Can cannabis help address the opioid crisis? What is Northeastern University’s relationship with the environment? What about the university’s role in gentrification? And what is the future of digital storytelling?

Those are the themes of four new publications launched last week by undergraduate students in my course, “Digital Storytelling and Social Media,” at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. In groups, these young reporters used maps, timelines, podcasts, videos and interviews to probe these questions.

And they reported it all directly into email newsletters.

In the space of a few weeks, they conceptualized, audience tested, branded, reported and shipped their newsletters – “The Exit Drug,” “Northeastern’s Environment & Health Unearthed,” “NEU Impact” and “Testing Ground” – and will be creating two more issues before we adjourn for the summer.

I wanted to share a set of guidelines that I hope might help others develop similar courses.

Logos and themes for the email newsletter campaigns that students designed. (Photo: StoryBench)

Why a newsletter? Why not a blog?

Many of the same learning outcomes can be expected from a course designed around blogging, sure. But I see some added value in the newsletter format – and not just because they’re hot. Students learn the design process, how to A/B test subject and headlines, how to grow and segment audience lists, and how journalism should treat the highly personal email inbox.

Let the Students Choose Their Own Beat

The main ingredient to this course is letting the groups self-select along shared interests. I send around a poll on the first week of classes asking students to choose one of the following themes: 1) politics, 2) science, health and the environment, 3) criminal and social justice, 4) media or 5) other. The poll helps me group the students by a broad beat. The following week, I have them brainstorm – using sticky notes and whiteboards – and focus their ultimate newsletter theme.

Do User Interviews

Next, they head to the streets – or the dining hall or the library – to interview prospective readers, understand their news diets and figure out what they want to know about the themes they’ve chosen. The groups first develop a list of questions and an online poll to gather research on their audience – as well as build a list of email addresses. After the first newsletter ships, they repeat this process, continually iterating and improving their product. Encourage them to add friends and family to the email list. Reward the group with the largest reader list or highest open rate.

Have a Hands-On ‘Lab’ Section

We meet twice a week, and the first 100-minute class is reserved for dissecting case studies of digital journalism practices – from newsletter strategies to social media tactics to digital reporting tools to audience engagement – with the occasional guest speaker. The second weekly class meeting is designed as a “lab” section where students work on their newsletters, peer edit work, help each other find sources and learn new tools. “Ship day” is hectic with last-minute drafts and Mailchimp formatting issues, but it’s a relief for all once the newsletters are shipped.

Start the Reporting Early

As with any undergraduate journalism class, it’s tough to get sources to return emails or jump on the phone with students. Three weeks before the newsletter ships, I have students contact at least three sources for their story by email. I encourage students to send me drafts of email interview requests, questions, outlines and, of course, their stories – early and often.

Students in Aleszu Bajak’s Digital Storytelling and Social Media class at Northeastern University plan their email newsletter storytelling in groups. (Photo: StoryBench)

Make Sure to Learn New Digital Tools

On top of all the best practices, case studies and discussions, find space to let the groups tinker with new tools and consider whether or not they’re appropriate for the story they’re telling. Tools like Carto, Google My Maps, JuxtaposeJS, TimelineJS, StorymapJS, Chartbuilder, Google Sheets, Canva, Piktochart, Infogram and Giphy have all been popular. Make extra time during office hours to help students out with these tools.

*I ran the same class last semester and those newsletters – “Beneath the Blindfold” (on campus social justice), “Cortechs” (on psychology and technology), “College Town” (on college sports in Boston), and “Lolitics” (a satirical take on national politics) – were equally impressive.

Storybench’s editor is Aleszu Bajak, a science journalist and former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is an alum of Science Friday, the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, and is passionate about breaking down the divide between journalists, developers and designers.

The post How to Design a Journalism Course Around Email Newsletters appeared first on MediaShift.

I discovered content marketing in 2015. The media outlet I co-founded in 2011 in Ecuador, GK, was going through a crisis: We were having trouble selling advertising because some of our news coverage was controversial, and an initial investment we’d won was almost gone.

At about that time, the head of the communication department of an automobile brand called and asked: “Is there a way that I could have content on my site that’s as well written as the content on GK?”

GK.city website

The question was almost a challenge. After meeting with our future client, we found the answer to our problems: content marketing. At first, we were uncomfortable even saying the words; we were journalists first. But as we started thinking creatively, we realized how we could use our reporting and writing skills to do content marketing. Producing content for clients became the income source that allowed us to continue doing what we love the most: journalism.

Then, Janine Warner and Mijal Iastrebner told me about their plans to launch an online school this month as part of their non-profit dedicated to supporting Spanish-language digital media publishers in the U.S., Latin America and Spain. This part of SembraMedia was going to help entrepreneurial journalists build more sustainable businesses. I thought telling the story of our journey, by creating and teaching a content marketing class, would be a great way to contribute and show other journalists how content marketing could help them develop a new revenue source for their media outlets.

Breaking New Ground With Online, Spanish Focus

While I started preparing the class, I realized SembraMedia’s online education concept had a cooperative spirit and gave me the chance to share important skills and insights about entrepreneurial journalism, especially those that no one else has offered in Spanish.

SembraMedia’s Online School website

I knew one of the most important things I could share in the class was our story. I remembered how much GK’s founder, José María León, and I struggled years ago when we first started searching for new income sources, and how we went from writing four content marketing pieces per month to managing an entire digital content marketing agency with a team that includes a manager, a creative writer, a community manager, an illustrator and a designer.

