If you are like most Americans, most of your news consumption comes from television. You may also get much of your news via Facebook or other online news sources. In this class you will learn to become a more critical consumer of news from all sources. As you begin to study journalism and mass communication, you may find it particularly useful to read the print edition of a national newspaper like USA Today or The Wall Street Journal as well as a local paper. If you read news critically, you will be circling words, writing notes and highlighting passages.

Is anyone out there using a tool for annotating digital content that you actually find useful? You don’t need to necessarily be able to share the notes but the notes preferably would be persistent from device to device.

In the great debate about the future of journalism and the relevance of journalism schools, the Athar anecdote supports my belief that *every* college student should take a course in journalism. Whether they practice the profession or not, many of them will be “brothers in the crowd” — to borrow a phrase and a scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

At those moments, we don’t need journalists as much as we need people — like Athar — who practice journalistic thinking.

Some of the students are younger than Mosaic, and throughout their lives, their access to information technology has outpaced their understanding of it.

The answer to the question of “What is news?” for many of them is “Whatever my friends share on Facebook.” And that means popularity — and for many of them it’s popularity among a narrow subset of people who look, act and see the world similarly — trumps all the traditional news values of impact, proximity, prominence, timeliness, emotional appeal, oddity and conflict.

But rather than try to replace one with the other, I’m trying a technique that I hope will use their familiarity with social media to get them to think more about their audience. Try the following and let me know how it works for you, too.

1. Have the students organize their Facebook friends into various lists, using traditional news values. So, for example, students might organize their friends by geography, share experiences, relationship status, number of friends they have, frequency of posting, or a combination of those. Instructions for Creating a Facebook List

2. Throughout the semester, your students are already required to read the news. But this technique also asks them to share the stories they read with their friends on Facebook. Instructions for Sharing a Link on Facebook

3. The key is that they can’t share a link with ALL their friends. They have to pick no more than two lists with which they share each story. This gets the students thinking about how different audience value different information. Or how different audiences value the same information, but for different reasons. Instructions for Sharing Links With Specific Lists

4. Finally, with each link that a student posts she is required to “Say something about this link …” It doesn’t count if the annotation is merely a re-phrasing of the facts in the story. And it doesn’t count if the student merely writes about why she likes the story. The annotation must answer the question “So What?” for that particular list. The goal here is get students to change their belief that writing is about self-expression into a journalistic mindset in which writing is selfless expression.

Journalists have to give audiences what they want and need, and often must go to great lengths to explain to them why they need it. This isn’t paternalism. This is a service, and it’s the same one that attorneys and physicians and financial advisers provide. The choice remains in the customer’s hands. But we — as journalists — have a professional obligation to provide the best advice on the most relevant information possible.

Grading: You have two choices for grading this assignment. One option is to get a Facebook account and require that all of your students friend you and put you on every list they’ve created for the class. That way you’ll be able to see what they’re doing and use your own rubric to score their efforts. The other option is to have the students write a weekly reflection about their experiences sharing stories with their friends. What did they share with whom? How did they describe it? What didn’t they share? Why not? What responses did they get from their friends?

(For the sake of ease, you may consider creating a mock version of this assignment in which students simply write Word documents using imaginary friends, imaginary lists, imaginary stories or use an imaginary social network. But do not do that. It smacks of being phoney. And students — and journalists — hate phonies.

Students studying news writing, reporting and editing would hold periodic peer-editing sessions with a small group. Perhaps three journalism facilitator-students to 10 participants. Journalism students would critique the writing and reporting of the participants. Is the writing precise and concise? Is the spelling and grammar accurate? What questions are left unanswered?

An “each-one, teach-one” approach such as this would cost next to nothing. A few thousand dollars a year to support the role of a faculty mentor and various community-building activities.

Assessing the effect of a program like this would be easy as well. Survey all participants. Analyze content of participants before and after. Compare participant’s blog posts with non-participants blog posts.

It incorporates research, teaching and community service.

Some questions:

* Would there be interest among journalism students?

* Would there be interest among non-journalism students?

* Would there be interest among amateur, volunteer journalists in the community?

* How would the program reach volunteer journalists in communities far from campus?

* If you’re an employer, how much do you think an applicants participation in a program like this — as a mentor — would  influence your hiring decision?

