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Abstract: An in-depth audience study in Madison, Wisconsin, revealed new conceptions of “news” that warrant a reconceptualization of journalism schools’ curricula. Using an experiential-learning model, this essay explores how the digital-era “journalism-as-process” considerations on the part of news audiences might be incorporated into journalism courses. The findings suggest that journalism educators must reformulate traditional news-product classroom work into something more interactive, amorphous, and process-oriented. In addition, teachers should begin helping students to “own” conversations generated in cyberspace.

Like many tasks these days, the writing of this Editor’s Note got sidetracked due to some of the time I spent poking around the Internet, especially following projects like the continually surprising data visualizations on the London riots at the Guardian’s data hub or taking Google Fusion Tables tutorials. I spend way too much time just playing oldies on Youtube, too, but for purposes of this Editor’s Note I just want to point to the more purposeful procrastination I do.

When I am playing with data sets and admiring various data visualizations, I am usually thinking about what small data project I might try in one of my more advanced reporting classes. Such a project was on my list of possibilities last semester, but we ran out of time as some of our more traditional reporting projects on the election stretched on longer than planned. I assigned basic interview stories thinking it would take was just a few hours’ work, but a week later I was still pushing for more interviews (this time in person, please). We never made it to the next-step project, which was to use the city list of registered voters we had obtained to try some new uses for Excel. At the time, it seemed more pressing to make sure students understood that they needed to go looking for people, and make telephone calls, rather than sending emails and waiting for answers. Nevertheless, the data hub and other similar depositories of data journalism lie in wait as examples of the new skills we are being called to integrate into our curricula, even as we sometimes struggle to solidify the basics of journalism.

Most of our discussions about changing curricula have centered on the challenge of converging technologies—teaching students to create content for different media. This is a big shift. In this issue, we offer pieces on the use of mobile phones, social media and iPads in reporting. But technological mastery is just a piece of the ever-growing arsenal we’re charged with building. In the past couple of years, we have been called on to teach curation, introduce coding, internationalize curricula to create global citizens, encourage entrepreneurship, and incorporate more subject specialties. It does occur to me that if we were to incorporate everything that has been identified in this or that manifesto on the news industry, or on journalism and mass communication education, JMC graduates would be among the most educated undergraduates coming out of colleges and universities. And they would write well, too.

I am being only a little facetious.

Limited resources, time, university structures, and the disinclination of many of our students to embrace computer science and other skills, even when fed in small doses, are just a few of the barriers to creating the bionic knowledge worker, prepared to leap mountains of data and disrupt the status quo. But it is clear that the ever-growing set of skills identified under the umbrella of journalism expertise is evolving in ways that are making it a much more sophisticated field of inquiry than it has been. These new journalists would be prepared to create knowledge and transcend yesterday’s news—the reports of events and circulation of conventional wisdom that gets picked over, across the Internet, by all the major news organizations, bloggers, and everyone with a Twitter account. That news is pretty much shorn of its value by the time it shows up on doorsteps in the form of a newspaper the next day. Commentators on journalism and its future have come to call this content “commodity news” to reflect its pervasiveness, sameness, and limited value. In their examination of the end of what they call “post-industrial journalism,” C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky (2012), three prominent thinkers on journalism’s future, anticipate an emerging ecosystem that can sustain this production of news as it has been presented.

… without geographic barriers to entry, there is very little defensible advantage in running commodity news that’s the same as in the next town or state over. Like the principle of subsidiarity for the U.S. government (that the federal government should ideally run only those services not better run by the states, states than cities, and so on), news should be produced and distributed by the people best able to cover it. This suggests a shift to dramatically increased specialization and partnership. (p. 113)

In this scenario, there is both a deskilling and an upskilling of journalists’ work, as machines write certain types of news, while more deeply trained journalists spend time on more complex and specialized reports. The authors give some attention to specialized ventures such as the SCOTUSblog, whose legally-trained principals managed to out-report others and attract a broad audience with its reports on the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, as mainstream networks Fox and CNN fumbled on-air with misinterpretations of the ruling.

The extent to which a journalist now needs to have in-depth knowledge about something other than journalism is increasing. Exposed by the wider availability and quality specialist commentary and knowledge, a deficit in skills in professional journalism is all the more obvious. In areas such as economics, science, international affairs and business, the complexity of information and the speed at which people wish to have it explained and contextualized leaves little room for the average generalist. The cost of employing highly knowledgeable specialists means more expert journalism is likely to come from those who see journalism as only part of what they do—whether it is the SCOTUSblog founders, through their law firm, or the economists Nouriel Roubini and Brad DeLong through consultancy and teaching. Knowledge can be geographic, linguistic, or in a certain discipline or area of study. (Anderson et al., 2012, p. 35)

More recently, during the 2012 presidential election, pundits took on Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, the most accurate of electoral prognosticators due to his adeptness with statistics. When Silver put Obama’s chances of wining at 70 percent, some pundits revealed incredible innumeracy with their attacks, such as their failure to understand that predicting a 70-percent likelihood of winning was not the same thing as saying someone was 70 percent ahead. For his part, Silver was quoted on the website Politico as saying that “punditry is fundamentally useless” (Allen, 2012).

The implications for journalism and mass communication programs are significant. In 2012, there was much buzz over another manifesto: the letter various journalism foundations sent to college and university presidents in an effort to get JMC programs to be more responsive to the needs of the news industry, in both their research and their training of students. Educators had mixed responses, but Anderson et al. (2012) complicate the questions further. They write, “The process of journalism is so being radically remade by the forces of technology and economics that there is no longer anything that might be described as ‘an industry’ for the individual journalist to enter” (p. 40). They also argue against putting much energy and resources into trying to save something that is inevitably doomed, in this case the “the news industry.” The Tow report’s vision can be reconciled in part with the vision in the letter from the foundations, but Anderson et al. suggest different paths for JMC educators. Are we preparing our students for the news industry, or are we training them to go out and do journalism, however defined?

I played a little with this question as I revised syllabi for the spring semester. One of the classes I teach explores beats, albeit mainly the municipal government, education, and the courts. Students get a few chances to write on a beat of their choice. But like most programs, we typically train our students on those beats dealing with local government decisions and activity important to their communities, mainly because that’s where journalism students have typically started their careers, and often still do. But if they might also start at a local entertainment website or as the social media editor for a health or environmental publication, does that rationale hold up?

The web has made possible various microbeats dedicated to matters as narrow as a school district or a piece of legislation. At the end of 2012, several bloggers began discussing ways beats might be repurposed, with the possibility that some might be conceived as short-term—prompted by former Greensboro, North Carolina, News and Record editor John Robinson’s (2012) critique of local news as boring, or maybe just covered that way. Blogger Steve Buttry (2012) has two posts with reader comments on the matter.

Although I have had students experiment with microbeat blogs on topics from sweet-tooth outings to efforts to decriminalize marijuana, I am very much a city-council-zoning-annual-budget kind of prof. As I prepared syllabi, I did ask myself: Am I perpetuating yesterday’s news? What if I threw out some of the local government content? But I just couldn’t give up having students calculate the annual property tax. I still think it’s important for local readers, though some of the best local budget stories I read these days are on a local realtor’s blog. Realtors are naturals for the annual property-tax-rate story, having a much deeper handle on those taxes than the typical journalist. For better or worse, that example just might bolster the Tow report’s arguments. As journalistic expertise continues to evolve, JMC educators will probably find ourselves doing some second-guessing with each new manifesto.

Vivian B. Martin is chair of the Department of Journalism at Central Connecticut State University.

References

Allen, M. (2012, December 13). Politico Playbook. Retrieved January 10, 2013, from http://www.politico.com/playbook/1212/playbook9656.html?hp=l6

Anderson, C. W., Bell, E., & Shirky, C. (2012) Post-industrial journalism: Adapting to the present. Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/

Buttry, S. (2012, December 30). What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? Retrieved December 30, 2012, from http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/

Newton, E. (2012, August 3). An Open Letter to America’s University Presidents. Retrieved December 20, 2012, from http://www.knightfoundation.org/press-room/other/open-letter-americas-university-presidents/

Robinson, J. L.(2012, December 28). Fix local news or die. Retrieved December 29, 2012, from http://johnlrobinson.com/2012/12/fix-local-news-or-die/

Journalism and mass communication students in America today have lived continuously in a country at war—a War on Terror, a war in Afghanistan, and a war in Iraq—but most do not truly understand the cost of those struggles. Neither do their parents. Americans are not fully engaged with these wars, in part because of the absence of daily, widespread reporting about them. Many journalists have bravely reported from these war zones, but the saturation coverage of previous wars, such as Vietnam and World War II, has not been sustained, even though the casualties continue. Albeit these are very different wars, but journalists have no greater obligation than to keep a free and open society informed about the military actions of their government.

A book released this year could help journalism and mass communication educators teach their students about the journalist’s role in wartime. Ed Kennedy’s War, the memoir of a reporter who bucked the censors to write one of World War II’s most controversial stories, could be incorporated into a variety of courses, ranging from broadcast journalism, war reporting, public relations, and journalism history to media law, and mass media & society.

The memoir, completed in 1950 but not published until 62 years later, chronicles Edward Kennedy’s 10 years as a veteran war correspondent for The Associated Press (AP). Kennedy embodied the healthy tension between the Fourth Estate and the government at war. He bucked World War II censors to report what was arguably one of the most important stories of the war, and as a result, he lost his credentials, his job, and his reputation.

Kennedy’s monumental story, which haunted the venerable AP for six decades, was the first to break the news that the war in Europe was over. Kennedy was among 17 accredited correspondents selected to cover Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945. In order to cover the historic event, correspondents were required to acquiesce to an embargo because President Harry S. Truman had agreed that the Allies would hold the story until the Russians had a similar surrender ceremony. Reporters did not like it. The Supreme Allied Commander did not like it. Both correspondents and the commander knew that announcing the end of the war would be the only way to prevent further fighting. The correspondents weighed the price of the embargo against the value of witnessing the surrender, and they opted to see the surrender for themselves.

