They are not not consuming news; they are just getting it and sharing it in a completely new way.

I realized this when the Marjory Stoneman Douglas student journalists broadcasted live via Snapchat and Instagram as their school, friends and teachers were being attacked.  Despite horrific circumstances, those student journalists kept the tape rolling to share with the world what was going on in that school. As a result, these young people created a movement that originated and now is communicated with their peers and the world strictly online.     

This means, as teachers, we need to meet our students where they are – online, all the time. It is challenging because you must constantly change with the technology and what is popular with students, but that is the reality of our business, and I’ll show you how my journey to an online journalism instructor has evolved.

My, How Things Have Changed

I started teaching online media courses in late 2013.  Facebook had been around for a while, but Twitter and Pinterest were fledgling outliers. Instagram and Snapchat were practically still in the womb.  

Fast-forward JUST FIVE YEARS and social media tools have exploded in popularity for teens and young adults.  They use devices to communicate – with their friends, parents, teachers, employers. They use social media to maintain their social lives by “liking” and “following” photographs, celebrities and even causes.  Students also learn about the world – good and bad – because of social media.

At our recent college learning day, I attended the “bricks, clicks and teacher tricks” session on how to learn about communicating and collaborating with students.  We had “appy hour,” learned about teacher time savers and dazzling design, but I was floored that some colleagues still argued about “student responsibility” and “why they [students] expect email responses faster than 48 hours.”  

I thought: students barely even use email anymore, and if I had to wait 48 hours for an answer to my question about an assignment, I would go nuts!  I realized in the session that while some of these tools are great for teachers, they are not necessarily good for the students beyond the face-to-face classroom.  Tools like Kahoot and Go Soapbox may be cool in class, but they are not especially useful online. Teachers seem to fear Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter – for a number of reasons – but that is where the students are, and we need to be there, too.

Transitioning from Face-to-Face to Online

I teach the gamut of media courses – introduction to news reporting, writing for mass media, writing for social media and introduction to public relations.  I teach all of them online, except introduction to news reporting (for now).

At first, this was a real struggle.  I was trying to teach online courses like my face-to-face-classes.  I quickly learned this was not possible. Online students typically take this type of format because they need the flexibility. They often work full time and go to school.

Face-to-face students meet with area public relations professionals. Online students participated via Twitter Chat at #ValenciaPRChat. (Photo: Rebecca Newman)

For the last five years, I have changed, rearranged, restructured and learned a ton of new skills because I am trying to make the learning work for my students.  Students don’t read textbooks. They do not wait patiently for me to get back to them via email. But they do like clarity and consistency. They also like assignments that are interactive and challenge them to practice real-world skills.  How do you do this? The answer is, it is a work in progress, but it can be done. Here are a few tips:

1. Use the social media that students use:  Obviously I have boundaries, but social media tools really do make it easy to give students quick feedback when they need it.  I use Twitter in my classes since that’s what journalists use. I permit them to DM me with questions and comments, and my response time is actually far faster than traditional email.

2. Live Stream guest speaker events:  Twitter Live and Periscope are great tools for livestreaming events with professional speakers.  Use whatever tool is comfortable for you and where you have the most followers, but FYI – students are no longer using Facebook.  For these events, I collect my student questions ahead of time, so they can “ask” questions during the event, too.

Such a great day @valenciacollege hanging w/ these talented @orlandosentinel reporters. Thanks for sharing your experiences and caring for our community! #WomenInMedia pic.twitter.com/0KYOdsVNSt

— Rebecca Newman (@ProfessorBec) February 14, 2018

3. Study the apps and available technology:  Do you want to hear students practicing interviews with sources?  Have them record it and send it to you in an audio file. Want to have students build their “professional brand”?  Give them an assignment building a LinkedIn profile. Want your social media students to be able to post “professionally” designed content?  Introduce them to Canva (free) and have them begin creating and posting. There are TONS of choices out there. Find the free and easy-to-use tools.  Share them and use them.