To design my course, my first challenge was to sum up the steps it took to create an agency and transform it into a class. Telling part of the story of how it started was necessary, but I also wanted to include information about the tools we use, how we built the team and how we managed to keep GK on track while working at the agency.

Details Behind Distance Course Design

Writing the script for the class was not a problem. I’ve always worked as a reporter, writer or editor in print and digital media, so I enjoyed that part of the process.

The next part, however, was the real challenge: transforming my scripts into video lessons. I’ve never been a video person. In fact, I think I’m terrible in front of the camera. But to create the class, I got to use my own camera with no one else around.

I recorded myself over and over until I felt comfortable with the results. Then, I worked to make it better during the editing process. Finally, I created a list of links and activities students could to do after each video lesson to reinforce the lessons and give them a chance to put theory into practice.

These kinds of complementary materials are available in every SembraMedia class, and the practical exercises and resources help students apply what they learn to their own media businesses.

Gaining Professionally Through Building an Online Course

Creating courses for SembraMedia’s new online school was an enriching experience because it involved writing, recording, editing and seeking out simple, but extremely useful, tools such as CuePrompter. Ultimately, I realized the process of creating the class was a learning experience itself.

Isabela Ponce’s course website

Though I don’t think of myself as a great speaker, I really enjoyed sharing what I’d learned in my own business with other journalism entrepreneurs. When I give lectures or workshops, I always start with a premise in my mind: to be as generous as I can be. I do this because I want my students to learn something new and useful.

What Was Gained From Putting Entrepreneurial Journalism Online

In the end, I was happy with the result because I know how helpful this course would have been for me during my years in journalism school. Other instructors in the school have had similar experiences, including Fabiola Torres, one of the co-founders of Ojo Público, a Peruvian investigative journalism site. Torres is also an International Center for Journalists Fellow and SembraMedia’s ambassador in Peru.

“This school is necessary because as journalists we have not had the academic training in management or finances,” Torres shared with me via WhatsApp. “No one teaches us how to transform our ideas into a viable project. I think it is great to have this new online school where journalists can learn the kinds of skills we need to build successful media businesses.”

Fabiola and I share the experience of journalists throughout Latin America. Our journalism education never covered the business skills we now need to run our own digital media sites.

Although I’m enthusiastic about content marketing, I know it won’t work for all of the journalists who create independent media sites, yet with a variety of classes, journalists can find the revenue streams that allow them to practice journalism without compromising their integrity.

As the founder of an independent media site myself, I hope others can use my course or others to expand their understanding of entrepreneurial journalism, and that it’s not only about innovating and being creative 24/7 with your editorial projects. It’s about finding new ways of generating revenue so you can continue to publish for years to come.

Isabela Ponce Ycaza is the co-founder and editor of GK, a media outlet based in Ecuador that focuses on producing long-form journalism and providing context to complex narratives. The stories on the site include innovative narratives that range from video and podcasts to interactive card stacks and gaming apps. Prior to founding GK, Isabela worked for some of the largest traditional media organizations in Ecuador, including El Comercio, Revista Vistazo and El Telégrafo. She also serves as SembraMedia’s content director and ambassador in Ecuador.

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Awareness that data journalism is a serious and valuable part of contemporary journalism has well and truly dawned. There are — and hopefully always will be — inventive front-runners finding new ways to fulfill journalism’s time-honored mission, while also using the latest tools available. But, what has been slower is the induction of these trailblazers’ key ideas into the curriculum of everyday journalism education. And this is no small thing.

This was my dilemma in early 2016. My way forward was research. I wrote an academic paper that involved reviewing the literature and interviewing 35 other Australian journalism academics about what they were doing about the problem. What I learned, in brief, was that I was not alone, and there were tools and techniques that could help effectively bring data into journalism curricula.

Translating the Profession to Education

Like many journalism educators, I was initially employed by a university because I had worked as a journalist for many years and could bring real-world experiences into the classroom.  I’ve been doing this for a decade, and the fundamentals of journalism haven’t changed that much.

But data journalism presents a bundle of new challenges. I don’t have lived experience of being a data journalist to draw on, and neither do my colleagues. Data journalism is all-at-once the coolest, hardest and fastest changing kind of journalism there is, and that’s a hard thing to suddenly become competent enough in to stand up and teach. And yet that’s my job: to train people to be the journalists the future needs.

(Photo: Getty Images by MicrovOne)

In my research, participants agreed (almost unanimously) that up-skilling was an issue. Very few could access funding to bring in experts to teach students or support staff. Most were trying to cram their own up-skilling into their already overflowing workloads and puzzling over what specifically they should dedicate their limited up-skilling time to learning. Should it be Tableau, or more Excel, or coding or testing data scrapers, or data visualization tools?

The next ugliest problem was squeezing it into crammed curricula, already bursting at the seams because of pressure to produce graduates who can work on every platform.

Then, there are the students themselves. They have a mix of skill levels, which is tricky enough, but in this case, the mix is due largely to a fascinating phenomenon called “math aversion.” It’s a social curse and I, for one, would love to see it being tackled at its roots.

Diving Deep Into Math Aversion

In the paper, I cite researchers who have looked more deeply into it and have come to the conclusion that in some cultures, people are encouraged early on to think of themselves as “number people” or “word people,” and that this persists through life and leads to some having an actual aversion to numbers.

(Photo: Getty Images by NIpitphand)

My own data journalism course runs in the August-November semester, and in 2016 and 2017, I tackled this issue by making the first class about math aversion. We talked about it, confessed to having it and made a pact to deal with it as if we were in recovery mode, feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I took heed of what others in my study said, in comments like: “I map everything step-by-step, so they don’t get frightened,” and “We have to find workarounds like online percentage converters.”

