The Foundation-Inspired “Teaching Hospital” Discussion
Before and during the Chicago convention, the Newspaper & Online News Division’s email list had a spirited discussion inspired by Howard Finbeg of Poynter in response to an “open letter to university presidents” from executives of several foundations.
The foundations endorsed a “teaching hospital” model of journalism education and cautioned university administrators, “Schools that do not update their curriculum and upgrade their faculties to reflect the profoundly different digital age of communication will find it difficult to raise money from foundations interested in the future of news.”
Here are some key links for the discussion:
- Open Letter to University Presidents
- Knight Foundation blog by Eric Newton
- Finberg’s article about it at Poynter
- August discussion email list archive, with contributions from Howard Finberg, Dane Claussen, Bill Reader, Carrie Brown, John Russial, John Zibluk, Bob Stepno, Ann Brill, Chris Roberts, Andrew Ciofalo, Gary Kebbel, Brian Baresch, Skye Dent, Kathleen Hansen, Howard Schlossbert, Michael Abrams, Larry Dailey, Robert Picard, Maureen Croteau, Daryl Moen, and perhaps more by now.
The original foundation letter signers, and their organizations:
- Eric Newton, senior adviser, Knight Foundation
- Clark Bell, journalism program director, McCormick Foundation
- Bob Ross, president and CEO, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation
- Mike Philipps, president and CEO, Scripps Howard Foundation
- Linda Shoemaker, president, Brett Family Foundation
- Davis Haas, chair, Wyncote Foundation
Publisher seeks online newspaper innovation in-house, online
Employees at both MediaNews Group and the Journal Register Company are being invited into an ideaLab — a group of company employees promised “the latest tools and… the time and money to experiment with them.”
“Each member of the ideaLab will be equipped, initially, with a Smartphone, tablet and laptop,” CEO John Paton said in his blog, announcing the addition of 25 MediaNews employees to the original Journal Register ideaLab project, begun last year. He added:
“The Company will carve out 10 hours a week from their regular jobs to allow them time to experiment with these tools and report back on how we can change our business for the better. And we will add an extra $500 per month to their pay. Other than that – there are no rules.”
Following his own “digital first” philosophy, Paton invited employees to apply for ideaLab membership by posting responses on his blog or sending him an email message answering the question, “In about 200 words or less, what would you do with the tools and time to improve our business?”
Discussions and links:
- Charles Apple on ideaLab announcement, at “The Visual Side of Journalism”
- Amy Gahran on ideaLab announcement, at Knight Digital Media Center blog.
- Newspapers’ Digital Apostle, David Carr profile of Paton in The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2011
Teaching Challenge Continues Through June
Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century — plus five weeks
The deadline for TNT21, the Newspaper Division’s teaching ideas competition, has been extended to July 1. That means you have five more weeks to put together a submission that might earn a cash award.
Entries should be about teaching newswriting, reporting or editing.
A prize of $100 will be awarded for the best teaching idea from each of three groups of teachers:
- full-time faculty,
- adjunct professors, and
- graduate students.
Ideas will be judged for their originality, innovative nature, ease of application, completeness, writing and whether they would work in more than one course and/or at different types of schools. All entries should reflect:
- Original teaching ideas that have not been published elsewhere or adapted from another instructor’s work
- Ideas that have not been winners or finalists in other teaching awards competitions
- Ideas that have not been simultaneously submitted to other 2011 AEJMC division or interest group teaching awards competitions. Ideas that have been submitted, for example, to the 2011 Great Ideas for Teachers competition sponsored by the Community College Journalism Association and AEJMC’s Small Programs Interest Group, Scholastic Journalism Division and Graduate Education Interest Group are not eligible.
The new deadline is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time July 1. Attendance at the AEJMC convention in August is NOT required to receive the award.
For an application and full information, go to
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~susank/NWSP/TNT21.html
Google Unplugs Newspaper Scanning Project
The past may be prologue and newspapers may be the first rough draft of history, but less of that past will be searchable with Google. The company has informed newspaper publishers that it is ending a partnership project that had begun scanning about 2,000 newspapers’ microfilm and morgue collections.
The ambitious project, announced in 2008, originally hoped to put billions of news pages online, adding original scans to existing digital archives it had been cross-indexing since 2006 in conjunction with partners like Proquest and Heritage. “We’re looking for all the world’s primary sources, and the older, the better,” was the invitation on the project ‘about’ page.
The already-scanned archives are still searchable at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, including 19th and 20th century American and European papers, but Google said it will not be adding to the collection, and will return some unscanned materials to the publishers.
The Boston Phoenix, New England’s veteran alt-weekly, and the SearchEngineLand blog started getting the word out about Google’s decision to pull the plug on the scanning project. By Saturday no announcement had been added to Google’s original News Archive Partner page.