In his memoir, Kennedy wrote that he had planned to honor the embargo, but then a German radio station reported the surrender. The AP began asking Kennedy about the broadcast. (After the war, Kennedy confirmed that the Allied forces had authorized the German broadcast, making the embargo pointless.) After grappling with military censors, Kennedy released the story without authorization.

Among the 17 reporters, he alone did so.

His “scoop” unleashed a firestorm. Public relations officers stripped his accreditation as a war correspondent. Other reporters were enraged. The AP feigned support, but it eventually abandoned Kennedy, leaving him to fight for his reputation. And fight he did when he returned from the European theater. Kennedy believed he was vindicated when General Dwight D. Eisenhower reinstated his credentials one year after the war’s end. The reinstatement meant he could cover future wars, but he never fully regained his reputation.

The AP did not know how to handle this notorious incident in its storied history. This memoir has afforded the organization and Kennedy’s family the opportunity to address both issues. Upon his death in 1963, Kennedy’s ex-wife, Lyn Crost Stern, gave the memoir to their daughter Julia, herself an AP journalist, suggesting that Julia publish it someday. Julia Kennedy Cochran did nothing with the manuscript for more than four decades. When she eventually sought to tell her father’s story, she edited the memoir and an AP official co-authored the book’s introduction. Tom Curley, AP president and CEO, and John Maxwell Hamilton, series editor of Louisiana State University’s “From Our Own Correspondent” book series, wrote the introduction to the 201-page volume. Curley and Hamilton wrote that The AP “made a kneejerk response to repudiate him publicly to staunch an uproar” (p. xiii). They also applauded Kennedy’s reporting, concluding, “Edward Kennedy was the embodiment of the highest aspirations of The Associated Press and American journalism” (p. xix).

This endorsement from a top AP official goes a long way toward erasing the news organization’s past sins regarding Kennedy. Additionally, the introduction posits, “This book matches the best memoirs by World War II combat reporters for quality of writing and telling detail, some of it gripping” (p. xix).

Despite his claims to the contrary, Kennedy never fully restored his name during his lifetime, and the scar left on the nation’s largest newsgathering organization may now begin to heal with the publication of this significant book.

Ed Kennedy’s War is marvelously written and recounts an important story while providing insight into the inherent tension that exists between the government and reporters. Students should read it because it is great material. Students should read it because it is noteworthy. But most importantly, students should read it, because it will teach them what the best journalists do in the field when they face complicated ethical issues: They consider the reader, and then report the news as responsibly as circumstances permit. Edward Kennedy did just that, and it is reassuring that his news organization has had the courage to correct the record and applaud his achievement.

Pamela Ann Parry is an associate professor and chairs the communications studies department at Belmont University.

Abstract: In a multimedia journalism class, students were challenged to go “mobile-only” for six weeks. The students, juniors and seniors in the magazine and news-Internet sequences, were armed with a smartphone or iPod Touch loaded with apps with which to do all their newsgathering. They used the devices to take notes; shoot and edit photos and video; gather and edit audio; upload content to the class news site; livestream, liveblog or tweet an event; interact with audience; and even monitor police scanner traffic. The six-week unit had only one rule: no pens and paper, no cameras or audio recorders other than those on the smartphone, no laptop or desktop computers, and no software that wasn’t available as an app. The goal was to test the limits and potential of the smartphone as a sole newsgathering device and to acquaint students with preparing content for mobile consumption. At the end of the unit, students showed significant growth in their technical and multimedia abilities and in their understanding of what the mobile devices could and couldn’t achieve. Students also reported higher levels of engagement, collaboration, risk-taking and urgency in their newsgathering. They also reported feeling better prepared for the demands of the profession.

Part 1: Trends in Mobile Proliferation and Consumption

“Back-pocket” journalism is displacing “backpack journalism” (Briggs, 2013, p. 115). The increasing sophistication and affordability of smartphones means reporters can hold in one hand a full multimedia suite of reporting and editing tools. In a smartphone, they have everything they need to prepare text, photos, video, and audio; to publish content to a website or blog, or to social media; and to interact with audiences.

Journalism students and their teachers should anticipate and prepare for an explosion in demand for news and information on mobile devices. The iPhone didn’t exist until 2007, the iPad until 2010, yet nearly half of American adults now own a smartphone, and one in five owns a digital tablet (Mitchell, Rosenstiel & Christian, 2012).  By the end of 2012, there will be nearly 116 million smartphone users in the United States, and nearly 55 million tablet users (“Women More Likely,” 2012). Smartphone ownership is even higher among younger people. Sixty-two percent of 18- to 24-year-old mobile consumers own a smartphone; 66 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds do (“Survey:  New U.S. Smartphone Growth,” 2012).

This explosive growth is changing how Americans find and consume news and information. They spend more time on their mobile phones and tablets each day (65 minutes) than they do reading print newspapers and magazines combined (44 minutes)(“Mobile Passes Print,” 2011). In 2010, Business Insider marveled when the number of downloads of the New York Times iPhone app hit 3 million, nearly twice the Times’ Sunday print circulation (Reagan, Feb. 10, 2010). But that was just the beginning. By 2012, the Times iPhone app had been downloaded 14.9 million times, and the iPad app, 3.6 million times (Johnson, 2012). Analyst Kannan Venkateshwar estimates that the Times will have more digital subscribers than print subscribers by early 2014 (Kafka, 2012b).

The trend is clear. Publishers must go where the audience is—and the audience is now everywhere. Students now need experience in both producing and consuming mobile content if they are to be adequately prepared to tell stories across all platforms and if they are to thrive in a competitive industry. Journalism students should be immersed in the mobile world of smartphones and tablets. They should be comfortable and savvy about consuming content via smartphone and tablet so that they understand user experience. They should at least be exposed to app creation. And they should be proficient at creating multimedia content using a smartphone or tablet.

Many news organizations are already pursuing mobile newsgathering.  Thompson Reuters has been a pioneer since 2007, even before the first-generation iPhone was released, working with Nokia to tailor mobile phone software for reporters’ use (Quinn, 2009). Reuters first tested mobile coverage at New York’s fashion week in June 2007 (Kiss, 2007). In early 2012, Gannett Corp. bought iPhone 4Ss and data plans for its reporters and trained them in how to use the iPhone for mobile reporting (Sonderman, 2011). Philadelphia Media Network, owner of the Inquirer and Daily News, has done the same (Jordan, 2010). Neal Augenstein, a reporter for WTOP radio in Washington, DC, has been using only an iPhone since 2010 to capture and edit video, photos and audio and to post breaking news to Twitter (Augenstein, 2011). Reporters at the Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot shoot video using smartphones and post it to the Web (Powers, 2012). The BBC even developed its own iPhone/iPad app for reporters to file video, photos and audio from the field directly to the BBC’s system (Gunter, 2011).

Coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London generated an avalanche of mobile coverage. For example, Washington Post reporters used SocialCam to record interviews and live action at the Games and publish via social media networks (Isaac, 2012). Olympics fans devoured NBC’s video stream, with about 40 percent of 64 million streams the first six days going to mobile devices, rather than to desktop or laptop computers (Kafka, 2012a). Instagram users posted more than 100,000 photos from the Olympics in London (Laird, 2012).

Generating content for mobile consumption is now a job responsibility of a growing number of entry-level journalists. In 2011, 8.5 percent of journalism and mass communication graduates who had a bachelor’s degree and were employed said they produced content for mobile devices (Becker, Vlad & Kalpen, 2012). That may not sound like many, but it’s up from just 1.6 percent in 2006 and 4.3 percent in 2009. Based on industry trends, it’s safe to assume that number will spike in subsequent surveys.

Mobile know-how is an increasingly desired professional skill. In 2009, Vadim Lavrusik, then a graduate student at Columbia University and now the journalist program manager at Facebook, wrote: “Reporters need to focus on primarily gathering information and how to present that information in multiple formats: websites, mobile platforms, social networks and finally print” (2009).  The Society of Professional Journalists surveyed its members in 2011 to learn what types of training they most wanted. Training in reporting for mobile devices was No. 3, behind training in social media and website building (Wenger, 2011). As the industry moves toward mobile newsgathering, journalism curricula should, too.

Part 2. The “Mobile-Only” Unit in a Multimedia Journalism Course

In September 2010, I bought my first smartphone: a Motorola Droid X. Its potential as a platform for newsgathering, publication and audience interaction was obvious within a few weeks of my using it, and I began thinking of how to incorporate mobile into the spring 2011 Multimedia Journalism course.

Multimedia Journalism is required of all news-Internet majors. Students in other journalism majors may take it as an elective. Students enroll in it in their junior or senior year. Typical enrollment is 10 to 12, and it is offered in the spring semester only. The course was introduced in 2009, replacing a semester-long newspaper print-design course. Its objective is to provide students who are typically more print-focused with the multimedia skills needed to produce content for news and magazine digital platforms.

Early in the semester, students learn the basics of  shooting and editing photos and videos; gathering and editing audio; and creating slideshows. They use easy-to-learn, consumer-level, point-and-shoot cameras (Canons), video cameras (Canon ZR800 or ZR900) and audio recorders (Tascam DR-07 and Zoom H4), rather than sophisticated, high-end multimedia gear. Except for Photoshop, they use consumer rather than professional apps, such as GarageBand and iMovie. Soundslides is the software used to create slideshows. Students post their audio slideshows and short video stories to the Web.

In spring 2011,  when I first introduced mobile into the class, smartphones weren’t as pervasive as they are now. I received a $2,000 grant from the university, under a program to encourage the use of digital technology, to buy six iPod Touches for student use. The iPod Touch does almost everything an iPhone does, except make and receive phone calls. This purchase avoided committing the school to an expensive voice and data plan. The disadvantage, of course, is that the Touch must be connected to a wireless network to connect to the Internet, since it doesn’t have cellular connectivity.The university has campuswide wi-fi, so that wasn’t much of a problem. For off-campus use, students used a MiFi mobile hotspot owned by the journalism school and available for student checkout.

In spring 2011, the first experiment with the mobile newsgathering unit, the iPod Touches were a necessary investment. In that class, only 3 of 10 students had smartphones. By spring 2012, however, 10 of 12 students had smartphones, and six of those were iPhones. Even then, the iPod Touches were a useful addition, allowing students to compare the Apple and Android operating systems and available apps.

