What would you teach a journalist?
Tue, 2007-05-08 18:16 — Kevin Reynen
Yesterday I asked Dave Winer what he would teach journalists. He responded with the suggestion that the journalists should blog with existing software with instruction/feedback/conversations involving the local MSM and anyone else who'd like to stop by driving the instruction.
Interesting, but who is going to create checkbox news? Is that something you can create with a Blogger account?
Last semester I helped develop several projects that are really innovative approaches to complicated problems journalists face.
Notebook - This is an alternative interface for commenting that tries to lead users to categorize their feedback by Tips, Facts, and Sources. The comments are all fed into Drupal where they can be viewed by publication, journalist, tags, ratings, etc. The goal of this project is to try to create value from comments instead of simply having a flame war at the end of every story. The hope is that a journalist would go back to their Notebook before writing about a topic to see what users have said about other stories on the same topic. I ran into javascript conflicts between fivestar rating, jquery scroll, and jquery tabs that I haven't been able to figure out.
Places - This is Google Mashup maker for local news. Users can draw and tag polygons that using PostGIS can search any geotagged content. Once this is modularized, any newspaper that has gone with Drupal will have the option of giving users a feed for stories that are within 2, 3, 5 miles of where they live. Google has added KML to sitemap definition allowing sites to define special data for special searches outside of their local site. With services like GeoNames.org's RSStoGeo Converter it's possible to pull feeds that combine news and places like this.
Voices and Around the Lake - Are looking at group blogs and topic blogs with hierarchical structure. Many blogs write about something that appeared in the MSM. In Voices, we replaced that with a rich media piece that was created with a traditional journalism approach of representing all sides of the story. Then the bloggers post longer (hopefully more professional) op-ed style responses. At the "bottom" of the content hierarchy are the comments. All of these types of content have different characteristics and different informative value to different audiences.
There are several reasons I recommended Drupal for journalism sites and schools.
- Drupal is being used by several large, well known news organizations for their primary news site(http://www.observer.com/ ), hybrid news/community sites (http://www.savannahnow.com/ ), as well as several citizen journalism sites (http://www.nowpublic.com/ ).
- CMSes exist in news organizations. Ignoring them and publishing with tools outside the organization doesn't help improve the systems that host the majority of the organizations content. Knowing what decent CMS is cabable of when you have the right type/number of people
involved is important. Too many news organizations are using a CMS the vendor either can't or won't allow them to change or the person in charge claims that because they lack the knowledge/skill to make the changes. These same people recommend selling their archives to companies like NewsBank for short term gains with long term costs. - Many newspapers have been installing seperate software packages for blogs, comments, discussion boards, photo uploads, podcasting, etc, etc. Every featurea reader/contributor would like to use requires a seperate password. OpenID will help (assuming it lives up to the
hypepromise), but using a framework like Drupal to enable these features as parts of a larger system makes maintaining users and permissions much more managable. That is a big deal because as Dave knows all to well, when managing users take up too much time, services and features are killed off. - There are several really bright people contributing to Drupal in the newspaper space like Ken Rickards, David Strauss and Todd Ross Nienkerk from Austin's That Other Paper. I can't develop every idea the faculty and students have into a functioning application so I look to the Drupal community for help. I contribute back to the community when and where I can. In return, I have little trouble finding people willing to help when I get stuck. This is huge for schools that have limitted resources.
- News organizations are (or should be) looking for technologies that keep more content internal and allow them to grow the value being the best place to get local content. Tim O'Reilly recently claimed that Web2.0 was now about controlling the data. Yahoo pipes and Google maps are really cool, but only as long as they are accessible. What value/role do news organizations really have if every organization has access to the same aggregated data?
Comments
What would I teach
What would I teach journalists?
Nothing. And everything.
That was the short answer. I've now give you the long answer:
It depends.
