journalism

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Teaching “Journalism as Process”: A Proposed Paradigm for J-School Curricula in the Digital Age

January 22, 2013 in Research, Winter 2013

Sue Robinson

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.

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

January 22, 2013 in Symposium—Supporting Essays, Winter 2013

Marcus Messner

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.

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Whom Kneads Kopy Ediotrs?

June 13, 2012 in Industry, Spring/Summer 2012

Margo Wilson

If a reporter accused military personnel at the decommissioned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station near Irvine, CA, of recklessly (or was it wrecklessly?) contaminating the soil, Mark Ludwig, my copy editing colleague at the Los Angeles Times, knew how to handle the situation. If a photographer spelled a local spelling bee champ’s last name “Abecedarian,” although the reporter spelled it “Abcedarian,” Mark made calls, sent e-mails, and checked the phone book. He would excise the offending opinion word or correct the aberrant spelling. And those were some of the least significant things he did before shepherding the story from the rim to the slot. Then, he would grin at the rest of us rim rats and nod.

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On Editing and Editing Education

June 13, 2012 in Industry—Supporting Essays, Spring/Summer 2012

Editing is everything. At least, that’s what I tell my students because it’s the truth. Don’t we all tell our students the truth, at least the truth of the elephant part that we are touching? I tell my students that there is joy, power, and totally awesome responsibility in editing, in the fact that there [...]

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Team-Teaching Online Journalism by Focusing on the Great Migration

June 13, 2012 in Scholarship of Application, Spring/Summer 2012

John Beatty and Huntly Collins

In the Spring of 2011, we teamed up to teach an Online Journalism course that engaged 19 students in conducting in-depth interviews with six African American residents of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. The residents were among the six million African Americans who had migrated from the South to the North as part of the Great Migration in the first half of the 20^th century. The 19 students in the class were divided into six teams and each team spent approximately 10 hours interviewing one of the six Germantown residents. The interviews, which required students to cross race, class, and age boundaries, were recorded on video and audio. Each student in the class then produced his or her own blog about Germantown and the Great Migration based on the story of the person with whom the student’s team had been matched. In the fall of 2011, one student in the class worked in an independent study under us and pulled together the video from each of the six teams into a 30-minute documentary called Journeys of Promise: Germantown and the Great Migration. Here, we present the result of our students’ work and discuss the lessons learned.

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What’s a Phone Book? Teaching Information Literacy Skills to Digital Native Journalism Students

June 13, 2012 in Scholarship of Application, Spring/Summer 2012

Maureen E. Boyle and Patricia O. McPherson

An innovative program developed by Stonehill College’s MacPháidín Library and its Center for Teaching and Learning led to the creation of a semester-long partnership between a communication professor and a reference and instruction librarian. The goal of that partnership was to provide information literacy instruction to narrative writing students to help them meet the Association of College and Research Libraries Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, hone their online research and evaluation skills, and craft richer narrative pieces. Anecdotal evidence and student responses indicate the information literacy instruction delivered and the library aids created for this class not only helped students track primary resources and historical material for their assignments but also introduced them to search strategies and online resources with which they weren’t previously familiar.

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Encouraging Students to be Readers: Survey Results of Successful Practices

June 13, 2012 in Research, Spring/Summer 2012

Mitzi Lewis and John Hanc

Abstract: Motivating students to complete reading assignments is a problem documented across disciplines. Journalism and mass communication are no exception. This study used a Web-based survey to ask International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) members and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Small Programs Interest Group (SPIG) listserv subscribers about (a) observations of student reading practices with longer forms of journalism and (b) successful practices for motivating students to read. Educators’ learning goals for student reading and the strategies used to achieve these goals are discussed.

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SYMPOSIUM INTRO: Reforming the Journalism Curriculum: Explosives or Scalpel?

November 13, 2011 in Fall 2011, Symposium

Vivian B. Martin

Journalism education has been a target of criticism for most of its existence. Working journalists insist it’s too abstract and that the best education is on-the-job training. Academics fear it is too practical and smacks of trade school. But in recent years, we journalism professors may have been the ones scrutinizing journalism the most, as new technology, shrinking opportunities in traditional news media, and the redefinition of the profession have forced changes in what and how we teach. Calls to blow up the journalism curriculum are fast becoming a cliché; yet they convey the urgency many journalism educators feel as they face students who must gain new skills, often skills their middle-aged professors don’t possess, while also learning the fundamentals. The list of requirements is longer, but the semester isn’t. Further, the labyrinth that programs must navigate to make changes to the curriculum or find the resources for new technology can kill off the most modest plans before they are conceived [...]

Please also see these related supporting essays:
Reforming J101: Fire in the Hole: Curricular Explosion, Fearless Journalism Pedagogy, and Media Convergence by Michael A. Longinow
Reforming J101: Establishing an Online Presence by Carrie M. Buchanan
Reforming J101: What I Learned From the Rush to Publish by Mary Alice Basconi

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I Shot a Prescriptivist in my Pajamas Last Night: A Grammatical Disarmament Proposal for Editors and Educators

November 13, 2011 in Fall 2011, Research

Fred Vultee

Abstract: In an economic atmosphere in which “do more with less” means “fewer and fewer people are available, but they’ll still do more with less,” would a new look at how journalism schools teach grammar help editors—and instructors—do their jobs more effectively? This paper seeks to find out whether the profession and the academy can agree on what sorts of language “basics” new editors need to know—and, by extension, which old ones we can discard.

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Reforming J101: What I Learned From the Rush to Publish

November 13, 2011 in Fall 2011, Symposium—Supporting Essays

Mary Alice Basconi

My first steps—and missteps—as a reporter were on my mind the first year I taught a beginning reporting class. I wrote checklists aimed at closing the fact-finding gaps. I talked about the painful day my city editor made me spell out, in detail, how I produced an inaccurate news story. I recalled how my newspaper appeased an angry source by running a correction on Page 1. I preached the fundamentals: Choose a worthy topic, let sources know you’re a reporter, be accurate, write with clarity, follow Associated Press style, revise and proofread.

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