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
East Carolina University fires student media adviser
East Carolina University today fired Paul Isom, its student media adviser, a few months after the student newspaper published the nude picture of a streaker at a football game.
The Student Press Law Center‘s story is here.
From the SPLC story:
“There’s no camouflaging what this is, which is retaliation for an editorial judgment made by the students that was completely within the students’ authority to make,” [Student Press Law Center executive director Frank] LoMonte said. “They’re clearly punishing the adviser for something he not only didn’t control, but legally couldn’t control.”
Isom said he has no problem fighting his termination, and isn’t ruling out legal action against the university.
“If I was not willing to stand up for a First Amendment issue, then I wouldn’t have been advising them the way that I was advising them,” he said. “I would have told them, ‘Yeah, don’t run any controversial pictures, don’t make anybody mad.’”
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
Student press case educates prosecutor, $10,000 worth
Note: Watch for an insider account of the JMU Breeze case by James Madison faculty Mike Grundmann, editor of the Newspaper Division’s Leadtime newsletter. The summer edition will be on our website later this month.
Rockingham County, Va., Commonwealth’s Attorney Marsha Garst says her run-in with student journalists at James Madison University this spring “enhanced my understanding and re-enforced the role of a free press in our democracy.”
The experience also cost the state $10,000 — part of the attorney’s fees accrued after Garst’s attempt to seize hundreds of images student photographers shot during an off-campus party-turned-riot in April.
The Student Press Law Center and the Society of Professional Journalists issued statements in support of the paper, citing the 1980 Privacy Protection Act.
After lengthy negotiations, Garst and the JMU Breeze announced this week that they have reached an agreement under which the state will pay the paper’s legal fees, and the paper will turn over 20 unpublished photos — out more than 900 that Garst and police originally attempted to seize.
Garst said that in the future she will seek a subpoena, not a simple search warrant, if she feels a need to go after information or documents from any news organization, including the JMU Breeze.
“As a prosecutor, officer of the court, and elected official of the community I recognize the concerns of the Breeze and its staff, as well as other media sources, for the protection of the Constitution and First Amendment. I express my regret for the fear and concern that I caused the Breeze and its staff,” she said, in a two-page, single-spaced statement on the case.
Thanks to the Waynesboro News-Virginian for not only publishing a story on the incident, but including the full statements by Garth and the student newspaper’s editor, along with their 19 page settlement agreement:
News-Virginian: State to pay legal fees for student newspaper
• Statement by Commonwealth’s Attorney Marsha Garst (PDF)
• Photo seizure settlement (PDF, 19 pages)
Roanoke Times: Prosecutor, JMU newspaper reach deal over riot photos
US News & World Report: James Madison Student Newspaper and Attorney Reach Deal
Hampton U Prof Named Outstanding Teacher
An AEJMC Newspaper Division selection committee has named Rick Kenney of Hampton University the division’s 2010 winner of the Outstanding Teacher Award.
A former journalist with the Baltimore Evening Sun, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other papers, Kenney was named Scripps Howard Endowed Professor of Journalism at the Hampton, Va., university last year. He teaches media ethics and media law and directs the school’s Academy of Writing Excellence. He has won numerous awards for both his journalism and his teaching, and also has been an Ethics Fellow with the Poynter Institute since 2003.
Kenney, former executive news editor at the Evening Sun, holds a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Georgia and has taught at the University of Central Florida, Troy State University and Florida Southern College. He also directed a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern residency program for copy editing interns from 2002 to 2008, and wrote COPY! The first 50 years of the Dow Jones newspaper Fund.
Brian Carroll of Berry College, co-chair of the Newspaper Division’s teaching standards committee, thanked Kenney’s nominators, Rick Brunson, John Gogick, Melissa Patterson and Tim Lynch. Presentation of the award will be made at the business meeting of the Newspaper Division during the AEJMC National Convention Aug 4-7 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver.
Retroactive pay for interns in response to Times story
In response to a New York Times story The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not, the publisher of The Atlantic, National Journal, and Government Executive magazines and related Web editions has decided to offer only paid internships in the future, and to pay last year’s interns retroactively, according to at statement at AOL’s DailyFinance.com (linked to by Romenesco).