* Are there similar programs out there that already exist?

* Could you incorporate this as service-learning component of a basic news writing/editing/reporting class?

The bottom line is this: most of this student work was very good, and it’s important to show industry and other journalism students how we’re preparing the next generation to lead change in newsrooms. Students are young and therefore their work is not perfect, but it can be awfully good. Here are three examples, and the reason that each gives me hope for the future of journalism.
Splash! makes waves in school language programs
By Anika Anand and Kellen Moore

Update: Anand’s blog post on her final project experience, from Dec. 24

• The article was well written and free of grammar, style and structural errors. It demonstrated good news judgment. It was full of details that are best suited for text. It placed a story in a statewide context and clearly showed a substantial research effort to discover facts beyond the surface. It wasn’t investigative journalism by any means, but a good and full explanation of the subject.
• The content of the videos were appropriate for that medium. Anand and Moore used personal anecdotes that complimented the hard facts in the text. The subjects for the video were central to the story.
• The execution of the videos was very good, but probably had the most noticeable flaws of the project. I liked very much the consistency of visual style — the lower-thirds and the angle from which the videos were shot. Whether intentional or accidental, the effect of shooting up at the subjects and having the subjects look farther up still (and off the angle of the camera) made their comments seems “loftier.” Of course, you have to be careful of unintentional editorializing, but I found the message that was communicated visually here consistent with the content of the subjects’ words. The videos could have been shot tighter, I think. Especially in the one video where there are some distracting cords in the lower right corner of the frame. The audio on the video seemed hollow, which may have been a result of microphone equipment, placement or compression.
• The story included two videos that the students posted to YouTube. Using that method of getting video on site has weaknesses, but it also has two strengths. First, it’s easy. Second,  it serves as an additional distribution outlet for your journalism and a way to tease people back to the full story. A few things to remember when using YouTube to drive people to your site — be sure to include on the YouTube video a description of the story and and link back to your site. Also, consider grouping all other related videos together. The file names appear both on YouTube and on the site into which the videos are embedded, so be sure that the file names are descriptive. In this case, the titles were not descriptive enough to be helpful to searchers and scanners.
• All the videos were embedded in appropriate places in the story. Working with a designer would have improved the look of the package. But Anand and Moore did an excellent job with the tools they were given, and no editor or audience member could ask for more than that. By intent or accident, the alternating placement of the video subjects on the left and right provided a pleasant visual effect.
• Excellent work breaking up the story and anchor linking.
• The students on this project really demonstrated their ability to look for the “next-best” solutio — and that’s an underrated skill in deadline-driven journalism. When they weren’t able to embed their Google Map because of a problem inside the CMS, they solved the problem on their own by using  a screen grab. They had to do their own research to figure out how to grab a good still frame from the video to illustrate the piece. (The only improvement I’d make would be to make a link out of the map image as well as the map caption text. I wanted to click on that durn map.)
• Excellent and appropriate use of Google Maps to convey the *where* element of the story. Anand and Moore wisely used different colored markers to convey information. (Although I almost missed the key. Remember that when presenting tools like this, many people — especially people who are very comfortable with computers — will simply start clicking before they read. If they start clicking and don’t quickly “get it” then they will humph loudly and be on their way. The best tools rely on as little CHA (“Click here asshole!”) as possible.

Out-of-state students receive support from campus group
by Rachel Scall, Jeff Woodall and Tristan Long

Each piece of this project was executed well and the package as a whole made sense.

• The choice to do a photo gallery in video format was wise. The video editing application was the tool that these students knew the best and with which they felt the most comfortable. The content did not suffer at all because of their tool choice. The audio was well-matched to the images. They had multiple sources. The title on YouTube looked good, too.
• The map on this project was a knockout. It was nicely embedded into the story and it wisely provided two navigational techniques. The details were excellent and required a lot of reporting. I enjoyed spending a lot of time with it just clicking around, and that is the hallmark of a good online news package.
• The story was nicely done. It could have stood alone well, but it was appropriately enhanced by the other elements. Its links were appropriately placed and sent readers to appropriate destinations.
• I really like the smart way that Scall, Woodall and Long linked between each of the three elements of the story, allowing people to navigate horizontally. Each element stood on its own and had its own editorial reason for being.