Caution – my Twitter blows up in T-minus 90 minutes! But feel free to join if you have ? for guests @GabrielleRusson, @OSAliciaD @KaylaOBMedia pic.twitter.com/7dLNR9AD0b

— Rebecca Newman (@ProfessorBec) February 13, 2018

4. YouTube is your friend: There is so much great content on YouTube.  Students like to watch videos, so let them. I use a great video from Dr. Kim Zarkin that teaches new journalism students how to use the AP Stylebook.  I then make up a series of quizzes that gets them using the book and recognizing important style elements.

5. Be present:  “Talk” to your online people — FREQUENTLY.  Each semester, I host virtual conferences (for a grade) via FaceTime, Skype or Google Hangout.  Not only is this simulating real-world distance meetings, it is an opportunity to check in with these people, so they can put a face with the stranger behind the computer screen.  Is it time consuming? Yes, but it is totally worth it.

There are so many ways to make online learning engaging and meaningful.  There are so many cool tools to use to make this work. Some come and go, but if you pay attention to the right people (other faculty and colleagues), the industry and the kids, you’ll know what is working and what is going to be obsolete.

Embrace online learning.  It is here, and it is the future.  

Rebecca Newman is a media professor at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida.  She is the faculty advisor of the Valencia College student news organization, Valencia Voice.

The post How to Make the Transition to Teaching Media Courses Online appeared first on MediaShift.

Some of the old school methods, as boyd pointed out at SXSWEdu, may not be effective against the new “weaponized digital media,” trolls, bots and online political forces with millions of dollars behind them. She has concerns about the good will and the truth that many bloggers are sending out over the internet.  She sees neo-nazis and other extremists filling the new digital media with mirrors of truth, hate and evil. In a post-modern way, I believe she also argues whether or not the truth can be found at all.

This was a tough message for me to hear as a trainer of truth-seekers and someone who firmly believes in the power of the student voice. boyd is a professor of the complex, and she’s very good at delving into it. I am more “Mr. Easy.” In my journalism classes, I have one lesson plan: SEEK TRUTH AND REPORT IT.  

boyd left listeners I talked to at SXSWEdu uneasy and unsettled as they tried to decipher her speech. In my own presentation, with my cape back on, I discussed ways I still believe we can save the world from fake news and eliminate many of the problems media is facing today.  A few disgruntled, cynical truth-seekers brought up boyd’s points about the darkness and complexities of teaching media literature in 2018, but no one could quite put their finger on her meaning, or how it practically applied to teaching media literacy in the future.

Iowa City High School journalism adviser Jonathan Rogers speaks during his presentation at SXSW. (Photo: Don Goble)

boyd’s speech has unsettled me, but it has also made me believe more in the ways I have found to teach media literacy. Now back in my classroom, I see students grappling with bias, publishing important stories, reading the news on their phones through a variety of sources, and taking pride in the rising power of student voices. The complexity of the screen world doesn’t look so complex to me when I see real students working in a journalism classroom.

Presenting on media literacy during the past year, I have also learned that teachers are not islands.  There are well-funded media literacy resources being developed to fight the darkness and complexity of the web that are far from the old school methods that boyd rightfully criticized. Many can be found on my website. I also think it is important to look at examples of journalism done right. The focus too often is on how journalists are doing it wrong. The Journalism Education Association and Flipboard have created a magazine showcasing the best high school journalism students that are models of responsible digital citizenship. Teachers need to use the good models of stories that tell the truth. It is fun to look at the Hot 50 fake news stories on Snopes, but it is more important to discuss the journalism that is bringing truth.

For the rest of this article, I think I can put my cape back on, or at the minimum give teachers three easy “buttons” for teaching media literacy. I believe that if teachers follow these methods, students will become media literate, critical thinkers and truth-seekers with powerful voices. Will some of them possibly use these new skills for evil?  It’s possible, but in almost 15 years of teaching journalism, I haven’t lost too many to the dark side.

1. Social Media and Google Searches are Dumpster Fires of Bad Information

At first, I was a bit nervous about attacking Google, Twitter and Facebook. Now, I am not. Social media and Google are to blame for the fake news and information crisis online. Teachers need to inform students not to get their news and information from Google, Twitter and Facebook. They also need to teach students not to share false information on Twitter, as a new MIT study shows how fast fake information is spreading on that platform.