It’s an approach that, according to the student feedback at the end of semester, is working, but it means that our exploration of the intricacies of cutting-edge data journalism is minimal for now. Yet, we are laying the groundwork, and by tackling the fears, we are setting people up for lifetimes of learning.

Blended Learning to Teach Data

Other helpful advice that emerged from the study was to be bold about blended learning. One of my respondents said she required students to complete Lynda.com’s Excel Five-Day Challenge before starting her course, and another said she encouraged students to use Lynda.com when they were stuck.

In my own course, I started offering a few points in return for a completion certificate from a Lynda.com Excel course of their choice. This was a good precursor to our other Excel-based activities, as it allowed those lacking the basics to get them, while students who knew the basics could build on their skills. While not all universities subscribe to Lynda.com, it’s a good resource for those that do, and there are many other similar resources available online.

An Expanding Notion of Data Journalism

The key insight that came from the literature review section of the study was that data journalism is clearly not just one thing. Drawing on the conclusions from a number of studies that looked at the kind of data journalism that was being practiced and published around the world, distinctions can be made between decorative data visualization; journalism demonstrating mature quantitative literacy; and the geekier hacking/coding end of things.

At the point of publication, these things can conflate, like when hacked data is presented in an infographic, but as skills for incorporation into a course, it can be useful to distinguish them.

My study found most of the data journalism being taught was at the visualization end, and very little of it was at the hacking/coding end. But as we enter 2018, I suspect that the space is moving fast and changing.

(Photo: Getty Images by Delices_89)

Data scraping software is proliferating, there’s now a Chrome extension and several apps available that make it possible to go to a website and pick elements you want to harvest into an Excel sheet. This can be done on campus in a single tutorial class, yielding some fresh data to sort and find stories in.

In another single class, pivot tables can be introduced and mastered, thanks to handy online tutorials. All that is required is the will, a staff member who has up-skilled enough to know how and a good data set.

In the meantime, my message to others interested in the progress of data journalism in the academy is that we are working on it. We are talking to each other and sharing success and failure stories, as well as teaching materials. There will be a special issue of Asia Pacific Media Educator on the topic coming out in June 2018. If you would like to contribute an article or commentary to it, please email me. The deadline is Feb. 16, 2018.

Kayt Davies is head of the journalism major at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. She has worked as a business journalist at The West Australian, on international news at Visnews (London), and edited community newspapers, magazines and online news services. Her PhD was an ethnographic study of women’s magazine editors. She has been awarded two Vice Chancellor’s citations for innovative teaching and an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Award, and Davies’ research interests include using journalism as an academic research methodology, the use of IHL to protect conflict reporters, and the pedagogical challenges presented by the rise of data journalism.

The post Why Teaching Data Journalism is a Challenge at Most Universities appeared first on MediaShift.

As a Pakistani settled in Melbourne, I was baffled. How could this Australian university-run news website have special reports from Pakistan? RMIT Senior Lecturer Alexandra Wake, a participant in my research project on trends in Australian journalism education, explained it was the product of an international collaboration between RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), University of Peshawar (Peshawar, Pakistan), and University of Stanford (Stanford, Calif, USA).

International collaborations like this one, as well as those with indigenous groups and across various regions of the country, are driving Australian journalism education right now. Additional key shifts include an emphasis on entrepreneurship, adaptation to a changing industry and a focus on indigenous cultures, all of which help students build connections in a global society.

How International Collaboration Worked

The students from Melbourne and Peshawar had a joint classroom via Skype and worked together on news stories. As a first-year course, the stories weren’t that refined, but the learning that happened was steep, and not just in regard to news reporting skills.

“The students were confused what a tea man was doing serving tea in the classroom,” Wake said, laughing.

More than surface cultural differences, the students also learned how difficult simple things can be in a different region. Even for Wake, who has worked in the Middle East, gaining a deeper understanding of regional issues was eye-opening.

She recalled approving a student’s story proposal on polio immunization by mutual consent from her counterpart in Peshawar, Altaf Khan. Shortly thereafter, she learned that Pakistani social health workers had been targeted by the Taliban. Covering stories about immunization wouldn’t exactly have been safe.

According to Wake, Australian students learned a lot about the socio-political culture of Peshawar and the geopolitical situation of Pakistan. They also became aware of the difference in news reporting in Melbourne and in Peshawar. Furthermore, they developed ties with journalism students in Pakistan, contributing to their understanding of the world and perhaps providing them with more empathetic and rationalized perspectives.

Expanding Collaborative Learning Opportunities

In the past five years or so, other interesting collaborative learning projects have happened in Australian journalism education. Perhaps the largest of these is UniPollWatch project.

It was developed and facilitated in 28 Australian universities, and the main theme was coverage of Australian federal elections in 2016. Participant academics had flexibility to select their own student cohort, and then developed their own project design and assessment evaluation. The result was a plethora of student journalism stories from different parts of Australia. These stories came from students at different levels, using different kinds of writing and platforms, with different takes on the election.

As an example of extensive collaborative learning, this project, like others, included the compulsory elements for journalism in the contemporary job market: writing, data collection, interview techniques, building relationships with sources and use of technology.

An Emphasis on the Entrepreneurial, Indigenous

A digital-era addition to this classic skill set is entrepreneurship. Since 2012, there have been approximately 3,000 journalism job cuts in Australia, so knowledge of developing marketing plans, attracting target audiences and budgeting are essentially survival tactics. There is a constant struggle with a lack of job security, and journalism academics understand students need entrepreneurial skills to be successful in the field.

