The title of the talk was Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer.

Abstract: Social media is becoming ever more ingrained in the experience of news consumers. Social networking sites are evolving from being more than spaces for personal exchanges, becoming one of the mediums for sharing and recommending the news as users appropriate computer-mediated technologies for their own purposes. While the dissemination of news through social interaction has always played a role in the diffusion of media, sharing is becoming central to the way many experience the news. Research into how networked publics are reframing the news and shaping news flows suggests people are using social media to complement, rather than replace, more traditional media sources.

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Ward’s starting point is that in a mixed media environment, everyone has the potential to perform an act of journalism.

As a consequence, he argued, ethics is for everyone.  The responsible use of media tools needs to be taught across the curriculum. This means that media ethics is not just for journalism students but for all.

For Ward, ethics is a vital part of journalism.  He said teaching ethics was essential as it is key to the identity of the responsible journalist. A code of ethics separates the journalist from the world of content producers.

But, at the same time, Ward acknowledged that there is no longer one set of ethics. Instead, we need to deal with pluralism of today’s ethics.

He argued journalism ethics needs to accommodate different approaches in journalism that have not been included in traditional journalism ethics. For example, the notion of the activist journalist, the reformist journalist or the participatory journalist.

The starting poing should be with the student experience of the media, and encourage them to reflect on their use and practice.

Professors should take a transitional in how to teach ethics, allowing students to go back and forth between traditional ethical approaches and emerging ethical approaches.

Finally, Ward wrapped up by arguing that journalist students and educators need to take an international approach and consider a global journalism ethics. This would include approaches to journalism ethics from other countries.

His rallying call was for journalism ethics to “revolutionize thyself”

Ward is director of the Center for Journalism Ethics, University of Wisconsin, and a friend and former colleague from UBC Journalism.

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Online video has been around for more than a decade but it has taken some time for journalists that video on the web is not the same as video on television.

Best practices of online video are evolving. It is not just about giving all your reporters a Flip cam and asking them to shot some video.

Much as with any other act of journalism, key decisions should be made about the best way to tell a story.  When it comes to video, reporters should consider:

• the message they’re trying to deliver
• the kind of story they’re trying to tell
• the audience they’re trying to reach

The medium affects the content, so it is important to consider what kind of video works best on the web. Here are some suggestions:

Experiential: This is the kind of video that takes you straight into a situation and conveys a sense of being there. It has a feel of immediacy and rawness, but this does not mean that it is shoddily shot.  This video report by CJ Chivers for the New York Times on a firefight in the Helmand province draws the viewer into the action in a visceral manner.

Direct: This refers to the video that shows the action. It may have been captured on a cellphone by someone at the scene or a journalist. The video just shows that one dramatic instance of a story. It is based on the premise that viewers will be familiar with the story and just want to see the dramatic footage they have read about. Clearly, there is a danger that divorced from context, the video may be misleading.

Speak: Here the characters of a story are speaking directly to the viewer. Even though the clip may have been edited by a journalist, there is no reporter in the video. Instead, time is given over to a character to talk to the audience, as my students did in this report on a community garden in Vancouver.

Show: In these instances, video is a powerful tool to literally show viewers what a journalist has written about. Having a piece of video may be more effectively in demonstrating the essence of the story than words alone. Here, the BBC uses a short piece of video to show viewers how a programming tools for children works.

Explain: Video can be a powerful tool to guide viewers through a process and explain the different stages. The video can be mediated by a reporter, as in this video on genetic testing by one of my students, or just involve one of the characters in a story.

For me, one of the best examples of online video was an online video by CBC, where the son of a Canadian victims of the Haiti earthquake pays tribute to his father. The broadcast version is narrated by reporter Nahlah Ayed. The online video just features the son’s recollections and has far more emotional impact than the TV video.

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Students graduating in 2010 faced better prospects than those looking for jobs in 2009, according to the University of Georgia’s new Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates.

The survey found that 2010 students with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and mass communication programs were more likely than were graduates a year earlier to leave college s with at least one job offer of some sort.

