My J-school students take on blogging this week. It is one of the assignments in our core multiplatform journalism course, so they don’t really have a choice but to blog, at least for a few weeks.
Some students are enthusiastic about being freed from the constraints of the traditional news pyramid. Others see it as another assignment and some, well, they don’t use blogs.
This isn’t about teaching students how to set up a blog. They are already familiar with WordPress as we use it to power our student publication, TheThunderbird.ca.
The aim is to allow students to explore how to blog as journalists, with a specific focus on a topic or on their urban beat in Vancouver. Rather than writing as reporters, they will be writing as commentators, providing context and perspective on the news.
Blogging as a journalist means retaining some of those key values such as accuracy and fairness, but opening the door to a more personal, conversational take on the news.
It creates an environment which encourages the students to explore what others have written about their chosen area, through the use of links. In other words, be part of the world they are blogging about.
There is much talk about newsroom culture and whether you can teach someone to think digitally. Journalists need to go beyond being on the web, and instead be of the web.
Being of the web means being active online and blogging is just one way of doing this.
It might even help a student land an internship over the summer. Last year, one of them ended up running a programme blog during the summer on CBC.ca.
(For some reason, the programme website now throws up an error message).
This is my post for January’s Carnival of Journalism. It is currently hosted by Adrian Monck.
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Blogging has allowed me to join a broad network of journalists and has led to a few different job offers from organizations all over the U.S. I’m glad most of the students in my Jschool aren’t keeping their own professional blogs. It makes things easier for me.
I also provide the web address to my WordPress blog on my hard copy resume and in clips I email to prospective employers.
Eighty percent of the production for the online journalism degree course I taught last year was to keep what I called a “newsblog”.
As part of a group discussion, each student picked a beat to cover as their own – one they were passionate about and which could stand on its own but one which would hang together with the rest of the newsblogs as a single entity, covering a good range of subject matter. It was WPMU installation.
By this point, they’d already been introduced to formalised news writing and production conventions. And they weren’t discouraged from using these in the newsblog, which we treated both as a “blog” in the usual sense and also merely as a CMS…
Over the course of maintaining their newsblog, they could write as much as they want on the niche topic of their own interest, but had to come up with at least four original news stories with original research, at least 10 news posts essentially aggregated from sources in their field (they were encouraged to seek them out and subscribe to them by RSS at the outset), at least seven analysis/insight posts/articles giving their own expert opinion or interpretation of a development taking place in the niche, and some evidence they had been able to customise the default CMS furniture.
The students felt a real sense of ownership over their beat, but I felt it important to retain a sense of professionalism despite the more usual proclivities of the medium. A blog doesn’t negate the inverted pyramid where necessary.
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Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.
[...] Alf Hermida at Reportr.Net also tips his hat to Conley: “There is much talk about newsroom culture and whether you can teach someone to think digitally. Journalists need to go beyond being on the web, and instead be of the web.” [...]
Hello Guys! I just came across this blog quite by accident. To be honest, I am not much of a blogger myself and am new to this entirely… however, I thought to take a chance and see if you guys know where I could find a student interested in writing short articles in return for exposure of their work on an international site. I work with a site called http://www.buysellhomesinternational.com. We are a new site but have big plans for the future. Basically we need someone to write a short article monthly. Since the topic is international real estate it could be anything from writing about different unique homes or even about life in a particular city, international real estate investing, etc. It could really go in many different directions. Anyhow, we were wondering if maybe a student would be interested in doing something like that. Please check out our website http://www.buysellhomesinternational.com Any ideas of where we could find someone? Any feedback and ideas would be much appreciated. Have an awesome day everyone!