Most of the Australian journalism programs now have embedded training for entrepreneurial skills in their teaching, and as Peter English (University of Sunshine coast, Queensland) aptly put it: “We try to prepare them for what’s going to happen in newsrooms, but we also give them skills that would help them if they don’t end up in newsrooms.” Like most of his colleagues, English has extensive field experience and understands the importance of providing lifelong, employability skills to students, especially those that extend beyond classrooms on campus.

Students at The University of Melbourne work on campus in the Baillieu Library. (Photo by: Jeff Greenberg/UIG via Getty Images)

Field trips that use entrepreneurial skills, both national and international, are limited for students, but they are significantly instructive. Kayt Davies at Edith Cowen University has been involved in organizing field trips to regional Australian communities like Onslow, Kimberley and Kununurra. These trips often target areas with indigenous populations. For students, this learning is more intensive as they are in a different environment. I can visualize a group of young city dwellers, being challenged by trying to find a story in a hot, dusty, country town full of strangers.

Davies agreed: “This teaching is about how to enculturate people into being somewhere unfamiliar but behaving respectfully, without gawking or gossiping about the people.” She mentions that students work with integrity, make friends and work their way through community. This has allowed her projects to gain trust within these regional townships over time.

Similarly, Saba Bebawi (UTS, Sydney) and Andrew Dodd (formerly at University of Swinburne, Melbourne) have been taking students on a foreign correspondent study tour since 2015. Their students travel to the United Arab Emirates and Jordan to cover stories.

These are just a few examples from a growing number of such journalistic study trips. According to Dodd, if “you can write, and you can create a picture, and you can structure an argument, and you can record an interview and package stuff and put it on social media and you can find an audience, you are employable.”

Preparing Students for Practical Possibilities

In my conversations with Australian journalism academics, I am struck by their sincerity toward equipping students with practical options for an uncertain industry. Initiatives for collaborative learning and field trips are time consuming.  They require extensive planning, unaccounted extra workload, much preparation, proper funding and the ability to ensure student security in places which might not be comfortable. In spite of these challenges, Australian journalism education continues to evolve and prosper in these areas.

I suspect the adrenaline rush from such modes of teaching is quite powerful.

“It was a magnificent class. I left that class each week on a high note,” Wake said about her joint teaching class.

That is exactly what a teaching philosophy should be: first, ensuring that you and your students are efficiently learning what is needed; second, ensuring that all involved understand the goal; and third, that all learners are being fueled by such a vital purpose.

Wajeehah Aayeshah is a curriculum designer at the Curriculum Design Lab (Faculty of Arts) at The University of Melbourne and a self-described academic geek who loves traveling, photography, drinking tea and collecting stories. When she isn’t busy working on her research, she likes writing articles and short narratives. As a Pakistani Muslim living in Melbourne, Australia, her perspective comes from intricate and diverse cultural experiences. Feel free to contact her at wajeehah@gmail.com or @waj_aay.

The post Australian Journalism Education Fueled by International Collaboration, Field Experiences appeared first on MediaShift.

Journalism fellowships are great opportunities for established journalists both to gain a professional support system and to grow as professionals by working on new, innovative projects.

Connor Sheets

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute is currently accepting proposals from individuals and organizations who want to develop projects that can better journalism. RJI offers three options: residential fellowships, during which Fellows live and work in Columbia, Mo., for 8 months; non-residential fellowships which allow Fellows to work remotely; and institutional Fellowships that allow people to continue to work in their workplace. Fellows get stipends that range from $20,000 up to $80,000 for the year.

The Institute wants to tackle big problems and offer big opportunities with practical approaches, RJI Associate Director Mike McKean explained. He said applications should describe projects that can be completed, or see substantial, measurable process, within a year’s time.

The Fellowships are competitive, with RJI typically receiving a couple hundred applications. We spoke to several Fellows from years past to see what advice they have for prospective candidates interested in applying for the 2018-2019 class.

1) Find a need.

Connor Sheets is an investigative reporter at AL.com. As part of his 2016-2017 Fellowship, he created techniques to help members of local, Alabama communities pitch stories they believe should be covered in the news.

“I knew that I was ready to apply for a fellowship because I saw a clear need – namely that many small and local newsrooms would benefit from a simple, inexpensive way to keep better tabs on their communities – and knew that I had an interesting idea about how to help address it,” Sheets said.

2) Be passionate about your project.

Conrad Jungmann

Sheets also said his application was made stronger by the fact that he was passionate about his proposed tool, and had an idea of how to bring it to fruition.

Conrad Jungmann, who led an institutional fellowship for LION Digital Media in 2014-2015, said RJI recognizes projects that have both merit and passion. He advises that prospective applicants stay true to their own journalistic mission.

“If you believe your project will have an impact on journalism and/or the business of journalism, make sure your application shows it,” he said.

3) Be clear in your application.

The more thoroughly researched and clearly written an application is, the better the likelihood it will be accepted. Linda Austin, an editor and educator who is a 2017-2018 Fellow, advises that applicants do their homework before applying. They should research what’s already been done and how their idea is different.

Linda Austin

“In addition to demonstrating commitment, that research will result in a stronger application,” she said.

Another piece of advice from Austin: Have a trusted colleague look over the application before submitting it. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can identify key points that are missing from a proposal.

Barrett Golding, a web developer and executive producer of NPR’s Hearing Voices, created a suite of open-source WordPress plugins designed for use by journalists during his 2015-2016 Fellowship. He said that during the interview process, applicants are asked tough questions, which gives them more opportunities to expand on their written proposals.