2. Student Journalism Works to Teach Media Literacy and Gives us All Hope

Student journalists are amazing, and teaching students to publish following the SPJ Code of Ethics and to take pledges to follow the code of the Quill and Scroll Journalism Honor society is the best way to teach media literacy and bring student voices into schools. Period.  

Some of the ethical codes that high school journalists follow include seeking truth, doing no harm, being unbiased and being transparent.  At the end of each school year, The Little Hawk journalism team at Iowa City High School in Iowa City, Iowa, inducts students into the Quill and Scroll society of journalists. Students read this code by candlelight and take it seriously. The initiation concludes with students pledging to the following: Painstakingly seek truth no matter your profession; Aid the best interests of your community; Aid in the cause to better journalism no matter your job.

These mottos and codes were used this past month after the Parkland shooting. This incident and the subsequent movement have let the world know how talented student journalists are and the power of their voices as noted in “It’s Not Just a Story:  It’s Their Lives’” by NPR and “How Parkland Students Changed the Gun Debate” in the Atlantic. If anyone doubts the quality and responsibility of student journalism, I highly suggest reading the JEA Flipboard magazine of the Best High School Journalism or the Best of School Newspapers Online.  

Some of the staff members of the Little Hawk student newspaper read their latest edition. (Photo: Jonathan Rogers)

This past month reaffirmed my belief that a strong high school journalism program is essential to every high school and to media literacy — but closer to home.  As the adviser of The Little Hawk, my student reporters covered walkouts on school safety and have been some of the voices driving for change.  Mainstream media outlets from the Washington Post to Vice News to CBS to the Des Moines Register have all interviewed them on their role as student journalists — and also as activists. These students have been trained in the code of the journalist and take their responsibility seriously. When boyd suggested that training students as journalists or arming them with the new “weaponized” media could lead to neo-nazi bloggers or extremist ideas being published on the web, I couldn’t disagree more. In almost 15 years as a high school publications adviser, I have never seen a student use their power in irresponsible ways. To suggest that teachers not train high school students how to be journalists is exactly the wrong answer to the media literacy problem. Now is the time to arm students with their First Amendment rights and give them more digital citizenship training.  

3. Millions of Dollars are being Spent on Well-Developed Online Resources

From Newseum to Checkology to NAMLE to Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers, the internet is full of ways teachers can incorporate media literacy lessons into any class at any grade level. Teaching these lessons to help students get beyond social media and Google searches is essential 21st century skills training. To suggest not teaching these skills is dangerous, and sadly most students are not being taught how to get news on their phones or how to fact-check stories or information, or how to research online. At my session at SXSWEdu, medical students and science teachers all expressed how much more difficult it is to teach students how to find reliable sources and come to authentic “truths.” This problem is well beyond getting the news. I think teaching students how to get news from a variety of sources online is a start, but media literacy is a Kindergarten-until-death topic that all subjects and grade levels should be teaching.

I do believe there is a new hope in student voices and new ways to teach media literature effectively. This is not the time to tell any teacher that we should take off our capes. It’s just time to remind kids that with great power comes great responsibility.  

Jonathan Rogers is a journalism adviser for Iowa City High School and serves as a Master Journalism Educator. He is the president of the Iowa High School Press Association and was voted IHSPA Journalism Teacher of the Year in 2015. He also works as the JEA Professional Outreach Chair and is a Dow Jones Distinguished Adviser.

The post Teaching Media Literacy With A Cape After SXSWEdu appeared first on MediaShift.

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The 2018 National Day of Unplugging is on March 9-10 from sundown to sundown.

When I began teaching full time, shortly before 9/11, I brought news into the classroom by any means possible. Pre-iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and well-developed online news, I cadged AP news budgets from newsroom friends, toted the latest newspapers and wheeled in TV carts.

For the past year or so, I’ve often looked for ways to keep news out.

These days, news is ubiquitous, like ambient noise. It arrives in streams of constant, unsettling, confusing, contradictory information propelled by events that can defy immediate sense. What to make of a president who denigrates journalism by calling it fake, then – by The Washington Post’s count – averages about six false or misleading statements a day since taking office? Can we bear to hear of one more school shooting or other act of violence? When do we say enough and tune out, even for just a while?