Feeding hungry children one backpack at a time
By Elizabeth Lilly & Heather Mandelkehr

Overall, this is a good project. It went beyond the minimum requirements in terms of text length and presentation of the Google Map. The gallery was nicely organized from start to finish. There were a few things that kept it from being an excellent project, but it was overall well done.

• The choice to use a photo slide show instead of video was a smart one because they students were confident in their photo reporting and editing skills than their video production skills. To me, knowing your strengths and weaknesses shows a lot of maturity. Also, the subject didn’t need video. The order of the photos had a clear narrative arc that took us through the distribution process and it had a nice mix of faces and things.
• The audio of the slides sounded a little hollow, but that’s a technical problem that improves with experience. The bigger issue for me was an editorial one — the story of the audio I don’t think fit the photos as well as it could have. A better — and more difficult — audio would have been done with multiple voices of the volunteers talking about the program and walking the audience through the weekly process. Finally, I would have hid the captions as the default. I kept wanting to read them while looking at the photos and listening to the audio. Since I couldn’t do all three at once, I found myself getting distracted from the audio and stopping and restarting. If there’s good info in both the audio and the text, you don’t want your audience to miss either.
• The text was probably the weakest component of this project. There were some grammar and style issues, some passive sentences and imprecise wordings.  Also, I would have liked to read more about money, volume of food and quantitative descriptions of the program or its impact — and less about changes in procedure.
• The map was very well done and appropriately used for the information in the story. Good caption on the map and on each item’s window.
• Lilly and Mandelkehr  also showed an excellent ability to find the “best available” solution to problems. They were smart to insert a JPG of the map and also very smart to link the JPG as well as the text caption. And they demonstrated resourcefulness in your ability to embed the Soundslides. More than any technical proficiency, these problem-solving skills are important in all forms of journalism.

I’m writing for college students a book about online journalism. The book connects the traditional elements and values of journalism with new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences. It will start with a discussion of online news values and elements and the unique characteristics of the online news audience. Then it’ll take readers through the gamut of digital media skills and tools, and wrap up with a section that talks about how to make sensible use of the tools to create journalism that’s more engaging and relevant.

But… what should I call it? Please vote below and then leave any comments here.

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You can read my notes about their work at http://www.ncdropout.org/node/415
or visit the site’s homepage at http://www.ncdropout.org.

Among the pieces I’ve enjoyed the most are the online journalism tutorials that the students themselves created based on their own experiences hashing through their first efforts and multimedia, interactive, on-demand news story telling. You can see their tutorials here.

The Daily Tar Heel is preparing for a massive run on student newspapers tomorrow, and is asking that souvenir seekers take only one free copy.

But this also from the paper: “We ask that our readers be on the lookout for this, as you have in the past, and call our office at 962-1163 or e-mail dth@unc.edu if you believe you are witnessing the theft of the DTH.”

Print value = permanence and when demand exceeds supply (of both content and newsprint).

Online value = Interactivity. I’ll be curious to see whether Twitter is lit up more with reports of newspaper theft or reports on which newsboxes are getting refilled. Also, watch for amateur photo and video from Franklin Street tonight to beat anything done by professional media.

Of course, this is all moot if UNC doesn’t win, so GO HEELS!

(And, yes, this post is pure Google bait.)

More here.

When a bomb threat ousted The Daily Tar Heel staff from its office on deadline Sunday night, editor Allison Nichols turned to Twitter. Nothing new there, but check this out — she used Twitter to try to discredit a false rumor being spread on Facebook that there was a gunman loose on campus.

Nichols and her staff used social media not only to distribute news, but to monitor it. Because they were savvy at doing both she was able to let her audience know what to fear and what not to fear. That’s journalism.

Oddly enough, e-mail was the big loser Sunday night. The University sent out their alert only after their hand was forced by the DTH’s own breaking news alert. Neither, however, sent an email saying the coast was clear. And because I wasn’t monitoring social media on Sunday night, when I logged in to my email and went to the DTH Web site on Monday morning, I was left wondering whether the bomb scare was still developing.

So, Twitter beats Facebook beats e-mail. Ready? 1-2-3…