“Show them on your application what you want to do, why it’s worth doing, and why you’re the one to do it,” Golding said.

RJI will understand what candidates are proposing if they propose it understandably, he said.

4) Go for it!

Sheets said his biggest piece of advice is to just go for it.

 When he applied for the Fellowship, he felt like he didn’t fit the profile of someone who might be awarded a fellowship as prestigious as RJI’s. But he believes that the strength of his proposal, combined with his passion, is what moved RJI to choose him for the Fellowship that year.

Barrett Golding

“If you believe you have a good enough concept, as well as the time, dedication and drive to spend much of a whole year building something really great, then you should go ahead and apply,” he said. “It certainly couldn’t hurt.”

David Cohn was a 2010-2011 Fellow, and is now the senior director at Advance Digital. During his fellowship, he worked on his innovative Spot.Us project, called “a first in crowdfunded journalism in the United States.”

Cohn echoed Sheets’ sentiments – there are zero reasons not to apply, and interested candidates who don’t apply will regret it.

“Maybe you’ll find out that you can’t do the fellowship for one reason or another, and that happens,” he said. “But if you can dream it working, then why not apply to make it happen?”

David Cohn

And Austin has advice for individuals whose proposals are not accepted, too. She recommends those applicants ask why they weren’t accepted, because they may get advice that could refashion the proposal to make it stronger. She also said it’s worth investigating multiple funding options for a project.

“If you believe in an idea, don’t give up,” she said.

For even more advice, read our story from last year about how past Fellows succeed.

The deadline to apply to the 2018-2019 class of Fellows is Jan. 31, 2018 so be sure to apply today!.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post 4 Key Steps To Getting an RJI Fellowship appeared first on MediaShift.

That’s my conclusion after overseeing the publication of “Master Class: Teaching Advice for Journalism and Mass Communication Instructors,” a new book produced by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication standing committee on teaching, which I’ve chaired for the past four years.

It’s no secret that journalism remains in a state of upheaval, with many media organizations struggling to find new, and profitable, business models that will sustain their operations. What often gets underplayed – or downright ignored – is how fast academia is adapting to those changes.

“Master Class” addresses the issues facing today’s journalism instructors in a way that the last book on teaching in our field, which came out in 1992, would have never imagined.

Here are some of the major takeaways that came out of the two years it took to put the book together:

1. Technology is the future

If your program is not teaching the technology that comes along with producing journalism, then it is in danger.

Many schools are now exposing their students to the best search engine optimization techniques and using social media. But many schools are woefully behind in these areas. (Hint: Look to see whether your school has a LinkedIn page and how many of your school’s instructors are on Twitter.)

And “technology” means more than showing students how to use a content management system or download and edit videos. Today’s journalism student needs to be exposed to how virtual reality and artificial intelligence can be used to help tell stories. They also need basic coding skills.

The leading journalism programs are training their students to build media apps, and to download and massage data in ways that help tell stories. They are teaching students to use technology to attract audiences that may have never been exposed to content that they want and find useful.

2. Instruction is moving online

Many of academia’s top journalism programs have online master’s degrees that cater to professionals that need to upgrade their skills and understanding of how mass media works. That’s good and serves the industry.

(Photo: Getty Images)

The next step is moving more undergraduate education, and perhaps even doctoral education, online. As our universities and colleges struggle with limited classroom space and resources, the solution is to put more journalism education on the internet. It’s how most journalism is delivered today.

To be sure, not all undergraduate students thrive in an online teaching environment. But today’s millennial student wants flexible learning, and journalism can easily be taught with online tools. I’ve been teaching one section of our introductory newswriting class online now for more than a decade, and I see more and more skills courses moving online.

3. Non-tenured instructors in the classroom

The percentage of non-tenured, or non-tenure track instructors in the classroom is increasing, particularly at state universities receiving smaller slices of the budget each year.

As a result, many programs are hiring lecturers and contract professors from the local market to teach many of their skills courses. There’s a positive to this move in that professionals have recent experience. But this leads to higher turnover among instructors, and could cause the quality of education to decrease.

Some journalism programs are also partnering with local media organizations to have reporters and editors teach their classes at no expense to the university. The media organization gets exposed to the students and is able to recruit the best ones to come work for it after graduation. And the program saves money that can be spent elsewhere.

4. More schools have become content producers

The “teaching hospital” model of journalism education espoused by the Knight Foundation has taken hold at many journalism programs, which are now having their students produce content – either in the form of print or video – distributed to the local media for them to use. Some media are even providing spaces in their shrunken newsrooms for the students to work.

These classes are typically capstone courses for seniors that require them to cover a beat as well as market their stories to the local media organizations. The students get published clips while the media gets cheap (often free) content. As an example, last year I started the North Carolina Business News Wire.

In some cases, this puts the journalism program in competition with the student newspaper, which can be a tricky relationship, especially if the newspaper is not independent of the university.

I’d like to see a future where programs start selling advertising on a website where this content is posted, allowing them to generate revenue that can be put back into the education of journalism students. It would also allow programs to experiment with journalism business models themselves.

5. The lecture is not dead, but it’s on life support

This should go without saying, but it’s no longer functional for a journalism instructor to simply walk into a classroom and spend 45 minutes lecturing about AP style or the inverted pyramid to students. The millennial student will zone out and start scanning Snapchat, Twitter and other social media on their phone.

The best journalism instructors today incorporate video, gifs and other technology into their class time. Whether we like it or not, today’s journalism student also wants to be entertained. If you can get their attention by using new and unusual teaching strategies, then they’re more likely to pay attention to the importance of checking facts.