Overall, 58.2% of 2010 graduates reported having a full-time job within one year of graduating, compared to 55.5% in 2009.

Evidence of slight recovery was tempered by the fact that salaries are flat, as they have been for five years, while benefits offered also are stagnant.

The survey found the median salary of $30,000 for a grad was exactly the same as the median salary reported in 2006. However, the salary for a grad with a Master’s degree fell from $39,000 in 2009 to $36,200 in 2010.

Lee Becker, the report’s co-author, told the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

Any improvement underway is slight. Students are in a very challenging market. It is hard to be optimistic.

The survey covers a wide range of degrees, so the chances of landing a job depend on the type of course.

The survey also indicates that the job market varies depending on a graduate’s field of interest.

Grads specializing in news-editorial journalism, traditionally print journalism fared the worse, with a fall in full-time jobs to 50.5% compared to 71.7% in 2007.

More than 70% of grads in advertising and 62.8% in public relations had jobs.

The annual report was released at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in St. Louis.

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Arguing that j-school programs need to do better, among the challenges she highlighted:

• Perhaps most important: How to determine the best ways to prepare the journalists of tomorrow—our students.

This is something every j-prof wrestles with. And it prompted me to leave a comment on Mindy’s post, which forms the basis of this post.

I suggest that before we enter a discussion of skills, equipment etc, we need to change the way we think of journalism.

Our role in journalism schools should be to prepare students for the media of tomorrow, rather than simply the newsrooms of today.

At the core of this is how we think about journalism.  The biggest challenge facing j-schools is changing the mindset around journalism.

Rather thank conceiving of journalism as a profession to be defended, j-schools need to acknowledge that media is developing into an open and shared space.

This requires thinking of journalism as a space to be shared, where the voice of the professional journalist is one of many.

J-schools need to help students figure out how their voice as a journalist makes a valuable contribution to this emerging shared media space, be it through traditional news organisations, non-profit start-ups or media entities and forms that the students themselves will create in the future.

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One of the key roles of the university has to foster critical thinking, graduating students who have the ability to ask the right questions and think through solutions to problems.

For the revival of the Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked the journalist/scholar bloggers taking part to consider the place of the university in the information ecosystem.

Journalism schools are uniquely placed within the academic environment to play a leading role in rethinking how academia fits into news and information flows today.

Some journalism schools already are filling in gaps left by shrinking media. Our journalism students at the University of British Columbia do this, from covering local stories in Vancouver to producing in-depth, investigative work on international issues.

J-schools can go further than producing stories. After all, we are living in a time when the barriers to producing journalism are non-existent. In a participatory media culture, anyone can do an act of journalism.

As a result, what we consider journalism and who is producing it is evolving. Universities, and j-schools in particular, can make a critical contribution to enabling students to be informed citizens with the ability to apply a critical eye to the world around them.

The first step is helping students understand how the world of media is shifting and providing them with the theoretical framework and practical tools to be informed consumers of news and information.

This is just the start. The classroom provides a space to teach students how to be able to create media by applying some of the rigours of journalistic practice.

We need to recognise that journalism has gone beyond something that just happens in newsrooms. At universities, a broad array of people, from academics to students, are doing what could be called journalism.

There is, then, an opportunity for journalism schools to rethink their place within the university environment, approaching journalism as a space to be shared, rather than a profession to be defended.

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The e-mail interview is available on the site in Spanish. But if you don’t speak Spanish or are not sure Google Translate will be able to figure out what I mean, here’s the English version:

Q: What do you think about the education of today’s journalists?

A: Journalism education is in a process of transformation, reflecting the changes taking place in journalism.  The way journalism is been taught is evolving, though there are two distinct approaches.  The first assumes that journalism is much the same as always, except that it has become more technologised.  This approach is evident in schools that add on multimedia classes to an established curriculum.

The other approach is based on the premise that media environment is significantly different today due to the development and adoption of networked, digital technologies, and the new practices and social arrangements enabled by these technologies. For journalism schools, it means acknowledging that the profession is undergoing a period of fundamental change as a result of people imagining and exploring new ways of doing things and new ways of being. It is then not just as simple as adding multimedia to an established curriculum, but rethinking the curriculum.

