TNTeaching award deadline June 13
Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century call for entries
Deadline: 11:59 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Thursday, June 13, 2013
Do you have an innovative idea for improving the teaching of newswriting, reporting or editing in the digital era? If so, enter it in Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century, the teaching-ideas competition sponsored by the Newspaper and Online News Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
TNT21 was founded in 2009 to publicly acknowledge good ideas for teaching three types of foundational journalism courses – newswriting, reporting and editing – by three types of instructors:
- Full-time faculty members
- Adjunct professors
- Graduate-student instructors
Southeast Colloquium:
Deadlines in December, Florida in February
The Southeast Colloquium will be Feb. 28-March 2 at the University of South Florida in Tampa, with the Newspaper & Online News Division among a half-dozen participating groups.
Faculty and student research papers should be sent to Guy Reel (reelg@winthrop.edu) for our division or to the the paper chairs listed below for other divisions; the deadline is 5 p.m. EST Dec. 10. Panel proposals should go to Justin S. Brown at justinsbrown@usf.edu by Dec. 10, 2012, and should include proposed panelists and a brief description (no more than three double-spaced pages).
The Colloquium will meet at the Embassy Suites USF/Busch Gardens, located on the USF campus. The event will be hosted by the USF School of Mass Communications.
- Call for Papers: http://masscom.usf.edu/colloquium13/papers/
- Registration: http://masscom.usf.edu/colloquium13/register/
The deadline for paper submissions is 5 p.m. EST December 10, 2012.
- Newspaper and Online News Division, Guy Reel, reelg@winthrop.edu
- Law and Policy Division, Courtney Barclay, aejsoutheast.law@gmail.com
- History Division, Harlen Makemson, hmakemson@elon.edu
- Magazine Division, Erin Coyle, ekcoyle@lsu.edu
- Electronic News Division, David Free, dfree@austin.rr.com
- Open Division, Dana Rosengard, drosengard@suffolk.edu
Colloquium registration is $95 if the registration form is received by Feb. 20. Hotel reservations at the special colloquium price must be made no later than Feb. 7.
Students and faculty should indicate their status for consideration for faculty and student top paper awards. See the Call for Papers for details.
Thanks from Reporters Committee
We voted at our annual meeting in Chicago to donate to two of the nation’s leading press-law centers. 
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press interim executive director Gregg Leslie sent along this note of thanks.
And thanks to Newspaper and Online News Division members for their membership dues, which we use to support such worthwhile causes as RCFP and the Student Press Law Center, which also received a $500 donation from the Division.
–Chris Roberts
Head, Newspaper and Online News Division
Southeastern Colloquium: February 28 – March 2 in Tampa, Florida
The University of South Florida in Tampa is hosting the AEJMC Southeastern Colloquium 2013 on February 28-March 2. (What better time to be in Florida?)
The Newspaper and Online News Division is a co-sponsor, and we’ll of course have an academic paper competition. Details and deadlines will come soon.
The Embassy Suites USF/Busch Gardens is the site, at $139 for double/king suites (before taxes.) Yes, the hotel’s famed breakfast and the evening manager’s cocktail reception are part of the deal
Edward Jay Friedlander is director of the host committee, and program director Justin Brown will be working with research chairs.
Congratulations, TNT 21 Teaching Tips Winners!
From the convention in Chicago, award administrator Susan Keith announces the winners and offers a PDF TNT21 winners booklet from the Newspaper and Online News Division’s “Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century” teaching ideas competition. TNT21 was founded in 2009 to acknowledge good ideas for foundational journalism courses (newswriting, reporting and editing) from faculty members, adjunct professors, and graduate-student instructors.
This year’s winners…
- First place: Jennifer Brannock Cox, Salisbury University, Salisbury, Md., ”Better Media Writing is Just a Click Away”
- Second place (a tie): Amanda Sturgill, Elon University, Elon, N.C., ”Covering Class: Tweeting to Practice Social Media Reporting Skills,” and Michael Longinow, Biola University, La Mirada, Calif., ”Sidewalk-Level Teaching about Truth, Quotes and Plagiarism”
- Third place (a tie): Jennifer Kowalewski, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, ”Using Social
Media in Your News Stories,” and Sue Burzynski Bullard, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, ”Comparing Coverage: You be the Judge”
Adjunct division
- Paul Atkinson, Arizona State, Phoenix, ”Using Twitter to Teach Story Pitches”
Graduate student division
- Robert N. Spicer, ”Pressing Politicians: Participation and Writing for Campaign Press Conferences”
TNT21 has been administered since 2009 by Susan Keith, an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
Note: File updated 08132012
Tweeting the Convention
The Newspaper & Online News Division has its own @aejmc_nond Twitter account, launched during the Chicago convention, plus the #aejmcnond “hashtag” to mark relevant Tweets.
