BrianManzullo.com

Journalism quick hits amid the redesign: J-schools need to move ahead

For the better part of the last week, the redesign of the Central Michigan Life Web site has been my life apart from work at The Grand Rapids Press. So I haven’t really had much time to cruise around the Web in search of good reads on the journalism industry, social and new media, etc.

But here are two of the better ones I came across yesterday and this morning, and some of my thoughts in regard to them:

Fundamentally rebooting J school Daniel Bachhuber

This is a great read on what journalism schools need to do to keep up. How does J-school need to adapt for tomorrow’s needs? This was a question I purposely didn’t address when writing about J-schools and, from my experience, how they currently help aspiring journalists in teaching core journalistic skills.

Yes, those core skills still are important. But new ones need to be taught, and they’re not.

My J-school at Central Michigan went back and forth when deciding whether to stay accredited by the Accrediting Council on Education and Mass Communication, a distinction shared only by Michigan State University in the state. By following accreditation, the J-school had to impose credit limits for courses taken inside journalism (44 credits, including specific courses) and outside (80 minimum, including 65 in liberal arts and sciences). These requirements burdened our J-school because it sought to add an online journalism curriculum to teach Web skills and software.

After initially deciding to rid of the status because of its incompatible credit-hour limits with a desire to teach online journalism, students began an outcry that led to possible reconsideration. Former faculty even wrote in to complain.

I was vehemently against this outcry. Students weren’t doing their homework. They felt losing accreditation meant a hit to the resume without looking at what what it didn’t do for them: Give them the classes and skills they need to survive in tomorrow’s journalism. It’s the Accrediting Council’s responsibility to update its requirements for what students need and they had not done that, at least not last February.

Besides, I would argue losing any accreditation does little to nothing in hurting a resume in an industry where experience trumps everything and employers are looking for interns or new hires based on their previous work. Yes, studying at a well-recognized journalism college is helpful, but not as helpful as working with an award-winning college publication (i.e. CM Life), which is right at every CMU student’s disposal no matter what their concentration is. If CMU is worried about losing a selling point for prospective journalists, use CM Life as your selling point. You will learn these tools there better than you ever will in a classroom anyway. Bottom line.

This is not to complain about the CMU J-school. It’s making strides. Just last year, it received a renovated multimedia lab, located on the same floor as CM Life, with new Mac computers and a ton of useful software such as Final Cut, Soundslides, Adobe Creative Suite and more (thank you, former Board of Trustees chairman Jeff Caponigro). This helps students. Accreditation, in my opinion, doesn’t. At least not as much as people think.

I would ask our J-school not to sell out for what essentially is a meaningless stamp on a resume when you have so much more to gain from actual teaching of online journalism. These tools, along with social media stalwarts such as Twitter, can’t be learned overnight.

Speaking of teaching online journalism…

How to teach online journalism: Six questions Mindy McAdams

This is a good perspective piece on what journalism classrooms should be incorporating. CMU’s J-school does a lot of things to help students with multimedia – for example, in my Photo Editing class, we had two Soundslides projects in addition to laying out photos on centerpiece pages. Other classes get dirty with InDesign and Photoshop work. The online journalism curriculum offers Web work with Dreamweaver (although too much emphasis on the Dreamweaver aspect instead of regular HTML and CSS, from what I hear.

CMU’s J-school could use new techniques to compliment old ones, such as “speed stories,” in which students have to spend their 50- to 75-minute class time to go around campus, find a story, conduct at least two interviews, return to class and write the story. Why not incorporate video and/or audio work somewhere in there?

I’m also hoping classrooms incorporate Twitter, RSS and/or Facebook in some way. I’m afraid social media and aggregators have no place in most journalism classrooms right now. A major problem, if you ask me.

Also, be sure to check the links at the bottom of this page. All great reads, too.

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Conversing digitally at public events using Twitter

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It’s amazing how a simple networking tool such as Twitter can be used in so many ways to communicate. The Grand Rapids Press, a newspaper crazier about Twitter than most, introduced me to another this summer.

Grand Rapids hosted its 40th annual Festival of the Arts, one of the biggest West Michigan events of the year, in early June. To summarize it in one sentence, several roads are closed off downtown to showcase arts, entertainment, music, activities, food and more for one weekend.

Prior to the event, the entertainment staff, led by editor John Gonzalez, began promoting the use of a hashtag, #festivalgr, for all Twitter conversations involving Festival (the short term for it). They spread the word in the newspaper (see the “on Mlive” refer below), usually attached to all advance stories and refers. They had other Press staffers begin using the tag, as well, to spark the conversation.

The idea behind it was more than just conversation: It was to get people tweeting about Festival from Festival — using mobile phones. Just eat the best grilled pizza you’ve ever bought? Tweet it. Watching a local band put on a great show? Tweet it. Just find a tire swing you want your followers to know about? Tweet it. Using the #festivalgr hashtag, of course.

With the Press heavily promoting #festivalgr as much as possible and several reporters and editors sparking the conversation, other people began joining the act. I attended Festival on a Friday, the first day, and regularly checked #festivalgr on my phone to see what food and sights people were talking about. I saw a couple people recommend a food booth with delicious Mexican, so I tried it. One mentioned a tire swing in a hidden corner of the event area – my roommate and I eventually made our way over there.

It might seem like a gimmick idea at first. But it was surprising to see how many people in the community followed along with #festivalgr. They did the same with the 17th B-93 Birthday Bash, a weekend concert extravaganza in Ionia, Mich., by using #bash17. This hashtag particularly became popular to use among bash-goers when a storm front came through the first night and flooded the parking lots, leaving most cars stranded for an entire week, some with permanent damage. The Press did it one more time with #rothbury when Rothbury Festival came around. One of our music bloggers, Troy Reimink, used the hashtag frequently there, jotting down his thoughts about performances and select quotes he overheard.

These types of conversations don’t occur very much anywhere else on the Internet. They do with Twitter.

That’s why I find the use of these hashtags as a great way to bring the Grand Rapids community together. Although many people at Festival don’t even use Twitter, let alone use it on their phones, there still were a handful of people providing updates on when they were going, who they wanted to see and even giving recommendations on food and sights to see. A year from now, Twitter’s population probably will have grown by hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. Talk about a great way to chat with other community members you might never meet otherwise!

This type of communication also can help during, say, a hurricane watch or warning, even if the hashtag needs little help in promotion. Kevin McGeever, TampaBay.com editor, sprung the question to me earlier this week. While the tag will create itself through its news impact (people will begin using, say, #adam for Hurricane Adam no matter what), you still could promote its use and get even more people using it to converse about the storm, where it’s going, how to prepare for it, where there are shelters, etc. You could, in this type of emergency situation, get a lot of people to join Twitter just to help out, as well.

I’m sure the Grand Rapids Press is not the first news organization to utilize Twitter and hashtags like this. But I think any outlet that has big events to cover throughout the year (which, really, is all of them) should utilize this. It may not work as well at smaller community newspapers with fewer people, but it can be extremely effective among those who use Twitter.

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