The project had made it possible for smaller papers to provide archive search to readers and researchers. Through Google’s search engine, users could combine a search of its full-text databases with the pay-per-view archives at The New York Times and other papers indexed by Proquest Historical Newspapers.
Carly Carioli of The Phoenix wrote:
News Archive was generally a good deal for newspapers — especially smaller ones like ours, who couldn’t afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it would have cost to digitally scan and index our archives — and a decent bet for Google.
It threaded a loophole for newspapers, who, in putting pre-internet archives online, generally would have had to sort out tricky rights issues with freelancers — but were thought to have escaped those obligations due to the method with which Google posted the archives. (Instead of posting the articles as pure text, Google posted searchable image files of the actual newspaper pages.) Google reportedly used its Maps technology to decipher the scrawl of ancient newsprint and microfilm; but newspapers are infamously more difficult to index than books, thanks to layout complexities such as columns and jumps, which require humans or intense algorithmic juju to decode.
Here’s two wild guesses: the process may have turned out to be harder than Google anticipated. Or it may have turned out that the resulting pages drew far fewer eyeballs than anyone expected.
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/phlog/archive/2011/05/19/google-abandons-master-plan
AFP reported that Google had digitized more than 3.5 million daily or weekly editions, ranging from a 1752 edition of the Halifax Gazette and the 1895 London Advertiser to 85 years of the Milwaukee Sentinel.
The Guardian headlined its story Google euthanizes newspaper scan plan: We will organize the world’s information. Except the old newspapers.
Speaking of archives, here are the original Google blog announcement and Google video about the archive plan from 2008:
Here’s how Google described its News archive search to users on its help page:
News archive search searches across a large collection of historical archives including major newspapers/magazines, news archives and legal archives. Search results include both content that accessible to all users (such as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian) and content that requires a fee (such as Washington Post Archives, Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives). In addition to crawling content online, we’ve also worked with newspapers to digitize materials via our News Archive Partner Program. Through partnerships with newspapers around the world, the News Archive Partner Program makes unique and previously-unavailable newspaper content searchable and browsable online.
The general search results include a timeline in the left column, so that searchers can select recent years or decades into the past.
(This blog’s precursor had the story in 2008, complete with an attempt to find The Titanic in the archives, and a comparison with Proquest’s pay-per-view services. Here’s an updated version of that Titanic search, so that you can see timeline results. I recommend a visit to Dunkirk, NY, to see how The Grape Belt and Chautauqua Farmer covered the story.)
A new “national news brand” on iPad only
The word “newspaper” doesn’t show up in the “about” page text, but here’s Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad-specific litter-free daily, available by weekly or annual subscription through Apple’s App Store, The Daily.
The Daily launched on February 2, 2011 with the mission to provide the best news experience by combining world-class storytelling with the unique interactive capabilities of the iPad.
Led by Editor-in-Chief Jesse Angelo and Publisher Greg Clayman, The Daily is a category first: a tablet-native national news brand built from the ground up to publish original content exclusively for the iPad.
The Daily is incisive, optimistic, and independent. It’s not just an app—it’s a new voice. The Daily is offered exclusively in Apple’s iPad App Store and is available free for two weeks. It costs just 99 cents a week, or $39.99 a year.
More, from Macworld on YouTube and from The Daily’s first press release:
“New times demand new journalism,” said Mr. Murdoch. “So we built The Daily completely from scratch — on the most innovative device to come about in my time — the iPad.”
“The magic of great newspapers — and great blogs — lies in their serendipity and surprise, and the touch of a good editor,” continued Mr. Murdoch. “We’re going to bring that magic to The Daily — to inform people, to make them think, to help them engage in the great issues of the day. And as we continue to improve and evolve, we are going to use the best in new technology to push the boundaries of reporting.”
The Daily’s unique mix of text, photography, audio, video, information graphics, touch interactivity and real-time data and social feeds provides its editors with the ability to decide not only which stories are most important — but also the best format to deliver these stories to their readers.
“News Corp. is redefining the news experience with The Daily,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think it is terrific and iPad users are really going to embrace it.”
At http://thedaily.com there’s a walk-through for folks who don’t own an iPad. One page offers the concept in one-sentence: “The Daily has the depth and quality of a magazine, but is delivered daily like a newspaper and updated in real-time like the web.”
Its staff is drawn from a variety of newspaper, magazine and online careers. The editor in chief, Jesse Angelo, is executive editor of the New York Post, and will retain that title. A New Yorker and Harvard grad, he was a reporter for The Sun in London and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney before joining the Post.
News editor Mike Nizza has worked for The New York Times online, Atlantic Media Co.’s Innovation Center, and as editor in chief of AOL News.
The New York Times business section story on The Daily’s launch includes interesting details on costs, staffing and Murdoch’s deal with Apple. And, the Times calls it a “newspaper.”