With iPods or their own smartphones in hand, students in spring 2011 and spring 2012 spent the last six weeks of the semester in Multimedia Journalism exploring “mobile-only” reporting, multimedia gathering and editing, and publishing. There was only one rule: They could use only a smartphone to take notes;  shoot and edit photos and video; gather and edit audio; and publish to a website or blog or via social media. No laptop or desktop computers. No traditional cameras, video cameras or audio recorders. No reporter notebooks (although we bent that rule a little). No software that wasn’t available as an app. The challenge was to use only a smartphone, rather than a full complement of multimedia gear, to produce multimedia content that was at least adequate in a breaking-news situation.

The objectives of the mobile-only unit stated that students would:

1. gain technical proficiency with using mobile devices for reporting, producing multimedia, publishing, and interacting with audience, so that they can use them in the field to cover breaking news;
2. monitor and analyze how mobile tools alter their story selection, reporting, and presentation;
3. develop troubleshooting and self-teaching skills, enabling them to fix problems, find answers to questions, and adjust to advances in mobile technology;
4. emerge with a new “journalistic mindset” that embraces digital and mobile technology, immediacy, urgency, deadlines, and risk.

As an introduction to the unit, we examined the trends in mobile’s explosive growth; the adoption of mobile strategies by news organizations; and the growing importance of immediacy and urgency in news coverage. I tried to make our expectations realistic by telling students that they would not achieve documentary-quality content like “Frontline” or NPR, but that when speed is of the essence, the content produced could be “good enough.” Knowing the limits of the mobile devices, we set a goal to produce the highest quality content that was possible with them.

Students familiarize themselves with apps on a smartphone and iPodTouch.

Extensive preparation and hands-on practice with the mobile devices and with appswaskey to student success with mobile newsgathering.Students spent three weeks learning how to get the most out of their phones’ cameras and how to edit photos; how to shoot and edit video; how to gather and edit audio; how to store and share files; and how to post to various publishing outlets. They explored the best free or inexpensive apps to accomplish these tasks, including Audioboo, iMovie, PS Express, SoundCloud, Ustream, Qik Video, ProCamera, police scanner apps, Instagram, Dropbox, Evernote, WordPress, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Photo scavenger hunt. “Wheels,” shot with ProCamera app.

The students’ in-class work was often unpolished and sometimes even silly, as they worked through their uncertainty and self-consciousness. But the point is for students to make the embarrassing mistakes in class and conquer their self-consciousness before working more professionally in the field covering actual stories.

An example of an early in-class unit assignment was an on-campus photo “scavenger hunt.” Working in pairs, students had 45 minutes to interpret, find, photograph, edit, and post items on a quirky 26-item list, such as “heritage,” “silence,” and “mess.” They experimented with the ProCamera, Instagram and PS Express apps, and posted to Tumblr, Flickr, or a WordPress blog. After 45 minutes, students gathered to view and critique each other’s work. [Flickr photostream]

In another assignment, students posted a brief audio autobiography, using Audioboo to record, add a photo and geotag, and post to Twitter.

To gain more audio practice, students conducted brief “person-on-the-street” audio interviews on timely topics.

A student interviews another student at the university. Click on image to navigate to Audioboo recording.

To practice shooting and editing video, students again interviewed each other and again conducted “on-the street” interviews about current events and issues. They used the iMovie app to edit the video and posted the edited video to a WordPress blog, YouTube, or Tumblr.

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In-class exercises like these prepared them for the main event: “live” mobile-only coverage of community events and entertainment leading up to the annual Drake Relays track meet. The Relays draw thousands of athletes, coaches, and spectators in late April and engage much of the local community in the 103-year-old tradition.

Mobile newsgathering is, of course, best-suited for breaking news or for a developing story of immediate and wide public interest, such as a crime, accident, or natural or manmade disaster. The challenge in the classroom is to replicate that sense of breaking news. Our imperfect solution was to produce live coverage of the Relays activities, which is admittedly artificial but is as close as we could come to simulating a breaking-news experience.

All students in the class contributed to producing live team coverage of the annual Drake Relays Beautiful Bulldog Contest. (The university’s mascot is the bulldog.) The popular pageant selects the canine mascot for the Relays from among 50 bulldog entrants, many of them costumed as brides, ballerinas, superheroes, fairies, and even food.

Working in pairs or trios, students were also required to produce live coverage of one other event that week: the downtown streetpainting, in which corporations and organizations paint Relays-themed squares on the sidewalk in a popular entertainment district; “pole vault at the mall,” in which the Relays’ top male and female pole-vaulters compete inside the atrium of a suburban mall; or the Grand Blue Mile, a series of one-mile races downtown for people of all ages and athletic abilities, ranging from children and families to elite athletes.

Students planned their coverage of the events, divvying up duties and assigning specific tasks. Their coverage of the events consisted mainly of photos and captions and short videos. The bulldog beauty pageant was livestreamed.

Students posted their ongoing coverage to Tumblr. The campus newspaper, the Times-Delphic, embedded the Tumblr feed on a special “Relays Live Coverage” page.

Bulldog pageant coverage

One student with an iPod Touch shoots video of another student attempting to interview a bulldog and its owner:

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Students shoot video of the pageant itself and livestream it via Ustream:

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A student used an iPod to record and edit this video interview, including the addition of lower-thirds:

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Streetpainting mobile coverage

Using an iPod Touch, students recorded an introduction to their coverage of the downtown streetpainting and posted it to Tumblr:

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Interview conducted using an iPod Touch with an organizer of the downtown streetpainting:

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Photo of downtown streetpainting, taken with smartphone:

Students even assembled a video slideshow depicting the time-lapse completion of a painted square – music included. This was compiled after the event, using a laptop computer and iMovie:

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Grand Blue Mile coverage

Students posted video to a Tumblr page embedded on the site of the campus newspaper. Click the image to navigate to the video on Tumblr.

Students quickly learned that a smartphone or iPod Touch camera doesn’t capture motion well:

Coverage included interviews with participants, which were posted immediately to Tumblr:

Footage, shot with an iPod Touch, of the finish of the élite women’s mile race:

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An interview with the Drake Relays director, shot and edited with an iPod Touch:

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Pole vault in the mall coverage

Using an iPod Touch, students shot, edited, and posted videos of pole vaulters competing at the mall:

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The limits of the iPod Touch are evident when shooting sports. The iPod is susceptible to camera shake and lacks a video zoom. Yet it was sufficient to capture this superb vault and the ebullience of the athlete and crowd:

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With an iPod Touch, a student shot, edited, and posted a video of an interview with the women’s pole vault winner. Even without an external mic and with a noisy environment, the audio is sufficient:

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In the final week of class, students viewed and critiqued the coverage; shared lessons learned; analyzed how mobile newsgathering changed the way they reported; and identified ways to apply what they learned in successive classes, internships, or jobs.

Part 3. Student Outcomes

Student learning was measured through grading of assignments, a pre- and post-survey, and an open-ended qualitative questionnaire.

Overall, although some students were apprehensive at first about going mobile-only, they reported satisfaction with the unit.

• “It was a little strange at first to be relying solely on one device.”
• “I was kind of wary at first, but this was the best unit we did all semester—the most helpful and practical.”
• “It was amazing to see how much we could accomplish on just an iPhone with a few cheap apps.”
• “I thought going ‘mobile-only’ was going to feel a lot more unnatural than it did. I thought I would feel awkward without my pen and notepad and recorder and small microphone and point-and-shoot camera and extra batteries. … But then, once I got into the groove of the event I was covering, I forgot about everything else I would have normally brought. It might sound cheesy, but I felt like a little weight had been lifted.”

More specifically, significant learning outcomes were identified in four key areas:

1. Technical and operational proficiency with the mobile devices and apps;
2. Adaptations in how students practiced journalism;
3. A new mindset that embraced a journalism of immediacy, urgency, deadlines, and risk;
4. A greater confidence in students’ preparedness for a career.

Technical and operational proficiency

In the spring 2012 semester, students were surveyed before and after the mobile-only unit about their proficiency with mobile apps for reporting, for gathering and editing media, and for publishing. In the pre-survey, no student reported proficiency in any category. By the end of the unit, 66.7% reported proficiency with reporting apps; 88.9% reported proficiency with media apps; and 100% reported proficiency with publishing apps.

Students also quickly and correctly identified the technical advantages and disadvantages of the mobile devices:

• “Some lighting situations made it difficult to accurately capture images or video. And many times, due to the placement of the microphone or the amount of background noise at the event, it was difficult to record useable audio.”
• “Though the sound we gathered was nowhere near as good as it would have been with a directional microphone and more sophisticated equipment, I was impressed by the quality of audio we gathered.”
• “It was a lot harder to get a clear photo because the events that I covered had people and animals constantly moving. With an SLR, it’s easier to capture a clear motion-picture, but it definitely is not with a smartphone.”
• “If I had to pick any kind of equipment I missed, it would be a microphone, because people connect the microphone with where to direct their voice, and I think it makes them feel more comfortable than speaking to someone holding up a phone.”
• “The quality of audio, video and photographs might not have been perfect. But you do capture things quickly and get into the habit of shooting something and uploading.”
• “My iPhone had everything I needed. I could snap photos quickly—focus, crop, edit them—and then upload in seconds. I could record video and edit it with just my fingers. I could record audio, Google a reference, type up a quote. I could check our reporting through Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. My phone really had everything I need.”
•  “We definitely could take photos more quickly, just point and shoot. The iPhone can automatically focus, and I could crop and edit very easily. … I was surprised by my phone’s ability to take almost macro photos—very close up, focused ones. Audio was simple, too.”
• “There was definitely an increased necessity in paying attention to details such as placement and lighting when it came to taking photos.”
• “Although people are forgiving about the stabilization of videos, I feel it’s crucial to be as stable as possible. I found myself wishing for a tripod.”