I’m bullish about the future of journalism, and I’m bullish about the future of journalism education. In the past few years, I’ve taught myself – and my students – how to do basic coding, create a website, produce email newsletters, shoot and download video, and build an audience on Twitter.

And I’m still teaching my students the journalism basics I learned more than 30 years ago as well.

Chris Roush is the Walter Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism and the chair of the AEJMC Standing Elected Committee on Teaching. He was the School’s senior associate dean from 2011 to 2015 and director of the master’s program from 2007 to 2010.

The post 5 Takeaways on the State – and Future – of Journalism Education appeared first on MediaShift.

Those of us who teach often tell students that learning journalism is useful for many professions. The same might be said of teaching journalism.

Like other journalism instructors, I increasingly teach the skills and values of our profession to non-journalists. Much of that demand comes from scientists and researchers under the gun to more directly communicate the knowledge they create.

New doctoral students acknowledge the need to publish in academic journals. But they also want to reach more than just journal readers. They want their science to inform the public and policymakers.

The motive can simply be to bolster their shot at getting grants. Funders want research with impact. Communicating it is one way of making sure that it does.

The lesson here: Teaching journalism is as useful of a skill as journalism itself. It offers opportunity outside of our normal sphere.

A Chance to Travel, Teach Journalism

For me, opportunity meant teaching scientists and journalists in Malawi, Rwanda and Peru for almost a month this past summer.

Here’s how that fell into place: In addition to my work at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University, I’m on a USAID project at MSU that fosters food systems innovation. I have the overly grand and certainly non-journalistic title of director of translational scholars for the Global Center for Food Systems Innovation. It’s a gig I was asked to pick up because of some other communications work I had done with campus researchers.

Part of that job involves guiding journalism and other students to report on food system challenges and solutions. We report on a multimedia platform called The Food Fix.

Another part involves teaching faculty and student researchers affiliated with the center to do a better job of explaining what they do.

African journalists line up for editing by author David Poulson of SEJ, who traveled to Malawi, Rwanda and Peru last summer to help researchers and journalists explain agricultural issues to the public. (Photo: Flora Nankhuni)

Almost two years ago, I was involved in the MSU innovation center’s initiative to stimulate creative research at Malawi’s Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, or LUANAR.

When I first traveled to Lilongwe, I met people working on another USAID project doing what I more typically do – training journalists to better report on agriculture. We decided to merge efforts.

I became part of a team that worked with the LUANAR innovation scholars, building within them the desire and the capacity to communicate their research. But I also met with Malawi journalists, helping them make sense — and journalism — out of the research we exposed them to.

We worked separately with both groups before following an abbreviated script of a typical Society of Environmental Journalism conference. We brought the journalists to LUANAR to meet with the researchers, who by then were practiced in explaining their work. The reporters took mini-tours of research facilities. And we hosted a panel of journalists and university officials to discuss the challenges of communicating research to the public.

Then, we brainstormed story ideas and approaches with the journalists and provided feedback and edits.

Both groups benefited. So did the public. The journalists produced stories that would not have otherwise been reported. We even ran some on our Food Fix news service.

Telling Stories to Attract Support

From Malawi, I went to Kilgali, Rwanda, and then on to Lima, Peru, to teach at two workshops for the International Potato Center. I worked with that center’s economists, geneticists and ecologists after Hugo Campos, the group’s director of research, visited the MSU campus last spring.

His researchers have great stories to tell — the center won the 2016 World Food Prize, an international award recognizing people who advance human development by improving the quality and quantity of food.  Campos is convinced that his scientists and researchers need to tell those stories to attract support.

I was incredibly lucky this summer to meet great people with great stories, and to travel through some fascinating countries.

It’s fulfilling work, hopefully with lasting impact. I still do an occasional free edit for the journalists I met. And researchers have sent me articles, presentations and even poetry they’ve created subsequent to those workshops. It’s creative stuff that communicates.

Lessons Learned from Summer Opportunities

I’m leading some regional research communications workshops yet this fall. I’m unsure if I’ll ever again have the opportunities I had this summer.

But here are a few lessons I learned that can maximize your chances of finding similar opportunities:

• Write. The need for good writing of grant applications and reports is significant. Focus your skills toward helping others get grants.
• Network. My path to international development involved extensive source-building. I didn’t realize I was doing that because it is second nature to journalists.
• Learn. Attend a few of the excellent science communication training programs out there and borrow their methods. They’re generous. Just give them credit.  Read a few books.
• Say yes. I almost didn’t meet with Campos because I thought I had little in common with a potato geneticist. But we talked about narrative structures.  And the next thing I knew, I had an invitation to Rwanda and Peru.
• Take chances. I’ve led workshops where scientists wrote poetry, performed improv, pretended to be reporters, explained their dearest research project in less than a minute. It’s fun. It works.

Such work is not independent journalism. And that is our core constituency. We shouldn’t stray far from that. The world needs journalism and lots of it.

But fostering in non-journalists reporting skills and values like accuracy, fairness, transparency and engagement advances the function of journalism. It’s a valid use of our expertise.

Journalism is hard. Teaching it is yet another kind of hard. If you can do both, you’ve got mad skills that are in demand.

David Poulson is the senior associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. He teaches environmental, investigative, computer-assisted and public affairs reporting. Prior to arriving at MSU in 2003, he was a reporter and editor for 22 years, most of it covering the environment.

The post Why Teaching Journalism to Non-Journalists is a Noble Cause appeared first on MediaShift.

