Paul Bradshaw from the University of Central England Birmingham had his students do an interesting exercise in class at the start of a module in online journalism.
He gave his students 20 minutes to write a blog entry on why they needed online journalism skills. As you can imagine, there was a wide range of entries – links to the student blogs are on his blog.
One thing that stood out was how many students equated online journalism with being taught how to write for the web. I found a similar attitude among the students in the multiplatform journalism course I run at UBC’s School of Journalism.
Writing is a key component of any course in digital journalism. But text is just one ingredient from a rich menu available to online journalists. This for many is the biggest challenge.
Making a leap from the written word into conceiving of stories as interactive and multimedia journalism. This is where there is a huge opportunity to come up with innovative ways to tell stories and reach new audiences.
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As one of the students in Paul Bradshaw’s class I was surprised to hear that somebody from Canada noticed what we were doing. I was one of the students who didnt know much about online journalism (and i’m still learning!), and i certainly didnt expect any of my work to get noticed. I agree with you that there is a huge opportunity to come up with innovative ways to tell stories and reach new audiences, and I certainly have more faith in my work now, and will be presenting my work as professionally as possible. Thankyou for taking the time to have a look at what we were doing.
@azeem: I’m a mid-career journo presently taking a break from the newsroom and working in comms for Australia’s journalists’ union and I’m noticing your work from 12,000 miles and several (conceptual) years behind where you are in the UK. we’re playing catch up in Oz – both in terms of the numbers of mainstream jobs that are disappearing and the embracing of new ideas for how to tell stories and how to move the news media into exciting new ways of doing things. One of my aims is to design course modules for mid-career journos (like me) to help us – in Joanna Geary’s words – move from being Dinos to Digis. We read your work – and that of Paul Bradshaw, Joanna and all those driving the development of journalism, with great interest.
One of the things one reads about the reason for the slow decline in readership of mainstream journalism is that people are bored and cynical about quality. The challenge for our industry is to hold its nerve, not cut costs past the tipping poiint, and use new tools and new skills to find, tell and distribute exciting and important stories that will bring people back to the news.
Anyhow, that’s my rant. Any sugggestions re: course design will be hugely appreciated.
Hallo, i am a Student Journalist writing from Kenya and after WordPress landed me here through the ‘related posts feature’.On my latest blog post, i have been exploring the idea of journalism in terms of ‘typing’ and ‘writing’…with typing being the activity of pounding in the keyboard for hours trying to make sense.Writing ought to be the product.Though not quite deep, i am exploring the possibilities of inculcating literature into journalism as a way of giving it more meaning in relation to the artistic qualities Literature has. Therefore, landing on this site was quite helpful and this particular line in your post hit me as quite insightful in my quest
“Writing is a key component of any course in digital journalism. But text is just one ingredient from a rich menu available to online journalists.”
i hope sometime, hopefully soon, i shall land somewhere.