Adaptations in how students practiced journalism

Some students also thoughtfully considered how mobile newsgathering changed how they behaved as reporters and how they planned their coverage:

• “I found myself making sure that I was asking questions that could be turned into good sound bites or short video clips.”
• “I focused on what would instantly put the readers at the scene.”
• “I asked very ‘to-the-point’ questions and didn’t use too much time building rapport with the person/people, because I focused on getting to the point of the story right away.”
• “Working with mobile devices almost pushed me to report more because there was an immediate product.”
• “Overall, the tone of coverage was much more informal.”
• “The hardest part was making sure that we weren’t just picture-vomiting on the website, and making sure we were telling some sort of story.”
• “I was a lot more focused on images that could encompass a large deal of information, though only using a few words, and paid much more attention to details than I would have otherwise.”
•  “I relied more on visual journalism like photos and videos. …  Since I was more focused on the visual, it definitely affected who I interviewed or covered because I was unconsciously searching for what was visually appealing, and that could be a weakness.”
• “My focus was on the visuals. As a newspaper journalist, I’ve never catered to visuals so much. I had to change my mindset.”
• “It makes you lean more toward the side of ‘be first’ rather than ‘be the first to be right,’ and that can be dangerous.”

Some students reported feeling as though they weren’t taken as seriously as journalists when reporting with a mobile device. But others said the devices were less intrusive and put sources and interviewees at ease.

• “People are definitely apprehensive about answering questions when you’re just holding a phone up during the interview. It’s almost as if they question your credibility because you aren’t carrying around the heavy, expensive equipment like many other professional reporters do.”
• “I did find that people seemed to give me strange looks when I asked if I could record them and take their picture on my personal phone.”
• “At first it was a little disarming to approach people with only my phone in hand, but I soon found that because the people I was interviewing were more comfortable, that I was, too.”
• “People were slightly leery at first about who I was and what I was really doing, but once I had explained myself, they seemed to ease up.”
•  “Surprisingly, people were all for taking me seriously with my pocket-sized equipment. They didn’t act any different, so I didn’t feel any different.”
•  “It’s less intimidating for them to only have an iPod Touch in front of them instead of a recorder or camera. I think it relaxes them, and that makes your  job easier.”

A new mindset that embraced a journalism of immediacy, urgency, deadlines and risk

Although they didn’t cover “real” breaking news live, students nonetheless reported a greater sense of immediacy and urgency and of working against a constant deadline of “now.” At least one student didn’t like the greater pressure, however.

• “I felt more of a responsibility to post my coverage right away because I had the ability to do so.”
• “It made me feel more pressured. When videos didn’t upload, I freaked out. When apps crashed, I panicked.”
• “Mobile journalism made me think on my feet.”
• “It certainly encourages us to get information out in a quick but still professional manner.”
• “It reinforced the notion that we need to be ready to adapt and communicate in different ways and be as quick and interactive as we can.”
• “We needed to act fast and break the news. Our audience didn’t want to read about something that already happened; we were talking about the present, ‘right-now’ action.”
• “I felt this adrenaline rush whenever I posted a picture on Tumblr. I even remember saying to myself, ‘Hurry up! Load! This needs to get on there!’ There really was not a significant rush at the events we covered, but I still had that feeling of urgency when publishing content.”

One of the unit’s objectives was a bit more difficult to assess: a shift in journalistic mindset toward a willingness to take risks and fail; to collaborate with and learn from others; and to take the initiative to experiment.

•  “I took more initiative when working with the mobile devices because I had all of the technology I needed in the palm of my hand.”
• “Our failures taught us more than our successes.”
•  “One of the things that I really enjoyed was being able to see the work that other people were doing right away – I think that that was one of the most valuable experiences.”
• “I definitely felt more comfortable using these devices than the more sophisticated equipment. It is much easier to take risks and try new things when you aren’t surrounded by a ton of bulky technological equipment.”
•  “With the technological advancements, journalists, of all people, need to be using and experimenting with mobile applications.”
• “I’m the kind of person that is nervous to try new things, so this was a challenge for me. But it was motivating and I found it easy to want to learn more.”
• “I felt comfortable and confident taking risks, even if I failed. … I didn’t feel as bad discarding things that weren’t useful.”
• “It’s fun to go mobile. You get kind of in a ‘wing-it’ mentality and do the best that you can with what you have.”

A greater confidence in students’ preparedness for a career

Finally, students reported an increased confidence in their ability to cope and adapt in the profession.

• “Definitely gave me a different outlook on how journalism is evolving as a profession. There is no longer time to go through multiple drafts and edits of a story before it is printed or posted to the web, and I think that things like live-blogging and Twitter have really come to accentuate that.”
•  “I definitely feel more prepared and adaptive within the industry, having worked with a wide variety of mobile platforms and applications. I also believe that the process is ever-changing and evolving, so it is important to always be learning new technologies.”
• “I can show employers that I can think on my feet, that I am flexible and that I know the basics of good journalism, no matter what equipment I have to work with. Experimenting with mobile journalism is also a great way to practice becoming a more well-rounded journalist. The field of journalism expects us to be able to do everything, and with a device that fits right in our pockets, we have the ability to do everything.”
• “Interviewers are always intrigued when I talk about these experiences, and ask to see the work we produced.”
• “I definitely feel more prepared and ready to go forth in the journalism world. I learned valuable skills, and learned how to use my iPhone in practical ways. … I understand the limitations and rules, what works best and how to succeed.”
• “It made me feel more well-rounded, and I can say that I’m adapting to how communications is changing.”
• “I learned and was trained the traditional journalism way. … I am now more well-rounded and skilled as a journalist. I can offer many different talents and approaches to stories.”
• “I felt very tech-savvy, and like I am ahead of the curve, knowing how to successfully go mobile.”

One other measure of the mobile-only unit was student’s immediate application of what they learned to their internships and other classes. For example, one student interning with the local newspaper shot iPod Touch video of tornado damage in a western Iowa town.

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Two students shot video of the spring 2011 political protests in Madison, Wisconsin. (However, the video editing was done on a laptop.)

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Two students interning and freelancing for Patch shot video of an Olympics viewing party, as a local gymnast competed for, and won, a gold medal.

A student who is in ROTC shot videos and photos of a weekend field training session and posted them to the unit’s blog. This example underscores the difficulty of gathering good audio on a windy day.

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Part 4: What I Learned  – and What I’d Do Differently

An undertaking this experimental is bound to come with its share of frustrations and unexpected glitches, some technical and others pedagogical. Colleagues considering such an undertaking might consider the following:

Technical considerations

Accessibility of gear. Not all students will own a smartphone and, with higher-education funding tight, few faculty are likely to persuade their universities to buy the necessary gear.  At the private, four-year university where I teach, more and more students own smartphones with data plans, but that is unlikely to be the case everywhere. One solution might be to pair up a student without a smartphone with one who has one.

If faculty or their students are looking to purchase a device, one cost-saving solution is to look for slightly outdated gear. I bought my iPhone 4 for $100, when Apple was looking to unload old products to make room for the iPhone 4S, which costs $199 to $399. As of mid-October 2012, after the release of the iPhone 5, Apple was literally giving away the 8GB iPhone 4 (with a two-year wireless service plan). It was selling the 4S (16GB) for $99.

Even if students do own smartphones, they may have so much music, or so many stored photos and videos, that they don’t have storage left for multimedia apps and large media files.

Account and password management. Creating and maintaining multiple accounts was an unanticipated logistical headache. If you are using school-owned equipment, plan ahead about who will inventory the devices, set them up, sync them to Apple or Google Play accounts, set passwords and monitor checkout. If students are publishing content to YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Twitter, Audioboo, etc., whose accounts are they using? How widely shared is the password, and what security challenges does that present? I created a Gmail account for the course, then used that email address to create accounts with a common password that was shared with students. At the end of the unit, I changed the passwords.

Another unanticipated account security issue was that students often logged into their personal Twitter or Facebook accounts on a school-owned device, but didn’t log themselves out, giving the next user access to their private accounts. Fortunately, all “hacks” were benign.

Wireless network strength. Students are at the mercy of whatever wi-fi network they’re on or, if using a mi-fi mobile hotspot, the strength of the cellular signal. Signals can be weak if you’re in a remote area, or if several people are camped on it. A mobile hotspot that operates off a 3G cellular signal can get bogged down quickly if many are using it, especially if they’re uploading large media flies. We noticed that, even in our classroom, when several of us were connected to the university’s wi-fi network uploading media, the connection slowed noticeably.

Limits and unreliability of apps. We learned the hard way of Tumblr’s daily limit of 75 photo postings. To adjust, we moved to Flickr, which allows 300 MB of  photos to be posted each month. Sometimes Twitter goes down, or WordPress hiccups, or the Ustream feed crashes, or the iPod battery dies. Happily, students always seemed to find a solution or a work-around for the problem. For example, during livestreaming of the bulldog pageant, students quickly realized that livestreaming video is a significant drain on a phone or iPod’s battery. To accommodate, they adjusted by having one student operate the livestream, another on stand-by with a fully charged replacement smartphone or iPod, and another charging the dead or dying devices. In another example, when they had difficulty posting video files to WordPress, they uploaded them to YouTube instead, and embedded the link. Problem solved.

Pedagogical considerations

Artificiality of “breaking news.” The biggest problem, and one I don’t feel I ever completely overcame, is the inability to truly simulate a breaking-news environment. Yes, my students covered “live” news, but it wasn’t really breaking news.  It was human interest news. Clearly, smartphones are best-suited for a breaking-news environment, when reporters want to deliver important, perhaps even life-saving, information that a large number of people want or need to know. Although I haven’t resolved that artificiality, students did respond to the live coverage with urgency and adrenaline, as though it were breaking news.

Lack of audience. Although the class posts its work all semester to a magazine-style blog, the site doesn’t have a big audience. It’s meant to be more of a playground and a place for students to store portfolio work.  Generating an audience for our coverage proved difficult. We tried to solve that by collaborating with our campus newspaper, which embedded our Tumblr feed on a “Live Relays Coverage” tab, and by promoting our live coverage via social media. But the existence of an already-engaged audience would allow us to better test mobile interaction with readers and viewers.