There’s a catch: how can we unplug when it’s our job as teachers, researchers and students to listen, see and know? Even if we must, breaking away may be extra hard because we’re probably also…addicted. To social media, to news, to feeling connected to family, friends and the world.

Struggling to Take a News Blackout

That’s something Steve Fox, of University of Massachusetts Amherst, brings home to his mostly-freshman News Literacy students in their first assignment. They’re challenged to a 48-hour news blackout: no tweets, no texts or Facebook posts, no television, no talking to friends, nothin’. “Some of them barely make it out of class,” Fox said, because he freely admits it’s a nearly impossible assignment. “They try,” he said, but they soon become aware news comes from nearly everywhere. “I couldn’t talk to my suitemates,” they report, “had to stop my Dad from telling me the latest; couldn’t walk into the cafeteria, etc.”

News immersion takes a toll, sometimes in surprising ways. I know. After days deep in Instagram feeds studying reaction to the Sutherland Springs – or was it Las Vegas? – shooting, the ping ping ping of a street crossing “wait” signal sounded for all the world like the pew pew pew of a gun. It was all I could do to not yell “Duck! Run!” and do so myself.

Working to Care for Students’ Minds, Hearts

At Arizona State University, where Kirstin Pellizzaro works with Cronkite News students producing statewide broadcasts, two students made the same sort of noise-fear connection. They were at school on Super Bowl weekend when they heard bangs. “They immediately went into shooter situation mode,” Pellizzaro said: turned off lights, hid under tables, called the police. Luckily, the banging was for a party setup, not disaster, but it led Pellizzaro to change the day’s lecture. “I wanted them to feel like their reaction was completely normal,” she said, “so that day we talked about the stress of news and how the consumption of horrific situations day in and day out can affect you mentally. I shared how I was working when Sandy Hook happened. I was a mess that day. I spent hours crying as I tried to put a broadcast together. Then we talked about how to decompress after a hard news day.”

Sometimes, she and others have said, students feel better knowing it’s not just them, that “someone in the business for years still cracks every once in a while.” Jacqueline Petchel, executive editor of Carnegie-Knight News21 based at Cronkite, said covering difficult stories brings a whole new level of immersion. “When that happens, I tell reporters to stay focused on the most crucial elements and essentially prioritize the list of things they need to do,” she said. “Why? Because without the ‘beating heart’ of a project, the rest of it won’t survive anyway.”

Amanda Crawford, who as a reporter covered politics and mass shootings, teaches at Western Kentucky University. “We had a school shooting in Kentucky in January. Many of my students are covering the shooting and the national gun debate in the wake of it,” she said. “I spent time in every class last week answering students’ questions about how to guard your own emotional well-being while covering these heavy topics.”

Taking care of the students’ own hearts sometimes means digging into news before backing away. Brian Rackham oversees NAZToday’s daily newscast at Northern Arizona University where he directs the Media Innovation Center and its immersion programs. “We did a piece on how NAU and the community college prepare for serial shootings,” he said. “The students felt like knowing how and why these shooters acted as they did makes them have a more realistic picture of the risks – that it is not very likely to happen here. Sort of a knowledge is power thing.”

Finding a More Positive Outlet

Fear is a natural reaction to fearsome news; visualizing fear – putting people’s fright into images – is what Julie Elman, of Ohio University (and a former Virginian-Pilot colleague) does as a project. “I am oftentimes surprised at what comes out on paper,” she said. “What I have discovered recently, though, is that I’m getting really sad and tired of illustrating the aftermath of gun violence in the United States.” The same, she said, for terrorist acts worldwide. But for her, art is also a balance. “I find that I can move into a mental space that’s calmer.”

Stress accumulates, reinforced by all sorts of news, perhaps simply the flow. Colleagues and friends report getting jumpy, cranky, exhausted, unfocused, depressed and sad after some ineffable boundary is crossed. Some know to take breaks; some know, but can’t or don’t. “It’s hard when you need to know what’s going on,” admitted Rackham. His breaks aren’t often enough, he said. But breaks work, Fox said. “Sometimes all you need is a half-day/day. No real downsides since you can catch up to everything pretty quickly. Upsides? Well, mental health.”

