It is also time for my students to take up blogging as part of the core Integrated Journalism course at the University of British Columbia.

I have written a piece for PBS Mediashift on why I believe that blogging deserves a place on a journalism curriculum.

The blogs are now live and cover a broad range of topics, from Canadian foreign policy to spirituality to Latin American culture.

Teaching someone to blog might sound odd.  My approach is to consider blogs as a delivery system that may or may not contain journalism.

I use newspapers as a comparison. Tabloids such as The Daily Star or The Sun in the UK are very different to The Times or The Guardian.  They are all newspapers, but have distinctly different content.

What makes a blog a “blog” are the social and cultural practices that have developed alongside this new web-based delivery system. In other words, the technology and history of blogs has resulted in certain generic conventions, much like the evolution of print led to a set of conventions.

It means that blogs tend to be structured with the most recent post at the top, they are written in a personal and informal style, they contain links to other sources and offer readers the ability to comment.

Since blogs are still a relatively new media form, its use is still evolving. I advise students to consider the blog format as:

1. A delivery system for journalistic elements that do not fit within established conventions of a news story
2. A mechanisms for communicating analysis and commentary to the public in an informal conversational manner
3. A way of reaching audiences in a personal voice, rather than adopting an abstract voice of authority
4. A platform to engage in a conversation with audiences through comments and discussion

For this assignment, the student blogs have to have a specific focus, choosing a topic where they can bring their personal knowledge and experience to bear.

The blogs are a platform for critical thinking and reflection by students about issues, rather than a pedestal to pontificate about personal views. The students are encouraged to work on their writing style, to develop their own voice.

And the content is unfiltered.  The students publish live to the web, with faculty members supervising the content post-publication.

As I concluded on my Mediashift post:

Blogs and new media have undoubtedly changed the landscape of journalism. In terms of its form, journalism as a whole has become more conversational, and iterative, as readers seek to contribute to the story, and journalists open more of their processes to public view. Blogging has played a role in this process and warrants a place on the curriculum at journalism schools.

This means that journalists need to think on different levels as they conceive of a story and its treatment. It involves taking a multifaceted approach to a story and working out how best to tell it with the media available. The attraction for journalists is the ability to tell a story in multiple ways, making information accessible in ways that go beyond the standard news article in print.

Among the online resources I recommend is the tutorial by Jane Stevens on multimedia story-telling.

Another invaluable resource is a post by Mindy McAdams on making multimedia story decisions. To help the students, I created a PDF version of Mindy’s cheat-sheet (PDF).

In her post, Taylor talked about what she saw as the shortcomings at NYU over its approach to new media. The column provoked a stir at NYU and among journalistic circles online.

It was followed up by a piece by Mediashift editor Mark Glaser on the controversy.

The whole incident was clearly troubling for NYU’s journalism school.  The issue was raised with the ombudsman by Adam Penenberg, an assistant professor at NYU and chairman of the journalism department’s ethics committee.

One of the complaint is that Taylor did not tell her professor or students that she would be writing for PBS Mediashift.  In his complaint, Penenberg cites PBS’s own editorial standards and policies on deception: “The credibility of content is jeopardized whenever the audience or a source is duped or feels duped.”

He also takes Mediashift to task for not giving the people criticised in Taylor’s post a chance to reply.  In its defense, Mediashift was planning to run a follow-up piece from the student with her professor’s point of view and interviews with faculty.

The problem here is that Taylor’s piece was published under the PBS banner, even though it was not written by a PBS employee. Since it was published on Mediashift, it drew far more attention than they would have if they had appeared on her own blog.

The ombudsman concludes:

But the PBS imprimatur on this online feature takes it out of the realm of what one ordinarily considers individual blogging. This was an assignment for a very large public service, and I do think that in this instance this posting did not meet PBS standards. There is no way that Taylor’s posting would have appeared as a PBS television segment or NPR broadcast without additional comment and reporting, and so PBS needs to look into this and perhaps come up with a more refined set of guidelines that cover these new situations if they are going to lend their logo and PBS.org link to them. NYU probably needs to do the same thing.

I suspect this whole episode be discussed at length in ethics classes at journalism schools. There is no easy answer here.

Taylor has a right to be heard and write about her experience at NYU. And professors should be accountable for what they say in class.

In hindsight, Taylor should have told her professors and fellow students that she was writing for Mediashift. But I agree with Mark Glaser that:

Alana has the right to voice her opinion about what went on in her journalism class and that just the exercise of bringing it up for discussion and conversation is worth it.

(Full disclosure: I am also an ‘embed’ for Mediashift and discussed this with my colleagues at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism before taking it on).

UBC School of Journalism students

In an article for PBS Mediashift, I looked at the challenges facing journalism schools in teaching technical skills without losing sight of the journalism.

This is a difficult area for j-schools as journalism becomes ever more interwoven with technology:

The challenges for journalism schools are two-fold. First, students need to be taught how to use a wide range of technical tools. Second, and more importantly, they have to learn how to produce real journalism using the technology. This is perhaps the hardest part.

Our students are digital natives, living in an always-on, always-connected world. The challenge in the classroom is less about teaching the technology and more about providing an understanding of how new media tools can be harnessed to create quality journalism.

I argue that journalism educators need to be part of the digital world if they are to teach digital skills.  Too often academics are observers looking in from the outside, rather than being part of the new media world inhabited by our students.

The full piece is at Mediashift.

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I am one of them, reporting back from the front line of journalism education. My first missive has just been published, looking at our integrated journalism approach at the UBC j-school.

This extract sums up what we are doing:

This past academic year, we decided to combine these three disciplines (news-writing, multimedia and research) into an ambitious team-taught integrated journalism program. Over two days every week for the two semesters, students receive training in core journalism competences. They get to apply these skills through assignments that take them from covering social issues in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to tackling questions of diversity, with the work published in TheThunderbird.ca, an online magazine.
Questioning What Is News

The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.

But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred

There is no doubt that journalism education has to change, just as journalism itself is changing. It is time to start a conversation on what we should be teaching the next generation of reporters.