Adequate training and preparation. Although college students of 18 to 22 years old are so-called “digital natives,” they need adequate training, preparation and practice with the devices and the apps to be able to produce good content and to go out into the field with confidence. Give them ample time to fumble around and make mistakes in the classroom so that they are confident and capable when it counts. In class, I often jokingly issued a blanket “formal pardon,” dispensation for any embarrassing mistakes. Although intended as a joke, it did seem to help create a classroom atmosphere where risk is acceptable and failure is instructive.

Modeling risk and failure. I tried to model my own risks and failures and to share them with students. It created a sense of collegiality and collaboration that I strive for.  For example, I didn’t know Tumblr had a daily limit of 75 photos. I found out when students embarked on their photo scavenger hunt and, after posting several dozen photos, couldn’t post any more. After we enjoyed a laugh that we had “broken Tumblr,” it turned into a “teachable moment,” in which I had them research Tumblr’s posting limits as well as those of Flickr, Facebook, TwitPic, YouTube, Instagram and others. If we hadn’t “broken Tumblr,” we may not have discovered these varying limits and discovered a better option for extensive photo posting.

What’s Next?

With mobile technology and the journalism industry changing as rapidly as they are, continuing research and experimentation with mobile news-gathering are warranted. In particular, three areas seem ripe for further research and experimentation.

1. Experimentation with the iPad as a news-gathering device. A larger device offers some advantages over a smartphone (a larger touchscreen keyboard, a larger screen for audio, photo and video editing) but also disadvantages (an inferior camera, less portability). Also, newer versions of the iPhone and other smartphones will provide more opportunities for worthwhile experimentation.
2. Use of GPS for location-aware reporting and news-gathering. Location-aware apps are the future (Deibert, June 14, 2012). Reporting that adds location information to mobile content can enhance aggregation, enable mapping, support sharing via social media, and target a specific geographic audience.
3. Authentic audience interaction during a live story. In our experiments, the audience for our class’s website was quite small. Although we generated some interest during events, particularly via Twitter during the bulldog contest and the pole vault, we didn’t achieve true audience interaction. I’d like to find a way to give students a more realistic sense of give-and-take interaction with users during a breaking-news story.

Jill Van Wyke is an assistant professor at Drake University.

References

Augenstein, N. (2011, April 4). How one radio reporter ditched his equipment for an iPhone 4. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/04/how-one-radio-reporter-ditched-his-equipment-for-an-iphone-4094.html

Becker, L., Vlad, T., Kalpen, K. (2012). 2011 annual survey of journalism & mass communication graduates. Retrieved from http://www.grady.uga.edu/annualsurveys/Graduate_Survey/Graduate_2011/GradReport2011BWv8912.pdf

Briggs, M. (2013). Journalism next (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.

Deibert, April. (2012, June 14). The future of mobile news: Location-aware apps and beyond. Retrieved from http://www.innovation-series.com/2012/06/14/the-future-of-mobile-news-location-aware-apps-beyond/

Gunter, J. (2011, June 14). BBC developing new iPhone app for field reporters. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/bbc-developing-new-iphone-app-for-field-reporters/s2/a544714/

Isaac, M. (2012, July 9). The Washington Post taps Socialcam for summer Olympics coverage. Retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20120709/the-washington-post-taps-socialcam-for-summer-olympics-coverage/

Johnson, L. (2012, March 21). New York Times iPhone app racks up 14.9M downloads. Retrieved from http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/media/12396.html

Jordan, G. (n.d.). It’s a lesson in digital transformation. Retrieved from www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/professor.aspx?profarticleid=100020

Kafka, P. (2012a, August 2). NBC says live online + taped delayed Olympics are a ginormous success. Retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20120802/nbc-says-live-online-tape-delayed-olympics-are-a-ginormous-success/

Kafka, P. (2012b, August 6). The New York Times reports a digital success story. Retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20120806/the-new-york-times-reports-a-digital-success-story/

Kiss, J. (2007, October 23). Reuters’ mo-jo experiment with Nokia. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2007/oct/23/reutersmojoexperimentswith

Laird, S. (2012, August 11). How Instagram is winning gold at the Olympics. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2012/08/11/instagram-olympics-infographic/

Lavrusik, V. (2009, August 14). 12 things newspapers should do to survive. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2009/08/14/newspaper-survival/

Mitchell, A.,  Rosenstiel, T., & Christian, L. (2012). Mobile devices and news consumption: Some good signs for journalism.  State of the News Media 2012. Pew Research Center, Project for Excellence in Journalism. Retrieved from http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/mobile-devices-and-news-consumption-some-good-signs-for-journalism/

Mobile passes print in time-spent among U.S. adults. (2011, December 12). Retrieved from http://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/mobile-passes-print-timespent-adults/

Powers, E. (2012). Learning to do it all. American Journalism Review 34(1), 28-31. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Reagan, G. (2010, February 10). New York Times’ iPhone app reaches 3 million downloads. Retrieved from http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/entertainment/29987257_1_advertising-revenues-iphone-mobile-advertising

Quinn, S. (2009). Mobile reportage continues historical need for speed. Journal of New Communications Research, 4(1), 13-27. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Sonderman, J. (2011, December 22). Gannett buys thousands of iPhones, iPads for its journalists. Retrieved from http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/157138/gannett-buys-thousands-of-iphones-ipads-for-its-journalists/

Survey: New U.S. smartphone growth by age and income. (2012, February 20). Retrieved from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=30950

Wenger, D. (2011, May/June). It’s all about the training: Get what you want, when you want it. Quill (99)3, 36-37.

Women more likely to go mobile-only for social activities. (2012, July 12). Retrieved from http://www.public.site2.mirror2.phi.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009183

Recommended Reading

Mobile Media Toolkit

Mobile Journalism Reporting Tools Guide

19 Resources to Improve Your Photo and Video Skills

Apps for the Mobile Journalist

5 Road-Tested iPhone Apps for Journalists

Mobile Reporting Field Guide

It is hard to remember when an iPad and an iPhone weren’t part of my digital life. Because I teach multimedia creation and video storytelling at Cabrini College, a mobile tool with camera recording, classroom-presentation and media-consumption capabilities seems like a must-use device.

Creating Ebooks

One of my more interesting recent uses of iPad technology involved turning our Communication Department’s award-winning multimedia senior capstone project website into an ebook.

The website www.YouthVoicesRise.com is video-rich and contains infographics, photos, and text. Cabrini College seniors partnered with a class of graduate political science students at The American University in Cairo as the revolution continued in Tahrir Square in early 2012. Using social media, our students also connected with journalists and photographers covering the events. The result is powerful original reporting that tells stories of discontent caused by decades of political autocracy. Students documented the political awakening of young people who expressed their hopes for better lives in the aftermath of the upheaval. This site won the College Media Association’s 2012 Pinnacle Award for Best Multimedia Feature Site.

Converting the website into an ebook involved using Apple’s iBooks Author program and my laptop to reformat and reassemble the students’ Web media. The interface of iBooks Author parallels Apple’s other programs, such as Keynote. As the ebook creation progressed, the only way to proof the book was by looking at a preview through iBooks on the iPad.

The students’ online stories of autocracy, awakening, and aftermath conveniently converted to book chapters, and each submenu of the site became an ebook chapter section. The resulting ebook Arab Awakening: A View From The Inside is a free download from the iTunes store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/arab-awakening-view-from-inside/id576503379?mt=11. At this point, the book can be viewed on an iPad only.

Paperless Workflow

Although many of our students are “fluent” in iPhone for media consumption, I want to encourage the same fluency in media creation for both the iPhone and iPad. Modeling technology use works well with our students, so I began last year by using my iPad to take notes during student presentations in class and during meetings. Sometimes I’d use the iPad’s audio-recording functions to make annotated recordings of meetings. Then last spring, one student used his iPad to present storyboard panels of his proposed website design to a group of 13 people sitting around a table. Soon, other students began bringing iPads to class for both note taking and presenting.

Because I am a major advocate of paperless workflow, common documents in my classes are available only in the cloud (mostly in Google Docs). Last spring, a student who directs our weekly college video news program began using his iPad to direct the show rundown and script, which were stored in the cloud as Google Docs. Going paperless allowed him to easily make “live” last-minute script changes. And on-camera talent used iPads as teleprompters during video recording sessions, a move that also accommodated last-minute changes to the script.

Multimedia Acquisition

The most potentially ubiquitous iPad/iPhone leap for our students is in multimedia content acquisition. Although our video content is shot in high definition using good prosumer cameras and microphones, in many situations an iPhone or iPad works wonderfully for acquiring audio and video. I’m training our video news and multimedia crews to use iPhones for single-person interviewing. Proper positioning and framing using an iPhone with a connected microphone lead to good quality interview footage. That footage is easily integrated with graphics and other media in the post-production editing process.

Here’s an example. Our journalism students recently visited five different college campuses to interview hundreds of students about their voting preferences in the 2012 presidential election. They gathered media with four uses in mind: as text with infographics and photographs for the online and print student newspaper; as Web-linked video packages for the paper; as segments for the weekly video news program; and as parts of audio pieces for Cabrini’s radio news program.

In planning these trips, students could have taken along a print reporter using pencil and paper, a photographer with a DSLR camera, a videographer with a shoulder-mounted camera, and a radio station reporter with an audio recorder. That gaggle of media-gatherers would have placed an intimidating barrier between an interviewee and the desired quotes about voting choices. An iPhone proved to be a more efficient and effective way to acquire raw media. An iPhone with an attached microphone can gather video, take photos, and provide a source of audio (when stripped from the video for radio pieces). That way, the media acquisition team could consist of an iPhone operator and a reporter—a far less intimidating presence. One finished project, an audio slideshow, is here: http://theloquitur.com/?p=34846&doing_wp_cron=1353286805.2041990756988525390625

In this case, one of the media acquisition team members also functions as the project manager, cataloging, backing up, and distributing the pieces necessary for each medium’s packages. That job is made much easier by a clever Apple-designed use of the iPad, which I discovered while traveling overseas this summer.

Media Backup and Archive

Each evening of our summer travels, after a day of gathering photos and videos on my iPhone, I transferred the media to iPad’s built-in photo app using an Apple adaptor that enabled the two devices to couple. My iPad functioned as an external hard drive, allowing me to delete transferred media and free up space on my iPhone for the next day’s shooting.