Update:
(One critical reader says “The Daily” name itself is out of touch with the new medium, that it should be “The Moment” — “with rabid updates throughout the day.” I suspect rabid for rapid is a Freudian-Murdochian-Foxian slip.
If you’ve tried The Daily, feel free to add reviews or links to them below… Your mild-mannered webmaster is an Android user, at least until iPad 2 comes out.
Reflections on a newspaper’s online transition
AtlanticWire blogger Jared Keller summarizes recent online articles about the present and future of newspapers…
Seattle PI Heralds the Dawn of the Blogpaper | The Atlantic Wire.
- An E-Model For Journalism , Los Angeles Times
- How Blogs Are Becoming Like Newspapers , Gawker
- New, Old, Niche, Mass, It’s All Media , Adpulp
Also see the “More on Journalism’s Future” tab at the bottom of the page.
Teach news terrifically? Enter competition by May 21
Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century is a teaching ideas competition sponsored by the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
The deadline for e-mailed entries: 11:59 p.m. EDT, May 21, 2010.
Here’s the “call” for entries, courtesy of Susan Keith at Rutgers, Newspaper Division teaching standards co-chair : Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century
Excerpt:
Do you have an idea for improving the teaching of newswriting, reporting or editing? If so, enter it in the AEJMC Newspaper Division’s teaching competition, Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century, for the chance to earn recognition and a cash prize.
TNT21 was founded in 2009 to publicly acknowledge good ideas for foundational journalism courses from:
— Full-time faculty members
— Adjunct professors
— Graduate-student instructorsA prize of $100 will be awarded for the best teaching idea from each group. This year, the deadline has been moved to 11:59 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time May 21 to allow professors to enter ideas they used in courses during spring 2010.
Or, if you know terrific teaching when you see it, go to Susan’s page for information about becoming a judge in the competition.
NYTimes featured in Apple iPad launch
Apple's iPad displaying a New York Times front page
Here’s Apple’s iPad. The format looks familiar… See the video below.
Endgadget live blog of Apple iPad announcement.
NYTimes live blog of the event
Martin Nisenholtz of the Times told the Apple iPad launch-event audience that the newspaper’s developers wanted to offer “the best of print and best of digital, all rolled up into one.”
The iPad with the Times front page bears a striking resemblance to “TheTablet” pictured in Knight-Ridder veteran Roger Fidler’s book Mediamorphosis, published in 1997, on page 238.
On page 239, he wrote, “The idea that people will be leisurely reading documents on portable tablets by the year 2010 may seem unrealistic given the present state of computer and display technologies, but it is no more fantastic than was the 1980 vision of people routiinely using mobile cell phones…
A quick search just found this post by Juan Antonio Giner Roger Fidler and his vision of a newspaper tablet, complete with a link to this 1994 video showing that TheTablet mock-up. Here’s more from the Reynolds Journalism Instititute’s tablet-watch and the Society of News Design.
SeeClickFix as a fix for newspapers?
Tale of three newspapers:
The New York Times reports that The Journal Inquirer in Connecticut is using SeeClickFix.com, a Web service that allows citizens to post “something needs to be done about this…” alerts to other citizens, the media and officials:
Newspapers See the Appeal of a Local Web Gadget, SeeClickFix.
The story mentions that The Journal Inquirer began participating in SeeClickFix, but “did not receive responses until an article about the site ran in The Hartford Courant.”
There was no irony flag on the Times paragraph, but as a Courant alumnus, I recall the Rockville/Manchester J-I as Courant competition — a scrappy suburban daily covering cities north and east of Hartford.
Curious, I checked: That original Courant SeeClickFix story was about SeeClickFix as a New Haven-born startup, mentioning its use by publications outside the Courant’s main home-delivery areas. The May item is behind the 30-day paywall for archive searches at Courant.com, but a Google site search of courant.com found it in the paper’s mobile edition.
I also found Courant reader comments mentioning SeeClickFix, such as this one about a Manchester restaurant, and this letter to the editor about bicycle commuting. But the Courant itself doesn’t appear to be using the service.
However, my search also found a blog item today by a Courant reporter linking to the most recent Times story. Its heading was “The future of journalism,” so who knows…
Meanwhile, SeeClickFix’s own blog has items about the JournalInquirer’s involvement (at a $38 a month investment), as well as a working link to the Courant’s original coverage.
Related links:
Calls for papers: Newspapers, new media & election ’08
How did newspapers, their online counterparts and other “legacy media” cover — and use — Facebook and other interactive tools in the 2088 presidential campaign?
That’s one of the questions posed in a call for papers issued by Tom Johnson of Texas Tech, editor of a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on social media and the 2008 election.
Texas Tech also plans a mid-April conference on New Media Theory, which may be of interest to Newspaper Division members, Johnson said. Both the conference and the journal special issue have submission deadlines in January.
