Archive for the ‘N.C. Journalism’ Category
Budget Cuts Begin to Hurt
After extolling the virtues in post after post of UNC’s computer based training as a wonderful resource that’s free to every student, the University announced today that it would be shutting the site down on Feb. 28.
The move was done “in order to achieve the level of budget cuts currently mandated.”
The full announcement and address to send letters after the jump.
Site Critiques and Story Ideas
Our Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class is transitioning from the first to second phase of the semester, and I’ve blogged about it a bit more over at http://www.ibiblio.org/newsdesk/apples/sp09/blogs/ryan-thornburg
In the first phase, we’ve been cramming on learning more about the topic of dropouts in North Carolina and also cramming on learning the tools and techniques of online journalism. We’re now starting to think about some of our initial content creation.
In two blog posts, I summarize our critiques of other online news projects as well as our initial brainstorm of story ideas.
Cooperating Across Newsrooms
The newspaper partners for our Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class joined the students and I in Chapel Hill this week for a discussion about how a collaboration would work. I was interested in hearing about content ideas as well as logistics. I think we had an incredibly engaging and informative conversation about story ideas. Logistics seemed to be less of a concern.
Here are some of the angles to the dropout issue that our partners were interested in pursuing:
Case Study: Link Journalism With Publish2
I start every semester in my online news classes teaching students the fundamental concepts of HTML. Not primarily because I want them to know the technology, but because I want them to appreciate that for all the bells, whistles and buzzwords it is the lowly link that makes online journalism fundamentally different than offline journalism.
If journalism is a conversation, I tell them, the first key to being a good conversationalist is being a good listener. You’d never walk in to a party and just hijack the first conversation you come across. You listen, wait and figure out what you can add and how you can move the discussion. Putting this analogy in to practice with links from your site to another site is the first step in developing authentic conversational leadership.
After all, the man who invented the hyperlink also hypothesized this role for journalists.
This semester, we are putting this concept in to practice in the site we’re building for Public Affairs Reporting for New Media. Using Publish2, the students are getting to practice “link journalism.” The site is now live, and here’s how we’re starting to build it out.
How to Cover the Dropout Issue
Perhaps my biggest fear about the subject for this semester’s Public Affairs for New Media class is the danger of mission creep. We’re going to be covering the state’s dropout rate, which anyone who has spent any time with the issue will tell you is not a problem isolated to single moment in a child’s life.
Reading up on the issue, it seemed that people tackled the issue in one of two ways — either as a trailing indicator with roots in pre-kindergarten or as a leading indicator of difficulties that a person will have throughout his or her life staying out of jail, holding down a job, and maintaining a family.
So we run a real danger of trying to wrap our arms around a topic that seems to be correlated to lifelong problems that begin at birth persist throughout life.
On Monday, we’re hosting our newspaper partners in Chapel Hill. We’ll find out then how they see the issue playing out in their communities. But as I educate myself on the topic and have been discussing it this week with students, here are some of the questions I have.
My question to you: What would you like to know about North Carolina’s diploma dilemma? How would you like to see us cover the issue. I welcome your comments.
Online Class Discussions and Twittering Breaking News
Things were a little out of rhythm all day today, with a weird snow storm that couldn’t decide whether it did or did not want to close down UNC today.
The bad news is that I didn’t get a chance to have MDC’s Richard Hart host a discussion about the N.C. dropout rate. The good news is that I had a chance to run two good live experiments in online journalism.
Newsdesk, Day 1
The other class I’m teaching this semester is “Newsdesk,” a capstone convergence lab class for journalism students at UNC. Here’s the syllabus.
The idea of creating an online newsroom from the ground-up has been a bit of a tough sell. I have four takers this semester.
I’m most excited about the possibility of collaborating with other classes and other local media. There is also one national partnership I’m looking forward to announcing here soon.
We kicked things off today with a discussion of how people read news online and how it is different from the way they consume news in print. I’ll be blogging more about it over the next three months. You can follow along here.
Public Affairs Reporting for New Media: Day 1
The new semester kicked off this at 9:30 this morning in CA 132 with “Public Affairs Reporting for New Media,” a new APPLES service-learning class I’m teaching.
The goal: Partner with N.C. news organizations to create a set of multimedia, interactive news reports about the state’s high school dropout rate. And since part of the class’s mission is to be a public service, I’ll be blogging from now until May 2 about the lessons we learn.
Here’s the syllabus and here’s how the first day went …
Activist’s Death Takes Toll on Newspapers
If Chapel Hill had a patron saint of town-gown relations, it might have been Rebecca Clark. The 93-year-old woman was not only a leader in the area’s black community, but the mother of the late Doug Clark, who entertained generations of frat parties with his band, The Hot Nuts.
Ms. Clark died on Saturday. But the Triangle’s newspapers should ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
Leaders — Political and Editorial — Need to Work the Network
The News & Observer in Raleigh today picked up an op-ed I wrote about the need for winning political candidates to follow through on their gestures of online community connectivity. (Hat tip to WCHL for the idea…)
But this challenge isn’t unique to political leaders, it’s also one that journalists must meet and a gesture on which they are following through even less.
Hooked on the promise of the free advertising inventory generated by online comments, more and more newspaper Web sites are deploying some type of online discussion technology. What they aren’t deploying is the kind of human resources that are needed to foster and develop online conversations. Why do most comments on news articles follow Godwin’s Law? Because there is little or no authentic conversational leaders. There is no human being making connections between people and ideas and, um, fact.
Just look at this recent survey of online journalists in North Carolina — online community management ranked as the skill that these editorial staffers said was least important to their jobs.
Here are my quick thoughts on how news organizations should begin to approach online comments.