Here’s another wonderful aspect of the iPhone/iPad photo app. Because I have an iCloud account and enabled Apple’s Photostream, the cloud sucked up and stored my media every time I entered a WiFi hotspot. When I got home, all my photos and movies were both on my iPad AND backed up in my Photostream in iCloud.

As an alternative to iCloud, perhaps the same photos and movies could be uploaded to a college’s Dropbox-type account, which makes the media available to students for download and editing. This kind of streamlined file distribution system requires judicious uploads in view of video file sizes, but it might encourage more efficient shooting if students know there is a cap on the amount of raw footage that could be stored.

I found it exciting to watch multimedia production become second nature to our students. This is really dependent on the fact that video and photo files are now as easy to send and store as text files. I’m eager to see whether the new iPad Mini pushes that along even faster.

Cathy Yungmann is an associate professor at Cabrini College.

Please see these related supporting essays:

Reporting with the iPadJournos: Educating the Next Generation of Mobile and Social Media Journalists
by Marcus Messner

When iPad Meets J101: Can Video and Basic Newswriting Co-exist in the Classroom?
by Maureen E. Boyle

Back to “iPads and Tablets in the JMC Curriculum” main page

“We were so racially divided back then.”

Pronounced by a white student in my Media Ethics class last fall, the reference was not to the 1960s/Civil Rights Era, nor to slavery before 1861, but to the mid-1990s. A discussion of Time magazine’s infamous darkening of O.J. Simpson’s mug shot shortly after his arrest in 1994 prompted her half-defense half-explanation.

The discussion started as an attempt to look at digital manipulation in news photography and whether it is an ethical practice. Numerous examples before the Simpson photo produced an interesting, thoughtful discussion, as had been the case all semester with this particular group of students. But when I pulled that photo out of my folder, the mood of the room changed.

African-American students argued that black is the archetypal symbol for evil, white for angelic; darkening Simpson’s skin in the photo thus was an attempt to make him look more evil. This was done, they argued, to appeal to white readers and to reassure them that the darker the skin, the more evil the person. White students concluded that it must have had something to do with the technical quality of the original and they did not fully understand the racist implications. One white student suggested black students were just reading too much into the whole episode.

What really shook the class up was the underlying reassurance that we are no longer divided. The student’s follow-up comment was that we’ve made all kinds of progress since the uninformed era of the 1990s (when we arrived for school on horseback and read by candlelight, apparently), and that this kind of thing would not happen today. I wasn’t sure if the black students were more upset at her justification (we didn’t know any better then) or her insinuation that all is better now.

Many students seem to want to believe American society is now color blind and we are judged by our characters. But in this instance, the African-American students weren’t buying it, arguing that racism is still around, but because it is less acceptable to be blatantly racist, the rest of the world covers it up better. In an effort to convince their white classmates that we are just as racially divided now as we ever were, these students gave several additional examples: black athletes are covered differently from white athletes; no one ever questioned a white president’s place of birth; rap music has become far less scary now that white “thugs” are also singing it.

These and other examples were, in their minds, proof that racism is still around. It just plays out differently than it did when beatings or separate water fountains were acceptable.

“What about Tiger Woods?” a white student asked. “Don’t you think the media have covered him without prejudice?”

“He’s that cute Negro golfer who married a hot white model,” a black student replied.

This led to the question of whether we’re really in better shape now than we were 15 years ago, or 50 years ago. When the room went silent and all eyes turned to me, I knew my attempt at neutrally moderating had to come to an end. I also knew my students’ lack of historical understanding only complicates what is already complicated for most of them. I have been appalled at how poorly my students—regardless of race—know their history. So without answering the question specifically, I started with “you need some historical context here” and attempted to explain a few things.

It seemed to be going fine until I was interrupted with a question about Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, at which point the hoo-ha began hitting the fan. So I told everyone to stand up. “OK, let’s talk about progress,” I said. “If you’re black, sit down.” I then added Latino and Asian. Reminding the class that we are in Texas, the Bible Belt, the Deep South, whatever else we might call it, I said, “So here’s where we were in 1951. Sixty years ago isn’t that long, but the rest of you were not welcome here then. Women, sit down.”

When the three white males in the class of 26 were the last students standing, I said, “Welcome to Midwestern State University at its founding in 1922.”

I hated to resort to this level of drama. I thought I was explaining something important in a somewhat objective, though admittedly dramatic, way, but more than that happened. The interpretations:

• I was trying to instill “white guilt”;
• I was trying to demonstrate why everyone who isn’t white is still angry;
• I effectively showed that we really did make progress as a society;
• I effectively showed that we have made only slight progress, but yes, racism is merely better hidden;
• I effectively showed why I always say we can’t study mass media in a vacuum and have to look at the larger society too;
• I had a lot of nerve as a middle-class, highly educated, straight-white-male addressing it at all, regardless of whatever it was I was trying to show.

About three weeks later, when I thought the tension had gone away, the discussion turned to controversial ads. Some students defended running Holocaust denial ads, arguing that everyone has the right to free speech, even if it is misguided. Others defended ads supporting English-only laws for the same reason. For the first time, however, everyone in the room agreed on something: it is not acceptable to run ads that make fun of September 11^th.

An African-American student wrote her weekly commentary a few days later, saying she found it “sad and disheartening” that her colleagues could agree on the September 11^th ads but not the others. Acknowledging the horror of those events, she then wrote that the same students “don’t find the need to be sensitive about racial issues when over 3,400 black Americans have been lynched. They understand that they should not allow an expression in the student newspaper taunting America for being attacked by terrorists, but they would run an ad claiming the deaths of over six million Jews during the Holocaust never occurred.”

Part of the inconsistency, she wrote, is that these students lived through September 11^th but not the other historical events. “To make true ethical decisions, we all have to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes. My father has drunk from a ‘coloreds only’ water fountain. My mother has been ridiculed for the light color of her skin. I have been brought to tears listening to a survivor of the Holocaust speak. Let my colleagues be descended from parents who were hated by people they had never met or have grandparents they were never able to meet because they were murdered for their culture, and let us see if they don’t change their minds on what they view as controversial.”

Her essay made clear to me what I already understood and wanted the students to understand: that even if we have made some progress, being “so racially divided” did not end “back then.”

I had often removed names and passed out weekly commentaries, usually with a quick “Here are some of your colleagues’ comments of late. I thought they were interesting and think you’ll find them interesting too.” After consulting with her and deleting her name, I passed out her essay to the class, but without saying anything. As the students started reading, the room fell silent. Some students looked around, some made eye contact with me, but then each one looked down again. Finally, a “wow.” I didn’t say another word about it, instead launching into my usual “Today, we’re going to cover ____” statement.

I never brought it up again, because I didn’t think I had to.

I’m always nervous about discussing race in any classroom context, as one can never know where the discussion will go, who will say something offensive, or who will be offended. On the other hand, if we don’t discuss it, can we make any progress?

What are the possibilities for using tablets on assignments? What are the limitations? Do we give up teaching students about the appropriate use of cameras if we have them shooting with tablets and smartphones? Is the expense worth it? And should we privilege iPad over other tablet choices out there?

As a way to keep the discussion going, TJMC asked three people with iPad experiments to reflect on the journey. Our contributors—Marcus Messner, who received a Knight News Challenge Bridge Grant to introduce an iPad reporting project at Virginia Commonwealth University; Maureen Boyle, who used iPads in a reporting class at Stonehill College; and Cathy Yungmann, who uses iPhones and iPads in her teaching at Cabrini College—have a lot of insight to offer. But we decided to truly make this a conversation by hosting an online discussion on the issues raised by the essays.

On Jan. 25, SPIG Member Mary Alice Basconi, of East Tennessee State University, will moderate a discussion on iPads in the Journalism and Mass Communication curriculum right on the SPIG listserv. The authors of the essays in our symposium will also be available to respond to questions directed toward them. Look for Mary Alice’s opening remarks Friday morning as she launches the thread with the subject “Tablet journalism.” If you are not subscribed to the SPIG listserv, do so soon by sending an email to spig@simpson.edu. Keep the subject line blank and turn off any automatic signature line you use in your email. Simply write “subscribe.” Our goal in 2013 is to better link TJMC to our everyday pedagogical discussions. The lively SPIG listserv might be a place to start. – Vivian B. Martin 

Please see these related supporting essays:

Reporting with the iPadJournos: Educating the Next Generation of Mobile and Social Media Journalists
by Marcus Messner

When iPad Meets J101: Can Video and Basic Newswriting Co-exist in the Classroom?
by Maureen E. Boyle

Using iPads and iPhones in Communication Classes
by Cathy Yungmann

It was the second week of class and I was getting worried.

Students in JRN 101, one of the newswriting and reporting classes, would be using iPads to shoot video, tweet, and write short pieces in the field as part of a pilot program funded through the Stonehill College technology department. It would be a great experiment in mobile journalism, in which students would use this single, simple device to learn the basic skills local editors were calling for.

Or would it?

As we spent one class signing out the iPads and another on how to use iMovie, I began to wonder if I was sacrificing valuable time needed to hone the students’ still very green writing and reporting skills for technology. Would shooting video become a distraction in a course where students were still getting comfortable interviewing strangers, asking those hard questions, and writing concisely? Which writing assignments would have to be discarded? Was this too great a shift from the course core: writing and reporting?

Students in JRN101, labeled the Advanced Newswriting and Reporting course, had taken just one newswriting course, JRN 100, Basic Newswriting and Reporting. There is no requirement in our small program, where journalism is a minor, that students take the “advanced” course immediately after JRN 100. That meant some of the 14 student writers sitting in this pilot class could be seniors who took JRN100 freshman year and forgot many newswriting basics, including AP style. They would be required, by the end of the semester, to write breaking news stories as well as complex articles to be published in local news outlets. Now, I was adding multiple video and mobile assignments to the mix.