If you are running a journalism program that prides itself on how the da after graduation ceremonies, their start work in the journalism assembly line, transcribing quotes at at the village board meeting or churning out pages in Quark XPress, then really, all you need to do if make you your grades know some basic HTML. That way, the small daily and weeklies that usually hire your grads can put them to work on their insipid little Web sites ... in addition to their other duties, no doubt.
But if your programs turn out thinking journalists who know a thing or two about history, culture, politics, science, finance and education as well how to write clearly, then you might also want to ... make sure they know a little HTML.
Really, folks. There's nothing to teaching someone to be pundit-style blogger that isn't taught already in good schools all across this country. It doesn't really matter what blogging platform is used. You don't need to be a black belt in HTML-Fu or PHP-Jitsu to be a blogger. Almost every A-list blogger I know of paid someone to design their sites.
What matters is the content of their blogs. Content. Content. Content. Smart people do smart blogs. And you can't teach people to be smart, but you can educate them. And a good liberal arts education -- not a bunch of vocation skills -- will be just as important to the New Media as the old, dead-tree and broadcast-tower Mainstream Media.
And frankly -- while I am not necessarily knocking America's J-schools -- I'm not sure I want the citizen journalists of the future having all their quirky goodness beaten out of them by four years of journalism professors lying to them about the value of "objective" reporting and that the AP Style Manual was written by a finger of flame onto stone tablets.
But ... there is one thing, a concept really, that I want all journalists to understand: This country was founded by citizen journalists. None of them took Newswriting 101.
In my experience, what's
In my experience, what's necessary is simply the learning of the concepts behind a CMS. It's still almost completely foreign to a lot of the people in the grad program and that's been one of the things that has caused so many problems and hatred toward Drupal. Personally, I love it and am working on a new site that will eventually serve as my main one.
I think there's a misconception about Drupal in the program. Everyone speaks about how they dislike it but I think they would dislike any of the possible CMS options thrown out there. Why? Because they don't have a firm grasp of the ideas. That's why taxonomy and all that stuff is important. When you tried to explain it, everyone just said "just show me what to do and I'll do it." But when they ran into trouble, it was Drupal's fault and would have been solved had they taken the time to learn all this in the beginning.
I thought the goal of the
I thought the goal of the program was to prepare grad students to lead a redesign project like what the NY Observer did or to be a Online Community Manager. My OSCMS presentation was basically an outline of what how I'd modify what I've taught in intro to media production courses and advanced web design at other schools to get journalists from 0 to CMS "experts" in such a short period of time at UNR. IMHO, the RSJ is currently way ahead of other J-Schools in this area and if we continued down the CMS road, the RSJ could be leaders in effectively integrating more visual communication/rich media oriented work with a CMS. I'd like to see the curriculum categorized into basic publishing/community building (basic news/blogging/marketing/site promotion/etc), rich media/visual communications (Mediastorm type projects) that work WITH the CMS, and the innovation/entrepreneurial projects that are proof of concept TESTS... not the things that drive the OurTahoe.org site/community. The idea being that OurTahoe.org would provide an audience for the other projects. What students learn publishing to the CMS isn't really an innovation, but innovations that can't be tied to existing systems in the news organizations the grad students return to aren't going to get much traction or be likely to be funded. It's the difference between saying "I have this crazy idea" and "I have this crazy idea AND I've know how these crazy ideas can be integrated into a CMS because at the RSJ we did this other crazy thing".
Wow. So I expect Winer Grade
Wow. So I expect Winer Grade School would just give children pencils and let them discuss their way to learning how to write. And the Winer School of Medicine would just point would-be doctors to WebMD and start bringing in patients. I guess when all you have is a hammer...
Funny. I think most people
Funny. I think most people at UNR think Drupal is the only hammer I have. I really think the news organizations need to adopt frameworks that are designed to be extended and reworked, but I could just as easily be using Plone, XOOPS, Joomla, or even a commercial solution like Ektron. I was hoping Dave would say something like journalists need to understand taxonomy, semantic markup, marketing a site/service/content to users, etc.