His ideas are rooted in his father’s “aspirational relationship to the news.” Watson said his dad, a teacher like many in his family, believed media should be more than information passively consumed by an audience – it should help set a course for the future.

“News and culture and information can actually broaden you, and motivate you, and provoke you and really encourage you to try things you otherwise may not think about doing,” Watson said.

“There are more consumers who have more access to information and are therefore a more discerning, hungrier and more diverse audience,” Watson said. “I think that they aren’t simply up for having a handful of headlines regurgitated to them over and over again. … They want to see the world more broadly, they want what’s delivered to them to be not just a focus on today but a focus on what could happen tomorrow. They want things to be meaningfully global.”

Crafting News and Information for the Classroom

What this means for Watson and OZY.com is daily digests, original global reporting and a specific outreach to educators so students can engage with news. According to Watson, nearly a quarter of a million teachers and professors are now using OZY in the classroom.

“We find a lot of teachers and professors are assigning our presidential daily brief as a good daily way to keep their students up on what’s going on because it’s a fun and easy way for them to be current,” Watson said. “Then, we see them using other parts of OZY as a way to get their students not just to catch up but to look ahead.”

More recently, Watson and his team have launched OZY EDU, a section of the site built for educators to use OZY reporting as a tool in classrooms, along with companion teaching materials. This, again, was developed from the theory of following what an audience – in this case, students – need.

“Successful teachers and professors have to be able to use lots of different tools to reach, frankly, different kind of students,” Watson said. “I think you need to have something that’s not just smart but flavorful if you’re going to capture this generation.”

OZY EDU provides educators with a diversified tool kit through videos, podcasts, written stories, and the like, for teaching not only about the present but also in anticipation for what students will need to know about their future.

Working to Re-Imagine Journalism, Media

Watson has pulled some of this audience-based theory from his varied experiences in professional journalism – from the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press to roles on MSNBC and CNN – where he sometimes saw a resistance or sluggishness to change.

Watson and his team are working to step into a gap between what conventional media is doing and what today’s audience needs and wants, based on the premise of not just reporting the news that’s happening now but attempting to predict and cover what may come next.

“We’re in an incredibly tumultuous moment right now … no matter how you feel politically,” Watson said, noting such change has meant a fundamental revisiting of issues from nuclear weapons to health care to taxes to immigration.

This turbulent time means opportunity for Watson. He pointed to increased audience engagement, his innovative staff, and simply a “desire to be open and look around” as keys to the forward-thinking type of journalism that OZY hopes to employ, influencing mainstream conversations and decision-making with an eye to covering what may be the next big issue or debate.

Continuing the Conversation in a Civil Way

Before that future arrives, Watson’s other area of interest is facilitating civil debate on key issues, which dips again into both the journalistic and educational realms. His PBS show “Third Rail with OZY” tackles topics with guests from divergent viewpoints, who then have a constructive conversation.

“You need a place where people can talk, not just about the polite and politic, but frankly about the provocative and the difficult – the third rail, if you will — but it needs to be a conversation that doesn’t happen in a bubble and is not just happening between people who already agree with each other, or frankly people who disagree but who are just shouting at each other,” Watson said.

Though this modeling of civil discourse is not always easy, according to Watson, it’s “important work to invite people into the arena who aren’t all pundits and pollsters” to set an example that divisive issues can be discussed to a positive, and perhaps educational, end.

Regardless of the medium or permutation, Watson’s focus on adapting to audiences in both journalism and education is purposeful; he wants both learners and viewers to “see more of the world than you normally would, but in turn, maybe be more and do more, and that really has been OZY’s mantra.”

The post How OZY is Equipping Educators for Changing Media Audiences appeared first on MediaShift.

Students developed and pitched ideas for startups in artificial intelligence and media, while helping to bridge one important gap, like the gender gap, accessibility gap or rural / urban gap. The winning team was Team Mak, a group of women who pitched a startup called Context, a reading app for children with learning disabilities that adjusts the reading material depending on the disability of each child.

Coverage

How the Women’s Hackathon at WVU Tackled Diversity in AI, by Kassy Taylor, MediaShift

Hack the Gender Gap: A Woman’s Hackathon on Diversifying AI Begins in Media Innovation Center, by Kayla Gagnon, DA Online

WVU Reed College and MediaShift Aim to Diversify Artificial Intelligence, by Conor Griffith, Exponent Telegram

Trollbusters Founder Part of AI Panel at WVU Hackathon, by Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University

Hack the Gender Gap: A Women’s Hackathon on Diversifying AI at WVU, info page at MediaShift

Videos

All videos produced by WVU Reed College of Media:

Photos

Feedback

“I enjoyed the symposium and Hackathon. I would love to see more events like it at WVU and to participate in it again. I learned a lot and it will help me in my future.” – Caitlin Cuomo, WVU

“I loved being able to bring the Kanawha County Girls Who Code Club to the Hackathon. It was a valuable experience for the girls who got to see women in tech in action! Thank you so much for the invitation. We loved the experience!” – Emma Gardner

“I like the idea of running with the theme for women. AI was appropriate for our always-expanding world of technology. Anything related to those concepts going forward would be great!”

“In future events, I might keep it exclusively to college aged or slightly above participants. The age range in groups somewhat hindered my group’s progress.”

“I felt the students needed more time to develop their idea and presentation.”

The post Relive the Women’s Hackathon on Diversifying AI at WVU With Coverage, Video, Photos appeared first on MediaShift.

I ignored him. Every time. It didn’t matter how often he explained that understanding business was valuable or pointed out that if the journalism thing didn’t work out, I’d still be employable. My heart was set on being a reporter. Business sounded boring. Even, quite frankly, a little dirty.

