Please join me in congratulating my journalism students on the first edition of this academic year of our online publication, TheThunderbird.ca. My colleagues and myself at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have been working with our grad students on stories from their beats in Vancouver. It was their first major assignment of the semester. This week was crunch time, with Thursday being an intense day of final edits and
PDF Sarah Hartley of The Guardian has put together a video with the thoughts of the academics who attended the Future of Journalism Conference at Cardiff University. Perhaps surprisingly, she found most were positive that journalism was here to stay, though what we call journalism and how it is practiced, is going through a period of upheaval and change. My own modest contribution is about five minutes into the video. Print
Deborah Wenger of the University of Mississippi looked at what the top US news companies were looking for in new hires. In her presentation at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, she outlined what skills and attributes were mentioned in job listings. They found 715 job postings. In newspapers, a third of them for reporters and just 12% for web writers/multimedia producers. In postings for reporter positions, the most
In my latest post for PBS Mediashift, I look at how the evolution towards digital media and the emergence of the knowledge economy means that student journalists need to develop their own personal brand. The shift toward the individual and away from journalistic institutions was identified as one of the major trends in journalism by the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the Media Report for 2009. In the
This blog is among a comprehensive list of the 100 best blogs for journalism students. The list covers everything from general blogs on journalism such as PoynterOnline to those by educators such as Mindy McAdams to blogs by journalists such as Matthew Ingram. One site absent from the list is the UK-based Journalism.co.uk. It has created its own list blogs and sites also missing from the list which it considers
A documentary on the global traffic in e-waste produced by students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism airs on Frontline/World’s season finale on June 23. Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground investigates the growing problems caused by the global trade in electronic waste. Among the headline-grabbing findings, the students bought hard drive in Ghana which contained sensitive US Homeland data about military contracts. The work was produced as part of an
There has been a sea change at the Knight Journalism Fellows program at Stanford University. For the first time, the group of journalists have been chosen based on the program’s new focus on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. The list of US journalists just announced will focus on projects ranging from geographically-aware journalism, multiplatform publication and socially-networked foreign reporting while they study at Stanford during the 2009-10 academic year. The
At a time when journalism graduates are wondering about their prospects, and some question the value of going to j-school, my post for PBS Mediashift may offer some words of comfort. The words come from a selection of seasoned news professionals, interviewed on a Flip minoHD camera at the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. In the clips, they talk about having a
This video interview with Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, is timely for the j-schoolers graduating in a few week’s time and for the new crop of students getting ready to come to journalism school. In the interview by Nieman Journalism Lab, Murray talks about what he looks for when in online reporters: In the digital area, you do want people who can be very fast
My latest post for PBS Mediashift looks at how participatory media tools such as CoveritLive can be used in the classroom. One of the challenges, particularly in large undergraduate classes, is turning the traditional academic lecture into more of a conversation. Rather than simply being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, I wanted to try out new ways for students to collaborate on distilling and creating knowledge. The aim