Dawn Gilpin, who teaches social media at ASU, is “very big on escapism” and activity. “I’ve made a rule that when I go running or out for a walk, even walking from my parking spot to work, I can’t listen to current events podcasts. Getting out in the world and listening to music or a couple of people talking about Top Chef like it’s the World Series gives me a nice change of pace.” But she also researches social media about gun culture. “The last couple of weeks have been especially rough,” she said. “Seeing the same patterns repeat over and over. The same rhetoric from both sides….” She worries students will think everything online is suspect, fake, narcissistic, “because it’s conventional wisdom. I push back against it, but in a big online class it’s hard to know how much of an impact I’m making. But the trust deficit, I think that’s real. And not just among young people.”

Crawford noticed something similar when she co-taught The White House & The Press last semester. “That class was tough,” she said, “because students recognized the threat that Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric can have on the future of the free press in the United States and the anti-media climate that they will be facing as they enter the profession. It’s hard not to let that negativity seep in.”

Lily Ciric Hoffmann, an entrepreneur who teaches multimedia at the University of Maryland, fights the negativity by taking nature walks, listening to podcasts, reading books – anything to relax and feel better. “I take care of myself so I can take care of the rest,” she said. “Whatever is out there newswise will reach you no matter what.” Crawford, who needs to get away from news “for my own sanity sometimes,” gardens, writes, sings and tours with an indie Americana band.

Unplugging from News in a J-School Setting

In journalism schools, especially, unplugging goes against the flow. There are often multiple screens with ongoing news, newspaper stacks, framed images of news events and people sharing whatever happened last. One wants one’s tech.

The giant projection screen in the open-forum heart of the Cronkite School, where I work, caught my eye last week: CNN was reporting another shooting, another university shutdown. I was on my way back to class after a quick trip to the photocopier. I had my phone, so I checked Facebook. A former student, now a professor in her own right, had posted: I’m all right. I’m in a classroom, locked in with my students. We’re safe.

I thought immediately of Elman’s memorialization of the Parkland, Fla., shootings. She expressed so many fears that amplify every time more such deaths occur: who is next, who is safe, am I? So I paused. Normally, I would keep my classes informed of major news developments if they happened during class time. We are, after all, a journalism and mass communication school. This time, no. I wanted to buy them time. I wanted to keep them safe from the knowledge, the antsiness, the news, even if only for hours.

I went in cheery. Keep ‘em busy, they won’t check their screens. They call my multimedia classes “therapy” sessions these days. We’ll keep it real, I tell them, but we’re going to stay objective, focus on telling stories with technique and skill, and have fun while learning. It’s the type of class where you can talk while doing and students have spoken their peace about politics, sexual abuse, discrimination and, yes, shootings, in ways that were definitely therapeutic. But it needs to come from them, I’ve found, not like a rock falling from the sky via news.

Learning from the Relentless News Cycle

I’ve learned many things. Last year, one young woman in class said her friend’s headscarf had been yanked off with accompanying taunts on Nov. 9; she was told it was a new America now and she didn’t belong. The student said men catcalled her that day as she walked in her neighborhood. They yelled they wanted to grab her by the you-know-what. A Dreamer – we have many in Arizona – merely nodded that he felt affected by the election outcome, unable to speak but saying volumes with fearful, sad eyes. We needed to unplug. I took the class on a photo walk, and we plugged those images into a Tumblr.

The urge to protect by keeping news at bay, coupled with the occasional challenge of finding actual news in update swamps, can result in an ironic lack, according to Susan Keith, department chair of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. “When you first started asking people about this, I thought it was odd,” she wrote. “I have, in many ways, the opposite from the problem you described. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by news, I find it hard to get enough.”

Maybe, she thought, it was just her, with a two-hour commute each way to campus and a child to collect from school. Because of their 11-year-old, she and her husband rarely turn on TV or radio news in the morning: too much to hear at that age. News gets read “in dribs and drabs” of connectivity in subway stations. Email, grading, teaching and sometimes sleep crowd out other news acquisitions. “I sometimes have days when I go all day reading only one-paragraph news alerts on my phone, with no time to read or listen deeply until 10 or 11 p.m., as if I were snacking rather than eating a full information meal.” Or, she said, I get my news from you.