The role of journalism education is to prepare students for the journalism of tomorrow, not just the newsrooms of today.

Q: Do you encourage journalism students to blog?

A: We have a specific blogging assignment in the first year core journalism programme at UBC.  We discuss blogging in the context of developing a student’s professional identity and personal brand.  For the assignments, students have to maintain a blog on an area of expertise, providing analysis and commentary in an informal and conversational style, interacting with readers. Blogging helps students develop their own voice as a journalist, as well as establishing their specialist knowledge in a given area.

Q: What can do veteran journalists in order to create their personal brand on Internet?

A: Every journalist should aim to own their name online.  The first step is to buy your name as a web address and set up a professional website/blog.  But it also means establishing a suitable presence on other platforms, such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.  Veteran journalists can also build their brand by engaging with stories on other sites, leaving informed comments that add to the conversation.  Being involved in social media should not be seen as an extra activity, but as a core activity of one’s journalism.

Q: New media, such as Twitter and social networks, can help us do better journalism? Do journalists take advantage of their full potential?

A: Twitter and social networks enable journalists to engage and connect with audiences. Journalists need to understand that they need to go to the places where the audiences are, rather than expecting them to come to you.  For example, enabling others to embed your video content extends the distribution and reach of your work.

Twitter provides a way for journalists to distribute content. But it is far more than a broadcast medium. To take advantage of Twitter, journalists need to listen to what others are saying on the network and engage in conversations.

I have written of Twitter as ambient journalism. What I mean by this is that acts of journalism are taking place on Twitter all the time. The challenge for a journalist is the high noise to signal ratio on Twitter – clearly not all tweets are journalism, but the volume and speed of messages makes it hard for an individual journalist to sift through the content and identify valuable content.

Q: In 2009, you published a study of Twitter and journalism, what factors are different since then?

A: Since my paper on ambient journalism, we are seeing more sophisticated tools and techniques emerging to help us navigate the world of Twitter – from Twitter lists to services like Twitter Analyzer that help to explore the social graph of a Twitter user.

Q: Finally, do you think it’s important to news organization to create their own social networks? For example, what do you think of Eskup?

A: An inhouse social network can be of value to a news organization in providing demographic and other information about its readers.  It can be a way of tying readers more closely to a brand at a time when many users are promiscuous in their news habits. I am not familiar with Eskup but The Telegraph in the UK has a similar initiative. It it not a social network as such, but incorporates elements of social networking to enable like-minded readers to connect to each other and participate in discussions. At the same time, news organisations need to tap into existing social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Some users will not want to set up an additional account with a news outlet.

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The documentary, Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground, was produced by students of the International Reporting class, under the supervision of Professor Peter Klein, for PBS Frontline/World.

It was made possible by  a $1 million donation from Mindset Social Innovation Foundation to fund an international reporting course for 10 years.

The funding is designed to give students an opportunity to study international reporting techniques in the field and report on under-covered global issues.

The partnership between the school, PBS and Mindset shows how journalism schools can help to fill a reporting gap due to newsroom cutbacks in staff and budgets.

Many journalism schools are exploring similar partnerships, along lines of what Len Downie and Michael Schudson proposed in an influential article for the Columbia Journalism Review.

But this role has its challenges – from balancing the demands of professional work with educational priorities to sustaining coverage once a course is over.

On a personal note, I am very proud of our students and faculty have accomplished with the well-deserved Emmy win.

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The exhibition, called Growing Knowledge, runs from October 12 2010 to July 16 2011. The aim is “to inform and inspire today’s researchers, consult and engage with them, demonstrate the value of investment in digital research tools, and spark a debate on the future of research.”

Hopefully there will be a strong web component for those who can’t make it to the show.

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The series was kicked off by a piece I wrote on how to teach social media at journalism schools:

Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.

The article looks at how journalism professors are incorporating social media in the curriculum within an academic environment where the pace of change is slow. It includes practical examples of how educators are engaging with students.

The full piece is on PBS Mediashift.

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