Digital technology disrupts, especially journalism schools, which are dealing with a difficult problem: How to make room for convergence in an already-crowded curriculum. Where does it fit? What has to be dropped? What will it cost? Is it worth it?

The unknowns are daunting, and no one has the answers. Limited experience indicates that one size does not fit all schools. Each has different resources, goals, missions – and obstacles. We have been experimenting with a converged curriculum at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism and can share some hard-won lessons and tentative answers. Should schools make room for new media instruction? Absolutely.

  • First, students gain, whether they want to or not, especially the better ones.
  • Second, the faculty benefits. Careful convergence changes can draw a majority of faculty members together and break down the isolation of traditional instruction “silos.”
  • Third, journalism schools will be strengthened academically. Preparing students for a new media world represents a new mission and opens opportunities for research, experimentation and collaboration.

It’s hard, at first, to sell this vision. Reports back from many schools indicate stiff faculty resistance, a fear of online journalists as an attacking horde, lacking culture and leading a mindless audience revolt. This resistance must be approached from within, by converting one faculty and administrative ally at a time. If this resembles subversion, so be it.

Almost by accident, we found a path of least resistance: Start with one online class and build outward. We created our first, experimental new media course in 1994. This three-hour elective, for both undergraduates and graduates, taught students to cruise the Net, code in HTML and use Photoshop’s basic design and graphic elements to build a Web site.

The experiment evolved into “J412 Introduction to Online Publishing” with a syllabus that focused on learning digital technology. The course became reasonably popular, and we usually had two sections, totaling 30 students a semester out of a total of almost 400 majors. Some of our graduates were finding entry-level online jobs at double the $22,000 that prevailed in print and broadcast.

We began adding more advanced courses for J412 graduates who showed a passion for new media. These included seminars in “Multimedia and Graphics in Online Publishing” and “Multimedia Reporting.” They attracted relatively few students (8-10) but these were bright and dedicated, some of our best.

In 2001, our new director, Michael Parks, held a faculty meeting where he asked: Is our curriculum, even with these improvements, designed for the new century? The answer was a unanimous “no.” We lacked many elements, but what next?

We concluded that convergence had to be taken seriously, but we had trouble defining it. We started with the “Florida Model,” combining print, broadcast and online journalism into a coordinated product aimed at an audience capable of accessing all three platforms.

When should this converged curriculum be introduced, what would we have to drop to accommodate it? We saw several choices:

A. Offer one comprehensive new media course as a requirement.
B. Create a briefer survey course to introduce convergence to incoming students, followed by advanced electives.
C. Introduce new media into a basic Core Curriculum for all incoming students, including graduates, in which this topic is given equal weight with print and broadcast. Students would learn, at the outset, how to work on all platforms.

We opted for “C” with classes in print, broadcast and online in writing, reporting and production spread over three semesters. Schematically, it looked like this:

Print Broadcast Online
Semester 1: Writing Writing Writing
Semester 2: Reporting Reporting Reporting
Semester 3: Production Production Production

In other words, a student would take a 2-hour print class on Monday, a similar broadcast class on Wednesday and an online class on Friday. We envisioned, and tried to implement, lesson plans that would carry over from class to class, with the same story being done in all three media.

A commitment to convergence, even at the A and B levels, requires computers, infrastructure, class space, and instructors who are capable and willing. And the C approach calls for team teaching, tight scheduling, customized course materials and multiple texts.

Someone had to be designated to recruit adjuncts and full-time faculty members willing to retrain and become familiar with new media. This person, in our case a new full-time administrator, had to orient and familiarize the new faculty with the curriculum, develop the class materials, coordinate the labs and classrooms for 165 students, get university course approvals – and more, a huge job that took a year and a half to pull together .

Our converged curriculum went into operation in Fall 2002. Here’s what we found:

Students were not as enthusiastic about new media instruction as we had thought. Print students complained about being forced to take broadcast production and both print and broadcast students said they resented being forced to study online topics.

The technology Bubble Burst of 2000 had reduced the perceived value of online journalism and, in fact, the starting salaries for online editors dropped dramatically as electronic news outlets stopped hiring.

We had a hard time pointing out successful convergence models. The definition kept changing and the Florida Model was not accepted industry-wide. It seemed that each online operation had a unique media mix.

Instructors had many complaints but also felt we were going in the right direction. Team teaching and coordinated assignments worked to a point but cut into classroom autonomy. We also found that only a few stories worked well across all three platforms. Our biggest problem: too many of the “basics” had been crowded out of each sequence.

We concluded that online journalism was not well-defined enough to be treated as an equal partner. Also, we found that broadcast was not a good fit with online, since it has distinct production needs and a unique tradition of presentation that doesn’t play well on the Internet. Online video and broadcast television seemed like distant cousins. We found that online journalism has more affinity with print, radio and photojournalism.

