What to learn next

http://hackshackers.com/resources/hackshackers-survival-glossary/
The hackshackers.com glossary is a great place for May/June journalism or Web production  grads to browse for educational inspiration.

I’ll add more links here as summer goes on.

AEJMC conferencing via blog and tweet

While some ear troubles made me sensitive about flying to St. Louis, I still “made it to…” the AEJMC journalism educators’ conference there this past week by hanging out with my laptop and phone tuned to a Twitter “hashtag” of #aejmc11.

And, since I’m Web editor for the AEJMC Newspaper Division, I logged in and posted a list of the tweets that looked to be of the most interest to members of that division, updating the links a couple of times a day.

The division officially changes its name to “Newspaper & Online News Division” in a couple of months, so my page-of-tweets from the AEJMC conference should be timely. If nothing else, it’s a place where division members can find each other’s Twitter handles.

In the spirit of “walking the walk” of “Online,” I also did a little e-mail campaigning to invite other division officers to use the division blog to post news from the conference, and Rutgers University’s Susan Keith, teaching standards co-chair and past head of the division, came through in a big way. She posted several items after the division’s business meeting, including annual award-winners.

As for the tweets list, although it was a “blog post,” I returned to it several times during the weekend and finally had posted about 40 Twitter handles and links provided by conference goers, including conference papers, reports and slide presentations.

It was so much like being in St. Louis that I’m tempted to go out and buy a $5 Budweiser! (You have to read the list of tweets to get the reference.)

No offense meant to baristas

I’ve added some content, links and a made-up indented quote to my WordPress Notes page, after noticing one-too-many student sites made with WordPress that show signs of “this was just done for class and I left it hanging around.”

Often, they literally show a sign: The “about page” text or header “tagline” that WordPress includes on every startup installation. It’s like having a column full of “lorem ipsum” in your newspaper.

Other times, the problem is just that the student or professor set up a blog “for class” and hasn’t used it in months, or years. OK, I have a bunch of “demo” pages of my own, but I call them that and link them back to a home page that eventually leads to someplace where there’s up-to-date content.

I’m especially concerned about students looking for work in a blog-savvy, social-networked, online world. Demos, “for class” and “tried this” sites better not be all the prospective employers can find.

So… after going back into the page a dozen times adding a link here and fixing a typo there, I added this. (Quoting yourself can be tricky when you’re as wishy-washy as I am.)

“Unless something else about your site makes it clear the line is postmodern/ironic or expressing extreme gratitude to Matt and the other folks at WordPress, having ‘just another WordPress weblog‘ on your page might as well be saying ‘just another unemployed barista.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” — Dr. Bob

New tools and new rules

The last week of the semester is a great time for an inspirational speech. Rather than give one myself, I’ve found one in text and video for my “basic newswriting” students, whose semester experiences have ranged from AP Stylebook drills to reading about tornado damage in their own backyard.

During our Communication Week, they heard local reporters talk about their lives — from Beth Macy covering a cholera epidemic in Haiti and Ralph Berrier interviewing pioneers of bluegrass music, to  recent grad Justin Ward launching his career into regional TV news.

Maybe they don’t need another inspirational speech. But we’ve heard enough doom-and-gloom about the newspaper business (and I do teach a newspaper style of writing). Perhaps this will help.

Here… Listen to Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation, speaking at the College of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Nebraska, whose new dean came from Knight, which is using a newspaper-generated bankroll to fund innovative journalism projects. His real message starts about a dozen paragraphs into the speech…

All you need to do is plug into the stream and you see journalism and mass communication developments coming faster and more forcefully than ever. This is the dawn of a new age in communication, the digital age, and it is even richer with invention than the dawn of the industrial age.

New tools are being invented at a mind-boggling pace. Instead of the telegraph, the telephone and the light bulb, we’re talking about microchips, laptops, smart phones, tablets. We’re talking about companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter: from digital zero to number one in the market, nearly overnight.

As the legendary journalist Hodding Carter III once said, “This is the most exciting time ever to be a journalist – if you are not in search of the past.” The same I would say applies to being any kind of communicator – advertising, public relations, you name it.

That’s what’s exciting. The students of today actually are going to create the journalism and mass communication of tomorrow….

His “New tools create new rules” discussion, alluded to in my headline, comes later. Students should read the whole speech to find out just what he means.

Here’s the full text
and an MP4 video

Launching J-students into Twitter

What feeds should journalism students follow when they first begin to use Twitter?

Here’s my top 10 list, and I’ll be watching Twitter (and the comments on this page) for other suggestions…

1. A local professional news reporter
2. A local news organization’s main feed
3. A national news organization’s feed for a beat they follow
4. A feed about a subject they are passionate about
5. Their student newspaper
6. Another campus media organization
7. A different university’s student newspaper
8. A Society of Professional Journalists feed
9. A journalism review or think-tank like CJR, AJR, Poynter, J-Lab, Nieman
10. Their university’s PR office
11. The professor who suggested Twitter might not be just a colossal waste of time https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep

OK, so I’m not great at “top 10″ lists.

Once a journalism student has a Twitter account and has followed a few people to see how it works, what next?