Leslie-Jean Thornton, who hails from New York, is an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She’s been hooked on studying how information is shared since first stuffing a handwritten “newspaper” illegally into neighbors’ mailboxes at the age of 7. Her research focuses on journalism practice, visual communication and information ecosystems on social media.

The post How J-School Professors, Students Can (and Should) Unplug appeared first on MediaShift.

Students in Candi Carter Olson’s class also identified comments in other articles about the Alabama Republican Senate candidate, who was accused of initiating a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32 and pursuing several other teenage girls when he was in his 30s:

• “It was 40 years ago.”
• “Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”
• “There’s nothing wrong with a 30-year-old single male asking a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old, or a 16-year-old out on a date.”

The discussion led one student to raise her hand and ask earnestly, “If we can’t use the name of survivors in stories, then how do we get their voices into stories? These stories are obviously biased, but as journalists, how do we fix that bias?”

This question is perhaps the most important one that we professors and professional journalists are tackling right now: How do journalists handle these types of stories and include survivor voices in a respectful way?

While this is a conversation that needs more analysis than one article, we’ve developed steps that instructors can use when training students to be responsible media producers on the topics of sexual assault and harassment.

Step 1: Understand Rape Culture

It’s important for students and instructors to understand that every story about sexual assault and harassment occurs within a much broader cultural context.

Rape culture is real and is defined as an accepted societal belief that normalizes rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. Rape culture blames the victim for her or his own assault or harassment and encourages myths such as “she asked for it,” “he couldn’t help himself” and other falsehoods.

By talking about rape culture and teaching students how to tell individual stories as part of a much larger cultural conversation, we will give our students and their readers the tools to understand not only how each individual assault happens, but also how those assaults are part of discussions on gender, women and men.

It is helpful to understand that these are NOT stories about sex. They are stories about violations and crimes against girls and women, boys and men. They are stories about power and taking advantage of others who don’t have it.

Rape Culture Pyramid by Ranger Cervix & Jaime Chandra, based on Version 2 created by Kate Seewald of ActionAid / Safe Cities for Women and original concept by Ranger Cervix is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

In a nutshell, rape culture often deters victims and survivors of sexual violence from coming forward about crimes because of fear they won’t be believed, that they will be blamed, that they will be ridiculed and/or because of feelings of shame. This diagram about rape culture should help people identify the attitudes that support it.

Step 2: Use Empowering Language in Reporting About Sexual Assault, Rape

The Associated Press Stylebook offers surprisingly little help on covering sexual abuse, beyond an entry under “privacy” that tells us not to identify people who have been sexually assaulted unless they voluntarily identify themselves.

That same group of journalism students at Utah State University exploring how to analyze news reports about Roy Moore asked, “Why don’t we name survivors?”

This led to a conversation about personal violations that occur during and after a sexual assault or harassment. Survivors whose names are reported without their permission are often subjected to a level of scrutiny and criticism that far surpasses that faced by the accused. The news media, in effect, become judge and jury over the survivors.

Gymnast Rachael Denhollander bravely chose to file the first police complaint against Larry Nassar, longtime doctor of the United States Gymnastic teams and Michigan State University’s athletics programs. Her experience after that filing is a case study about why so many survivors choose not to come forward. Even though Larry Nassar faced more than 150 survivors who gave their statements in the courtroom and was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison for up to 175 years, Denhollander lost her church, friends and “every shred of privacy.”

If we cannot report names without permission, then how do we empower survivor voices and put them in our stories?

First, we should teach students how to use key terminology when referring to survivors or victims, rape and sexual assault, and other loaded terminology. This handy guide from RAINN breaks down the most important terms and phrases people will use in their stories. Hand it out to students and make sure the link is somewhere accessible for everyone in your department to use.

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is a stellar resource for reporting on sexual violence. For example, it advises: “Rape or sexual assault is in no way associated with normal sexual activity; trafficking in women is not to be confused with prostitution. People who have suffered sexual violence may not wish to be described as a ‘victim’ unless they choose the word themselves. Many prefer the word ‘survivor.’”