Shooting video for the classes wasn’t new. In earlier JRN 100 and JRN 101 classes, students were required to shoot a short video to go with stories posted on a class blog hosted through Blogger. Those videos were shot with cell phones, laptop cameras or personal point-and-shoot cameras, then uploaded to a class YouTube account. While those videos helped students see the importance of linking video with stories, they weren’t very good. Most of the students didn’t know how to edit video, were shooting with a wide range of cameras, hadn’t taken our television production course, and/or were intimidated by editing software. As a result, the video quality ranged from adequate to horrible.

With the help of the Technology Department’s Faculty Initiatives Technology (FIT) program, we were hoping the iPad2 would help change that and bring consistent multi-media and mobile reporting elements to the course. Students signed out the iPads for the semester and used the tablets both in and out of class. They were required to download iMovie ($4.99), use Twitter and were encouraged to use any note-taking apps. iMovie was picked because it was simple and required the least amount of training. Students did not use any add-ons to the iPad for the course: no keyboards, tripods or external microphones (this was by design: I wanted to see what could be done with the single device). I also knew from the start many of the students didn’t have a clue what to do. In a short survey at the start of the semester, only one student had regularly shot video, and on a scale of 1 to 10, eight of the 12 students who responded listed five or lower on the comfort level of editing video (two students didn’t respond to the survey). In contrast, the students appeared to have more experience with social media, a plus since they were required to tweet six times a week. Nine of the students already had a Twitter account (Boyle, 2012).

The iPad dovetailed nicely with what was going on with media in our area: two community newspapers were already starting to use iPads for newsgathering and would be expecting interns to do the same. At The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Mass., reporters can use iPads to write and post stories directly from the field to the website through the paper’s Web-based management system, said Mike Kirby, Sun Chronicle editor, and Jessica M. Kosowski, assistant managing editor. At The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass., sports and features editor Jonathan Comey used the iPad for Superbowl 2012 coverage and later when he walked about 120 miles during a fundraising stunt for the paper’s holiday charity fund, blogging and shooting video and photos with an iPad and IPod Touch.

So how did our experiment work out? Pretty good. The bulk of the video work was done as homework while writing remained the main focus in class. An exception was for video “sudden death” assignments—where students were given a topic, went out and interviewed four to six people, then returned to class to edit and upload the project all within the 75-minute class period. These were in addition to similar written “sudden death” assignments given at other times.

A couple of older writing assignments were tossed to make way for iPad-related assignments, including using the FaceTime feature in class for mock “stand-ups” and in-class interviews so students could get a quick view of how someone will appear for live field shots. But additional writing projects were added—with video elements. These included sports Q & A profiles used by local weekly papers and coverage of an inner-city parent workshop. The student midterm and final stories, posted to separate Blogger and WordPress blogs, were as good, if not better, than those done in previous years.

Were the student iMovie videos of broadcast quality? Probably not. Were they comparable to videos on some newspaper and radio station websites? Definitely. Did the students believe the iPads helped them in the course? The overwhelming majority said yes. In an end-of-the-year survey, 12 of the 13 students who responded (one did not respond) said the iPad was effective for the course (Harrison, 2012).

Students juggled complex writing assignments and video editing with relative—and surprising—ease. It wasn’t an “either-or” for the students, but a matter of learning how to report news in different ways. It turned out all the worrying at the start of the semester was for nothing.

Maureen E. Boyle is director of the journalism program at Stonehill College.

Please see these related supporting essays:

Reporting with the iPadJournos: Educating the Next Generation of Mobile and Social Media Journalists
by Marcus Messner

Using iPads and iPhones in Communication Classes
by Cathy Yungmann

Back to “iPads and Tablets in the JMC Curriculum” main page

Works Cited

Boyle, M. (2012). iPad in the classroom class: Initial questionnaire. Stonehill College.

Harrison, J. (2012). Using the iPad survey Item Analysis Report. Stonehill College. Technology Department.

Stonehill Students. (2012). Advanced Newswriting & iPad. Retrieved from Advanced Newswriting: http://stonehilladvancednewsipad.blogspot.com

Stonehill Students. (2012). Just a Few Minutes with Local Sports Stars. Retrieved from Advanced Newswriting: http://localsportstars.blogspot.com

Stonehill Students. (2012). Safe Homes and Streets. Retrieved from Safe Homes and Streets: http://safecommunityandstreets.blogspot.com

Stonehill Students. (2012). Safe Homes, Safe Streets. Retrieved from Safe Community Safe Home: http://safecommunitysafehome.wordpress.com

Journalism students Nicolas Nightingale and Zachary Holden were conducting interviews for a story about daylight crimes at Virginia Commonwealth University when another news story unfolded before them on the urban campus in Richmond. A homeless man who allegedly tried to steal a purse from a university lab was chased and captured by several VCU students, who then formed a circle around him until police arrived. Nightingale pulled out his iPad, started shooting the man’s arrest by campus police and immediately tweeted about the breaking news story via the iPad’s Twitter app. As it turned out, the man was suspected of several campus larcenies and had an outstanding warrant. A TV producer noticed the students’ tweets and a few hours later the iPad arrest video made the evening news on the local CBS affiliate.

Nightingale and Holden were students in my Social Media Journalism class, which pioneered the use of iPads in a VCU course during the spring semester 2012. Combining mobile technology and social media platforms, students reported news via Facebook and Twitter apps, posted videos on YouTube, and curated social media conversations via Storify. We abandoned our assigned PC lab and moved into the School of Mass Communications’ computer-free conference room, turning our class into the “iPadJournos” project. All we needed to run this class were the university’s wireless network and a projector … and an iPad for every student.

Replacing computers with iPads

The idea of adopting iPads for an entire reporting class developed a year earlier when I listened to my colleague Jake Batsell of Southern Methodist University at the International Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas-Austin. Batsell had used iPads for a news platform study with his students. That led me to think about the iPad for more than just news consumption: It could be a multimedia news-reporting tool.

I discussed this with the staff of VCU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, a hub for technology innovations in the classroom. Then, in the fall of 2011 I joined an interdisciplinary learning community for faculty interested in mobile learning. My goal was to educate myself about applications for iPads. Soon after, I applied for an internal CTE grant to equip my upcoming Social Media Journalism special topics class with several iPads that students could share.

Fortunately, at the same time, the CTE’s co-director Jeff Nugent was looking to fund an iPad pilot project at VCU. He doubled my initial request and funded 16 iPads for my class project, an investment of approximately $10,000. Quickly, we decided to completely replace computers and digital cameras with the iPads as the only classroom technology for this pilot project. For the setup and maintenance of the iPads, we brought on board the Technology Services Support team of VCU’s College of Humanities and Sciences.

Finding a media partner

About a month before the project started, I began discussing a partnership with the CBS affiliate in Richmond, WTVR-CBS 6. The station is very active on social media and embraces Facebook and Twitter as day-to-day reporting tools. All TV reporters at the station had just been equipped with iPhones to bolster the social media reporting efforts. The station’s director for interactive media, Scott Wise, joined the project as a mobile and social media expert and agreed to publish the students’ mobile multimedia reporting packages throughout the semester. Other CBS 6 reporters and producers visited our class as guest speakers on specific mobile and social media topics. Social media experts from other media organizations, such as USA Today, Tumblr, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, also spoke to the class.

Setting up the class

The Social Media Journalism class started in mid-January 2012 with 14 students who were all equipped with an iPad for the duration of the semester. I gave some basic instructions on the functionality of the iPad and on downloading essential news and social media apps. I limited my own lecturing on the iPad and put that responsibility on the students, who had to present social media tools and apps in almost every class session. This led students to explore the “cool tools” of mobile and social media and created a collaborative atmosphere in the class. The students just walked up to the front of the class with their iPads, connected to the projector, and presented what they found on their explorations of the Apple App Store.

We used the electronic version of Mark Briggs’ “Journalism Next” (CQ Press) as the textbook for multimedia production, and downloaded it to the iPads via the Kindle app from Amazon. I shared the other assigned readings on the social bookmarking platform Diigo.

The class was run completely paperless and outside of VCU’s Blackboard system. Blackboard was used only for posting grades. I created a WordPress site for all class material and assignments. Documents were shared via Google Drive and discussions outside of class took place in a closed Facebook group that also brought students and social media experts together. At the same time, students used the hashtag #ipadjournos on Twitter for open discussions among themselves and with the social media community in Richmond. A connection with the Social Media Club of Richmond was set up early in the semester through a class visit to one of the club’s monthly events. We used an “iPadJournos” Facebook page and a Twitter account to present our work publicly.

Working in the iPad newsroom

As part of their assignments, students were paired and had to pitch three multimedia story ideas to me during the semester. After I signed off on the ideas, students proposed their ideas directly to CBS 6. While Scott Wise came to the classroom during the first round of story pitches, we moved the process completely online afterwards, which turned out to be very efficient. Students pitched their ideas to me and we discussed them in our class. Once we agreed on the focus, students wrote a brief summary of their idea in our Facebook group and received feedback from Wise in a very short time, usually within minutes. This ensured that students produced stories that satisfied the demands of the CBS 6 newsroom. And with one or two exceptions, all multimedia stories were published on the TV station’s website.

Students used their iPads to do all their reporting while in the field. They shot video interviews with the subjects of their stories. They shot photos to illustrate their news packages and edited them with the Photoshop app. And they posted about their reporting on Facebook and Twitter as their stories came together. Since we did not have external keyboards for the iPads, however, many students used their own laptops to write stories, which were uploaded to Google Drive for quick collaborative editing between the students and me. Video production, nevertheless, was mostly done with the iMovie app, although some students preferred to take the video into our editing bays equipped with Adobe Premiere Pro. To share large files from the iPad, we used VCU’s file sharing site or uploaded videos to YouTube.

We sent multimedia packages to CBS 6 only after the student work went through several rounds of editing and revising. It took weeks at the beginning of the semester to establish these reporting and editing routines. But by the second and third rounds of multimedia production, we were turning around stories in a quick, professional manner. The fact that students knew their efforts would lead to publication helped to keep them engaged. Stories were filed in the evenings and on weekends, with students on standby during the editing process and CBS 6 staff expecting stories on deadline. Some students even used the opportunity to produce an additional story to strengthen their personal portfolios. In total, 22 multimedia packages from the class were published on the CBS 6 website.