We also got feedback from editors and producers who wanted graduates with “strong basics.” They said they could train people to use technology. What they needed were good journalists who wouldn’t screw up on the job.

In addition, we found in upper-level classes that many students still had problems with grammar, spelling, AP Style and mathematics. They seemed to have forgotten what it took to pass their SAT or GRE exams and couldn’t parse a sentence or calculate a percentage change. Statistics were a mystery and polling methods poorly understood.

Meanwhile, other curriculum demands had to be accommodated. Photojournalism and visual culture had become increasingly important as high-speed broadband enabled fast transmission of photos, video and digital graphics. The spread of digital cameras meant that photos could come from anywhere.

Web logs and citizen or participatory journalism continued to expand. It seemed that the industry definition of convergence was being eroded by technology. What was the role of “gatekeepers” in a media environment where gates had been battered down?

Computer Assisted Reporting skills became more valuable in newsrooms, especially at operations that had no library researchers or designated CAR specialists – precisely where our new graduates could shine. We had little CAR instruction in our curriculum. Where should this go?

We began re-organizing the Core Curriculum in the summer of ’03. We might have made more drastic changes but were limited by university course policy and catalogue language. In retrospect, small changes and tweaking worked better.

On the plus side, new media software was getting easier to use and cheaper. It wasn’t necessary to spend much (if any) class time on technical instruction. We saved money by turning to InDesign and not teaching Quark. (Concepts are more important than specific pieces of software.) We taught Dreamweaver and de-emphasized HTML and coding [with some exceptions — Editor]. Photoshop and digital editing programs were popular with students. Many students had used Excel and spreadsheets in outside jobs.

We are now working on several long-term fixes to our Core Curriculum and hope to have them in the 2006 course catalogue. But here are some short-term changes that we made within the constraints of university policy:

  • We cut into the time allotted to Online Writing to spend more time on grammar, style and spelling. We now have drills on mechanics the first six weeks of that course, followed by a tough exam.
  • We are placing more emphasis on the “basics” of storytelling, especially lede writing, which tends to go naturally across all three platforms.
  • We will continue to develop extracurricular uses of new media, such as a Web log run by students and a local news network, now in a preliminary planning stage, that may cover the neighborhood surrounding the campus and serve as a laboratory for innovative digital news projects.
  • We continue to make more room for photojournalism and radio instruction, meanwhile cutting back on TV broadcasting as a major component in the Core.
  • We found that print writing, especially wire service style, fit well with online journalism. We are coordinating that better so that students now get stronger writing instruction throughout the week. We drill them in class on speed, rewriting and, most important, updating stories with new information.
  • We stress skills such as story boarding, database structure and creating “shells” or online news packages with a central story surrounded by elements and links that give it context. Design and navigation continue to be important.
  • We view math for reporters, CAR and statistics as a logical collection of topics. We were not able to define Online Reporting well in the second semester, so we substituted a math-CAR-statistics class. We are also coordinating Print Reporting and CAR assignments. They fit together well.
  • We have taken elements of our upper-class electives in new media and put them into the Core Curriculum. This has allowed the seminars to operate at a more advanced level.

Here are more specific suggestions, based on our experience at USC:

  • We strongly recommend recruiting photojournalism adjuncts from the ranks of professional photojournalists. The active ones have a problem since their spot assignments make it difficult to commit to teaching. The ideal candidate is a recently retired news photographer who has experience with digital cameras. They can be almost Messianic in their approach to teaching visual arts.
  • We are now integrating blog technology into our classes, either a class blog or having each student maintain a blog. It’s a lot easier and cheaper than Blackboard and gives the students hands-on experience. It’s a great way to manage beats.
  • We have had success forming partnerships with other schools and departments. The likely candidates would be Engineering, Fine Arts (Design, Theater, Dance), Cinema, Communications and Business – or Law. They are all active in the digital world.

Our conclusion: Convergence should be defined broadly. Schools of journalism should not adopt industry definitions wholesale, as we did, lumping print, broadcast and online together. We discovered more natural combinations.

It’s best to avoid treating journalism curriculum changes as a zero-sum game. It’s possible to fold new media and CAR topics into courses without sacrificing the basics of good writing, critical thinking and ethics.

Journalism educators have a great opportunity to do a better job for students and, by extension, the public. I teach in the Core and I’ll admit that it is hard work. Sometimes I’d rather be back in the simpler world of 10 years ago. But technology won’t stop. Audiences have been unchained, and we have to deal with that or risk being irrelevant.

A converged curriculum is a tougher discipline, more rigorous for students, faculty and staff. But I sometimes fear that too many journalism and communications majors are refugees from science and engineering, looking for a “softer” humanist path. We have to disabuse them of that thought. There’s no easy way out for any of us.

Larry Pryor teaches at USC and is the founder of OJR.

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