Wrapping up Women’s History Month in Radio Dramas

Over at JHeroes.com, I’ve had a fun month tipping my hat to Women’s History Month, exploring the audio biographies of famous women editors, publishers and reporters — partly because “women reporters” is a major theme my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” students are exploring this semester.

This week is registration for fall semester (already!) and I’ve been trying to spread the word about that course,  a “special topics” offering that isn’t in the catalog. In the process of doing the JHeroes blog and preparing that course, I’ve discovered quite a few films and novels I didn’t know about.

For example, I wouldn’t have known that the head of the Associate Press wrote a novel, “Anna Zenger, Mother of Freedom,” fictionalizing America’s first landmark libel trial. Luckily, the DuPont radio series, Cavalcade of America, turned Kent Cooper’s novel into a radio play — one they liked so much they did it twice, with different casts.

And I wouldn’t have known that America’s first woman foreign correspondent, Margaret Fuller, was also the the editor of The Dial — hobnobbing with Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, and maybe inspiring some of Hawthorne’s women characters.

I also didn’t know how many times daredevil reporter Nellie Bly had found episodes from her life dramatized — or entirely fictionalized, including  one series of novels that has her hanging out with Sherlock Holmes.

Take a look… After visiting radio appearances by 18th and 19th century women, I’m finishing up the month with some who are more contemporary.

Telecommuting from the Blueridge to the Rockies

I couldn’t go to the AEJMC convention in Denver this week, but I feel like I’m halfway there, following Twitter feeds and other online activities…

I’ve been updating the Newspaper Division’s blog with whatever I find online that might interest its members…

• For the stay-at-homes and back-at-homes
  (Twitter feeds and an archived “live” video about some online hyperlocal innovation involving newspaper companies)
• Virtual Denver: Twin presentation of twin surveys
  (Narrated Powerpoint slides online about the educational needs of today’s journalists, plus the related conference paper, online at a document-sharing site)

I’m still waiting to hear whether the “Newspaper Division” is still that, or has added “and Online Journalism” to its name, or named a committee to write a clarifying “statement of purpose” for one of AEJMC’s oldest and largest groups… and, come to think of it, to find out whether I’ve been re-elected its Web editor despite my perennial inability to get to the conventions.

Meanwhile, I keep thinking of an Eddie from Ohio song, with this lyric…

you think you’ll find some mountains
in western colorado
fifty weeks of snowy peaks
is where you’re gonna be
but babe the rocky mountains are gradually eroding
the hills of coors are nothing more
than blue ridge wannabes…

Kudos to Bristol Herald Courier

How did a local paper in Bristol, Va., win that Pulitzer Prize for Public Service?

Here’s the prize-winning series itself: Underfoot, Out of Reach

Here’s a how-I-did-it article (technical in parts, but even non-geek students should read it to get an idea of just how much work was involved): Printable four-pages, large type

Here’s the organization that provided some of the investigative reporter‘s training in Computer Assisted Reporting.

RSS widgets for republishing

For my intro to Web Production students to ponder over spring break, here’s a demo site that uses RSS plug-ins, content management software widgets, and related aggregation services to consolidate blog postings, social bookmarks and even a Twitter account…

bobwebs & cobwebs

I do similar things on my stepno.com home page and this WordPress blog. (The former uses a free service called RSS include.)

At the end of the semester, I’ll have students use Drupal, WordPress and the hosting services of their choice to make “mirror” (sometimes funhouse mirror) images of the sites they develop for class, so that they aren’t just learning how to use our university server.

Update on Multimedia Journalism Bootcamp in Nashville

Nice new promotional video… I attended last summer’s version of this workshop; it was terrific and worth every penny. (And, no, my university didn’t contribute any of those 150,000 pennies. Hard times, and all that.)

more about “Multimedia Journalism Bootcamp in Nashville“, posted with vodpod

Val Hoeppner’s Resources blog and Multimedia Toolbox document the equipment we used in the week-long, morning-to-night program. She includes tips and tutorials on the cameras, recorders and software.

Result: Here are two stories I co-produced, each with a different very talented classmate. Each was a day’s work, shooting and editing, after a day on how to use the equipment and software:

• Last Splash of the Summer (photos, audio, Storyslides and Audacity software)
• Rehab for racing hounds (photos, digital video, FinalCut software)

I’ve been trying to get the VodPod video player to embed those two stories, but it has problems, possibly because the page shows more than one video. However, it did capture this Animoto music video of our class at work in the lab last August. (About 1/4 of the way through, there are a few frames of evidence that my face did not “break the camera.”)

more about “FreedomForum Multimedia Bootcamp 09“, posted with vodpod

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Note: Although I was personally counting my pennies (including travel to and from Nashville), the workshop was priced reasonably at $850 for a week of instruction and some meals, plus $71 per night to solo in an “extended stay” hotel room (with kitchen), which was more than I needed. On my next trip to Nashville, I found a lower rate at a Best  Western  even closer to the Seigenthaler Center.

The Bootcamp’s 12-hour-a-day schedule didn’t leave me time or energy to take in Nashville’s nightlife. so I stayed an extra day to go window shopping at George Gruhn’s.