Transforming The Journalism Curriculum Presentation by Mindy McAdams University of Florida

What we do well now Teach students how to report and understand the professional norms of the field Train them in a specialization (e.g., such as photojournalism, print editing, on- camera reporting for TV)

What we don’t do well now Teach them how to survive and thrive in the field that journalism is becoming

Our challenges Our current department structures are not designed to support cross-platform journalism Our faculty are often not well-versed in multiple platforms, new technologies Our students might resist, saying “I only want to …” Our schools lack equipment and facilities, e.g., software, updated labs

Is it an option to wait and do nothing?

Possible solutions Hire one versatile faculty member and set up “convergence” courses Doesn’t this encourage the same silo mentalities among both students and educators? Does this prepare the students to “think different”?

If we want to train students to think different, then we’ve got to do it ourselves.

These reasons don’t cut it “We don’t know how” “We don’t have equipment” “We don’t know what they’re doing in these newsrooms”

Video

Example from the Toronto Star Example Example from the San Jose Mercury News Example And some blogs to keep you well informed …

Angela Grant: In the Circle

Cyndy Green: VideoJournalism

Richard Koci Hernandez: MultimediaShooter

Cade White: Digicade

Databases

Five things you can do now Assign articles by or about Adrian Holovaty Study ChicagoCrime.org Discuss the Naples affordable housing project Assign a project built with Atlas Use exercises from NICAR to teach Excel

“The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do: 1. Gathering information. 2. Distilling information. 3. Presenting information. ‘Doing journalism through computer programming’ is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.”

Graphics

Los Angeles Times

Another good use for Excel

Houston Chronicle

Photo

Two issues Visual skills for all students—not just the photojournalism students Composition Rationales Ethics Editing and formatting photo files for online

Magnum in Motion

Audio

Audio is easy and cheap Microphone handling Interview techniques Digital editing (Audacity is free)Audacity Save file as MP3 Use a free audio player to embed the MP3 directly on a Web pagefree audio player

HTML and CSS

Why teach HTML and CSS? Dreamweaver is not necessarily as useful as HTML and (at least some) CSS Facebook / MySpace will not help them in a journalism job It’s a leg up

Ways to introduce HTML and CSS One solution: Use Blogger (covered in a later session) Require students to build a simple Web page by hand with HTML Headings Links Images

Pssst! My own secret I have usually learned technology that I teach in class less than one week before the first time I taught it

In conclusion We all need to start now We are all behind—but we can catch up!

Transforming The Journalism Curriculum Presentation by Mindy McAdams University of Florida