Internet users without personal Twitter accounts can access either feed directly:
The general hashtag shortcut for the convention is
And a simple search for “aejmc” takes care of anyone who didn’t get the memo…
(For more about hashtags-for-journalists, see this blog post by Steve Buttry.)
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
Division seeks research, PF&R leaders for 2012-13
As we prepare for next week’s convention, I thought I’d update you on the proposed leadership lineup for 2012-13 and to seek volunteers to serve in key positions next year. As I’ll discuss later, we’re looking for help with Research and with our Professional and Freedom committees.
As you may know, the Division’s leadership in the last few years has moved in a four-year track from research co-chair (two years) to vice chair for programming, and then to Division head. That will not be the case this year, because Memphis’ Jin Yang has announced that, with regrets, she cannot move to Division head. She’s working on a U.S.-China project that is requiring more travel time. Jin has served faithfully for three years in research and programming, and we are grateful for her hard work.
Leslie-Jean Thornton of Arizona State has graciously agreed to stand for election to Division head. She previously served on the leadership track, and now tenured (and as last year’s winner of the division’s “Educator of the Year” award) will be my nominee to be Division head.
In 2012-13 we will need:
- Two people to serve as co-chairs of the research committee.
- One to serve as a co-chair of the Professional Freedom and Responsibility committee.
* Research: This year’s co-chairs were CUNY-York’s Claire Serant, who is moving to the division’s vice head for programming, and Florida’s Ron Rodgers, who is the new book review editor for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
Duties involve running the division’s blind-reviewed paper competitions for the 2013 AEJMC convention in Washington, D.C. You’ll help recruit judges, handle the calls for papers in three categories (student division, open division, and our new American Society of Copy Editors special call), assign papers to judges, and ultimately select papers for presentation. You’ll be busiest in early April in assigning judges to papers, and again in May as you finalize the paper presentation lineups. You’ll have plenty of help from the division’s leaders (and former leaders) who have done this rewarding job.
We generally want a two-year commitment for the research job, but that may not be the case as one of the two may move to programming in 2014.
* PF&R: We also need one person to serve as a co-chair. The key duty is to write for our newsletter, and to do other tasks as requested by the division head.
If you are interested and/or want more information, please contact me at croberts@ua.edu. I’ll answer promptly and can even meet with you in Chicago to walk through the job descriptions.
A reminder that our member’s meeting begins at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 10. I hope to see you there.
Chris Roberts, Ph.D.
Head, Newspaper and Online News Division
Assistant professor, University of Alabama
LeadTime leads way to Chicago
See the newsletter for the division’s Chicago convention events and more. (The image is just a preview — click it to download the full 17-page newsletter as a PDF file.)
For additional information, see the Spring Leadtime.
“Academic-Professional ‘Chasm’” fills summer e-mail boxes
A spirited discussion of academic research and its relevance to professional journalism poured into the in-boxes of division members on the weekend of June 23 via the Newspaper & Online News Division mailing list. By Monday close to 50 members had been heard from and comments were still being added. And it kept going…
Update July 2:
The mailing list discussion prompted this July 2 summary and response by AEJMC President Linda Steiner, of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Among other things, she points to the Research You Can Use webpage highlighting studies from AEJMC journals.
Update: The discussion kept going… Downloaded from the list archive, the June mail (admittedly inflated by the quoted responses) is a 1.1 MB text file, double the size of the last major use of the mailing list, a July 2008 discussion of renaming the division to add “and Online” to the name.
For the terminally text-oriented, that’s almost 600 pages of 10-pt Courier, including all the mail headers and repeated replied-to messages. The who-replied-to-whom discussion could be much easier to follow if it had been done in the comment section of this blog, but hitting “reply” to an e-mail message is still so much easier.
Utah State’s Ted Pease launched the conversation with his response to “How Journalism Professionals and Educators Can Close the Chasm,” an essay by Jerry Ceppos, new dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. Many of the responses included links to further discussion on members’ blogs and websites.
For anyone who, like me, inadvertently hit a “delete conversation” button on a (dumb) smartphone instead of archiving the discourse to read later, here’s a reminder that mailing-list items can be retrieved by date, topic or keyword at the list-server website. The links below go to the first 48 hours of discussion. The June discussion is here.
How it began:
- AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional “chasm” Dr. Dane S. Claussen
- AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional “chasm” SkyeDent at aol.com
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