Now I’m a journalism teacher, and even though I tell my students how the journalism industry is changing and how the “church and state” concept of separating the newsroom from the business side isn’t so strict anymore, I still don’t spend enough time on business.

That’s going to change. One weekend at MediaShift’s 5th Journalism School Hackathon at the University of North Texas made me realize what a disservice I’m doing to my students — and to journalism in general — by not exposing students more broadly to business principles.

For a day and a half in mid-October, we focused on the business of journalism at the Hackathon. Four-person student teams developed startup ideas for services, products or apps, and their focus was clear from their team names: Team Pingpong was sports-focused; Team Reflex Hammer meant health. Each team then got a revenue model, and students brainstormed, argued and created a business plan to pitch to judges Sunday afternoon. Faculty and professionals facilitated.

When I wasn’t facilitating, I was using information from the speakers and questions from the students to mentally redesign my classes. Here’s what we as journalism educators need to teach better:

Principles of Strategic Communications — Yes, PR

The two students I accompanied to the Hackathon zeroed in on this right away. They’re both journalism majors, and after the first day of the Hackathon, they discussed how little journalism they’d done in the previous 14 hours. “This was Gateway 3,” they agreed.

Gateway to Media 3 is a required class for all students in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications that focuses on storytelling from a strategic communications perspective. The students work in teams. They get a client from the community. The classroom examples are advertising, marketing and messaging.

Most of the j-students hate it. They’re thinking as I did when I was in their seats: PR? That’s the dark side.

But it’s not that simple. At the very least, students need to understand branding themselves through their social media, professional websites and/or portfolios. That takes a strategic mindset that is related to journalistic storytelling, but different.

“There’s so much thought that goes into who you are appealing to,” said Maggie Vanoni, a University of Oregon junior who was part of Team Pingpong. “The brainstorming. How to advertise. How to get people to work for you. Where do you see yourself? Who’s the target audience? How do you see yourself growing? I loved seeing how those things work.”

How to Work on a Team

When I was a student, I hated group projects. Now that I’m a teacher, I don’t assign them. Like a lot of nerdy students who grew up and found a home in academia, I was the person who ended up doing all of the work, and I didn’t want to be responsible for inflicting that on another generation of students.

Plus, I’m a writer. And an introvert. When I create something, I lock the door and sit by myself.

Many of my journalist colleagues and friends are wired in a similar fashion, and I see this in j-students, too. The conference rooms in our building are filled with advertising and public relations students. The j-students are hiding in the corners or in another building or in the corner of a coffee shop.

Journalists value independence. That’s often a strength, but it sometimes blinds us to the ways we can work together, whether that’s collaborating across newsrooms or within newsrooms.

“I really appreciated the ways that the conference pushed us out of our comfort zones,” said Sierra Webster, a University of Oregon junior who was part of Team Bocce, “but also showed us that we do have what it takes to pull something like this off.”

And it hurts final products when journalists, uncomfortable as part of a team and/or uncertain about business concepts, shy away from opportunities to get involved.

At the UNT Hackathon, participants work in groups to complete a innovative project — in two days. (Photo: HATCH Visuals)

One thing about the final projects stood out to me: All of the teams had journalism students, but none of them found a way to actually pay the people who were going to write the stories, take the photos and design the platforms.

Team Skateboard, for instance, which I facilitated, had a terrific idea about creating a website that would cover sports from a female perspective, not as an add-on to a website or brand that was primarily concerned with covering male athletes. The students knew they couldn’t raise enough money to pay writers, so they decided to hire college students who wanted experience.

Does that business model sound familiar? Does it make you cringe? It did to me, but I didn’t even consider arguing against it — when you’ve got basically a day to do your pitch, this strategy made sense. It would have made sense, from a business perspective, in any time frame: People are expensive. (I did strongly suggest a well-paid professional editor to cope with the copy and photos.)

We need journalists themselves to be in the conversations about funding models and startup costs. We need them to be fluent enough in business principles that they can argue for paying actual journalists – and articulate the value of it.

Principles of Human-Centered Design

The Hackathon began with a talk from Retha Hill, executive director of the Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School. She set the tone for the weekend by explaining human-centered design, and it was a great place to start for those of us who were journalists.

Here’s why: This strategic technique follows — for the most part — the way great journalists do their work, that is, interviewing people about how and why they do something, digging into their lives and asking why. Brainstorming ideas, not deliberating, but tossing them out. Narrowing the list. Selecting the best possible one.

What’s different is the way it starts: Select what Hill called a “pain point,” something that was difficult or problematic for people. She said it was important to not begin the process with your own idea: i.e., “I want to make an app that…” Rather, you need to ask questions that start, “How might we…”

This makes good business sense. And you know, it makes good journalism sense, too. Let’s not assume we know what the story is when we show up to report. Let’s listen to the people affected. Really listen. Let’s identify their pain points, not our editors’.

Not all of my journalism students are going to be entrepreneurs. And that’s OK, because they’ll surely be competing against one or consuming the content and stories produced by one.  Or, as Maggie said, “These are the people who are hiring us, so it’s better to know what they’re looking for.”

After all these years, it turns out that my dad was right. Again.

Lori Shontz teaches reporting and sports media at the University of Oregon, where she also runs Writing Central, a peer coaching center in the School of Journalism and Communication. She moved into the classroom after nearly 25 years in the newsroom, much of it in the sports department. Follow her at @lshontz.

The post Why We Need to Teach More Business Skills in the J-School Classroom appeared first on MediaShift.