Developing social media portfolios

Besides producing content for CBS 6, students also worked on their own social media portfolios to put them in a competitive position for internships and jobs at the end of the semester. Every student in the class had to create a personal blog and a Facebook page, and each maintained a Twitter account. They were expected to use their blog as the base for their social media activities and as the focal point of their portfolio. This included a professional photo, a personal description, and a showcase of their journalistic work. They had to post daily on Twitter and several times a week on their Facebook pages, and had to increase their following by specific target numbers. While the quantification of specific expectations on social media creates a somewhat artificial engagement at the beginning of the semester, it forces students to regularly engage on the platforms and helps to make social media part of their work routine as the semester progresses.

The students also had to develop a professional presence on the business network LinkedIn and demonstrate news curation skills on Storify. In addition, they had to choose one additional social media platform and engage on it regularly during the latter part of the semester. Their choices ranged from Google+ and Tumblr to Pinterest and Foursquare. This allowed them to venture out on their own and decide which platforms worked best for them.

Developing a social media portfolio and being branded as an “iPadJourno” put many of the students in a very competitive position for internships at local and national media. Students worked for The Washington Post and CNN during the presidential election, reported for Richmond Magazine, and interned with the technology shop Create Digital, which develops social media strategies for national clients. And some students were, of course, directly hired for internships at CBS 6. The conversation between the students and me has continued beyond the semester, and the Facebook group is still used to share ideas, resources, and job opportunities.

Planning the future of the iPadJournos project

Every technology experiment comes with challenges, and so did the “iPadJournos” project. The iPad is a fantastic tool that has changed the way we consume and produce news. But it also has limitations. The photo camera on our second-generation iPads had some problems when used inside and in settings with difficult lighting. The iPad’s built-in microphone also created some challenges. Students had to practice so they could hold the iPad steady when shooting videos. Some problems were averted when we added the students’ smart phones to their tool kits, because photo quality on the iPhone and Android was significantly better. The next generation of the iPad has already led to improvements as well. In future semesters we will add an adapter and lavalier microphone to improve sound quality. A keyboard for every iPad would be a great improvement for the future, but this is, of course, a budgetary issue. The next great challenge will be to replace this first batch of iPads with a newer generation.

Despite those challenges, the “iPadJournos” showed our students and project partners the great potential of mobile and social media reporting. It also helped to implement iPad technology into additional classes. I used the iPads in my Social Media Networking class in the summer semester 2012 and in my special topics class, Social Media and the Presidential Race, in the fall semester 2012. After our pilot project, VCU also launched two iPad projects in other departments and is planning to expand its mobile learning initiatives.

The “iPadJournos” class will be offered as a special topics course in spring 2013. This time it will be supported by a Knight News Challenge Bridge Grant that will improve its collaborative aspects, especially for video sharing. Faculty members are discussing ways to turn this project into a permanent journalism course. Revised accreditation standards of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications allow students to take more mass communications credits, and can greatly help to introduce innovative reporting projects into the curriculum. By changing credit requirements, we won’t have a copy editing or media law class competing for space in the curriculum with new offerings. A mobile and social media skills class such as the “iPadJournos” project can be added without sacrificing parts of the traditional journalistic skill set.

Marcus Messner is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Please see the website of the “iPadJournos” project for additional information and class materials.

Please see these related supporting essays:

When iPad Meets J101: Can Video and Basic Newswriting Co-exist in the Classroom?
by Maureen E. Boyle

Using iPads and iPhones in Communication Classes
by Cathy Yungmann

Back to “iPads and Tablets in the JMC Curriculum” main page

The importance of having a good social network

When snowflakes began flying on Oct. 29, 2011, in Connecticut, newsrooms heeded the warnings of the meteorologists: heavy, wet snow on still-leafy trees meant disaster. Nearly a foot of snow fell in some areas, and Connecticut faced one of the biggest disasters in history.

When damaged trees fell on utility wires, the state experienced its biggest blackout ever. More than 800,000 people were without power, and some were stuck in their houses for up to two weeks because of downed trees, wires and power poles.

I was working as a reporter/meteorologist for the NBC affiliate in Hartford, and this was going to be one of our biggest stories. Because of the massive blackout, few people could see our reports, however. Before this storm, using social media had been just another aspect of the job. After the storm, I was thankful, as were my managers, that I had built up a social network via Facebook and Twitter. This “electronic Rolodex” helped me cover the stories following the storm, and my experience gave me some lessons to take back into the classroom.

Search the Web for the words “crowdsource” and “lazy” and scores of articles appear that are written by journalists, and, in my case, by some colleagues. Some of the articles are informative and positive, while others sound the alarm that crowdsourcing is a lazy person’s journalism. To some extent, it’s true that crowdsourcing can be used improperly, but the benefits of this contact with the news consumer far outweigh the negatives.

Based on some recent trends in a newsroom where I work as a reporter and anchor, I have started to incorporate more information about crowdsourcing in my Introduction to Journalism courses. As an on-air weather anchor, I regularly interact with viewers, answering questions about weather. But the lessons learned during the disaster of October 2011 were deeper ones about the power of social media. Since then, I have incorporated crowdsourcing into at least one assignment during the semester. I’ve learned that when the mainstream forms of disseminating news break down, journalists must be ready to find innovative ways to reach audiences.

Before coverage of the October stories could begin, my photographer and I had to spend more than one hour finding a gas station where we could fill up our vehicle. Most were closed because they lacked power. At every turn, I found it hard to meet my deadlines: Public information officers weren’t answering their cell phones, offices were closed, and even the traditional reporting method of driving around to find our story was a chore because many roads were blocked. I desperately needed to find localized storm damage in town but needed alternative methods to get the information. I decided to log into Facebook to see what people were talking about. Luckily, I had built up a social network of more than 8,000-plus users (Twitter/Facebook combined) as a result of my anchoring and reporting duties. I post daily and respond to the posts of others to keep the interaction going. At first I feared that social networks would be suffering from the power outage, as well, but I discovered quite the opposite. I found some of my best stories from postings. I also was able to track down power crews and local officials and even get information from the governor via Twitter. Although I wasn’t crowdsourcing every story, I found myself doing something that I told my students many newsroom traditionalists frown on.

Crowdsourcing is alive and well, even outside of catastrophes. This screen shot of my Twitter feed (from Sept. 2, 2012) shows a local newspaper in Southwest Florida seeking interview subjects for an upcoming story it’s doing.

This also was the first time I was able to reach out to mayors and other town officials (mostly via Twitter). Whether they responded directly to me or in a public tweet, I was able to get a quote or an answer for my reports on a timely basis. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton interacted with the media and his constituents via Twitter. He would publicly set up meetings with camera crews and interact with the media to both obtain and disseminate information.

He said in a recent email that during the storm, Twitter was “a critical tool; power outages, trees down, roads closed, all were reported through social media. Since many people now carry a smart phone, in many cases, this was the only form of communication from the city that people were getting during a difficult time.”

He added, “Having a large contingent of press follow has allowed me to communicate directly with reporters, anchors, and producers about important information that our residents need to know.”

Anchor and reporter Shirley Chan at NBC Connecticut said, “While I have never been a big fan of the use of Twitter and Facebook, it became apparent that during a crisis, it makes a big difference if you’re connected to a few thousand people. You can grab better stories and hone into areas where journalists might not be able to go. In this case, storm damage prevented us from getting into some areas.”

Forget your copy for air; update Facebook first

Photos of residents’ plea for help from local power companies were in high demand from our newsroom for our Facebook pages.

Because a majority of our viewing area couldn’t watch our coverage, our focus shifted from getting our stories on the air to getting them uploaded online first. Our Web managers and newsroom managers wanted extra hustle in the field to get pictures any way possible uploaded to both the station’s Facebook pages and our personal pages. Although we didn’t neglect our television deadlines for the viewers who could still watch our product over the air, this is the first time in my 12-year career when getting pictures up on Twitter and Facebook pages was more of a priority than getting the copy posted. 

A lesson for our students

The dynamics of this catastrophe changed the way we operated as a news organization and I knew I had to make this part of a classroom activity. Once classes resumed after the storm, I began to revamp the syllabus for us to follow what was going on in the media at the time. I also changed one of the stipulations for one of the students’ projects. I made them gather sources only from Facebook pages and/or Twitter. For each source for one of their field print reports, they were required to either crowdsource or use Twitter or Facebook to secure the interview. This challenged some of the students who had not fully understood the nature of the changing business. It was clear that some students had not heeded my warning of the need to build a solid social network before entering the workforce. Some students found they weren’t contacting people the proper way on Twitter. Others had to work quickly to follow certain news organizations or “like” those news organizations’ Facebook pages in order to have access to a large part of the public (many pages don’t allow public posting).

The students’ reactions were mixed about the project. They now had to use social networking for something other than just socializing. Some adapted quickly. Others found that they had a learning curve to overcome, especially when it came to Twitter. The students noted they were able to reach some higher profile people they otherwise might not be able to reach through telephone or email.

Incorporating social media into simple reporting was easy. Nevertheless, the students still had a lesson to learn about the changes technology is having on the business. In this project, many students also found that social media aren’t always the best avenue for sources. Students learned about how reporting is done today, whether their projects turned out stellar or problematic. Of course, the concerns about laziness and crowdsourcing remain.

I made sure to show students that I might have used a form of crowdsourcing, but the crowdsourcing led me to the scene. I didn’t use crowdsourcing simply for a quote. I showed the students that in broadcast, a reporter can gather dramatic video and let the viewer hear directly from a source. I made the contrast that, in print, if a reporter relies simply on online quotes or information, that reporter is missing out on seeing the scene and getting the true emotion.

My colleague, reporter Shirley Chan, summed up the ongoing debate about the use of a social network versus good old-fashioned reporting: “You can connect with people online, but the quality of your stories is still going to rely on how well you connect with that person by using a camera or your notepad. Human interaction and follow-through is the only way to truly gather a story. Social networks can be the start of the interaction but can’t be the only interaction.”

Darren Sweeney is an assistant professor in the journalism department at Central Connecticut State University.