Atlantic, which has a deadline this Friday for its July-December intern openings, said it felt it already had an appropriately educational plan: Interns work side by side with editorial and business staff, and there are lectures, case studies, homework and exercises. However, the company explained the change to Daily Finance’s Jeff Bercovici:
Thinking about the internship program through the lens of Saturday’s New York Times story, we found ourselves revisiting the concept. We had thought this was the way to structure unpaid internships but if it sits near a grey zone, it’s not for us.
The Internships link on Atlantic Media‘s own site, didn’t have a statement of the new internship policy today, presumably because the details are still being worked out. The ad for July-December and January-June editorial internship sessions doesn’t mention compensation. (A separate media research internship ad still uses the word “unpaid.”)
The Times story hadn’t mentioned Atlantic Media — or any newspaper internships — in its discussion of state and federal investigations not-very-educational unpaid internships, but did highlight an unnamed magazine with echoes of “The Devil Wears Prada”:
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
Newspaper Fund becomes News Fund, keeps funding internships
Dow Jones is canceling the ‘newspaper’ in the name of its venerable journalism education programs, now called the Dow Jones News Fund. Picky editors will notice that the name change hasn’t percolated down through all references in the organization’s Web pages. The good news is that the DJNF internship and grant programs are still there.
DJNF/The Journalist’s Road to Success.
THE NEWS FUND was created in 1958 by then-Dow Jones & Co. chairman Bernard Kilgore to encourage young people to consider careers in journalism. The Dow Jones Foundation continues to provide the primary support for the Newspaper Fund, along with contributions from other newspapers and newspaper companies nationwide.
Those “Journalist’s Road to Success” pages are still a good bookmark for journalism students, newspaper-focused or not.
Thanks to Doug Fisher for pointing out the change, and to Chris Roberts for adding a link to Doug’s blog in our name-change discussion page.
Academic Fellowships at Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma
Details: Applications Open for Inaugural Academic Fellowships
Deadline: Friday, March 26, 2010. Application guidelines
The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is launching a new fellowship program for journalism educators June 17-18 at Columbia University in New York. Travel, lodging and curriculum-development funds are available.
The program is designed to provide college and university journalism faculty and advisers to student media advanced skills in teaching the art and craft of newsgathering, storytelling and self-care when reporting human tragedy.
Meg Spratt, director of Dart Center West at the University of Washington, notes that few student journalists are trained to recognize trauma and stress reactions in survivors, to make informed ethical choices about trauma news or to deal with their own emotional reactions while on the job.
The Dart Center has provided such training for working journalists; this new fellowship will make possible a three-day seminar for up to 12 college and university journalism educators.
The Dart Center will provide airfare and hotel in New York City for each fellow. In addition, up to $500 in post-seminar support will be provided each fellow to design and implement educational projects.
Contact information:
Meg Spratt, Ph.D
Director, Dart Center West
Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma
University of Washington
Box 353740
Seattle, WA 98195
206-616-3223
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.
“Solving” the Future of Journalism Education
If February’s weather kept you away from New York and the Future of Journalism Education conference at the Paley Center for Media, you weren’t alone. But you can still visit the center’s website to see some seven hours of streaming video about the needs of 21st century journalists, including entrepreneurial ideas, new relationships with their audiences, new online tools — and, in the words of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, “an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.”
“By the end of the day, I think we can stop worrying,” Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, told his panel, his tongue firmly in cheek, noting that the event title was “Solving the Challenges of the News Frontier.”
Deans, faculty and students from 14 graduate schools of journalism participated in the Carnegie-funded event which, whether it solved anything or not, certainly featured well-informed and thought-provoking discussions.
From a newspaper perspective, panelists included executives and journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The St. Petersburg Times, the Associated Press and The Guardian, whose New York bureau chief described a contemporary reporting position — his own — in which he can write a 2,000-word analysis in the morning and “tweet” his way through an afternoon typing 140-character online Twitter updates from another news event.
The Future of Journalism Education event (well-Tweeted itself by @paleycenter and others as #paleynews), included an hour-long discussion by Alberto Ibargüen and Vartan Gregorian of the Knight and Carnegie foundations, respectively, and a roundtable on the Carnegie-Knight Initiative‘s News 21 journalism education project. Read more