Second, compile a list of sexual assault support services in your area, including those on campus. Advocates, rape crisis centers, lawyers who specialize in sexual assault and harassment, survivors who have come forward with their names, and psychiatrists and psychologists who work with survivors all are possibilities.

Have your students brainstorm ideas with you, and you’ll find they become invested in the topic and spark ideas we may not have considered as professors and journalists who handle this regularly. Sometimes, it really does take a fresh set of eyes to make sure that we are doing the best we can to be responsible journalists.

Step 3: Understand how to report with context

Always show compassion for those who are victims or survivors. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center, a Justice Department-funded agency, finds that a majority (63 percent) of sexual violence cases are never reported to police.

Such accusations are rarely false, and we should understand it takes courage for someone who has been abused to come forward. The Sexual Violence Resource Center also finds that only about 2 to 7 percent of sexual violence cases are falsely reported. Therefore, as journalists, we should always be skeptical, but we should keep in mind that false reports are a tiny proportion of reported cases. Some news organizations jump on these false reports as big stories, which causes them to appear more prevalent than they really are. However, if reporters tackle these stories within a broader context, they won’t dominate the headlines.

This leads to our next point: We should teach students to place individual cases within that broader context and focus on stories that show just how many people sexual abuse impacts every year. Topics to address include:

• Why do survivors of abuse decline to report cases? The fact that many women and men have been coming forward about celebrities in the past few months suggests a change beginning in rape culture. It shows that when survivors get together, they find strength in each other.
• Why do men (and most of the perpetrators are men, even when men are the victims) engage in such behaviors?
• What about our society and culture supports the myths that victims are to blame for their own assaults? That false reports are rampant?
• Why don’t we talk more about sexual consent and what it means?

This is an excellent video that helps define consent by comparing it to a cup of tea. College students love it. (Profanity warning here. There also is a “clean version” for middle and high school students.)

Step 4: One Bad Story Shouldn’t Deter Good Reporters

At this point, we are guessing some instructors and journalists are asking, “What about the Rolling Stone story?” The magazine ran a story in 2014 that described a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. The story was later debunked and the magazine retracted it. Rolling Stone was ordered to pay the fraternity $1.65 million.

While the Rolling Stone story had many problems, the main ones were not false accusations, rather journalistic failures. The story was based on one source, a survivor who apparently had been through a traumatic experience at some point. The reporter and editors did not check or corroborate records and sources to verify details of her story. Columbia Journalism Review took the story apart in detail, calling it “a failure that was avoidable.” CJR also published tips to avoid repeating those mistakes and noted that the incident should not deter journalists from reporting on the valid problem of campus sexual assault.

Journalists reporting on these types of stories need to know some of the basics about sexual abuse and violence, as well as myths that continue to be perpetuated. Accurate and fair journalism is essential to changing rape culture. It also is the first step to changing sexual harassment behaviors in newsrooms.

For a more robust discussion about discussing and coverage issues of sexual abuse in the journalism and mass communications classroom, join us for the February #EdShift Chat on  Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 12 noon Central / 10 a.m. Pacific Time using the #EdShift hashtag on Twitter.

NOTE: Some of this content previously appeared in a piece Tracy Everbach wrote for the Media Diversity Forum.

Candi Carter Olson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of media and society in the Journalism & Communication Department at Utah State University. Her research interests focus on women’s press clubs as agents of change, newswomen’s history, and women’s use of social media to build community and organize activist groups. She was the 2016 American Journalism Rising Scholar award recipient, a 2012-2013 recipient of the American Association of University Women American Fellowship and received a 2015-2016 Mountain West Center research grant. She has published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journalism, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journalism History, Feminist Media Studies, Pennsylvania History, and Media Report to Women. Carter Olson received her doctorate in communication from the University of Pittsburgh.

Tracy Everbach, Ph.D., is associate professor of digital/print journalism at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. Her co-authored book, Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology and Harassment, is being published in March 2018 by Palgrave MacMillan. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on race, gender and media, news reporting, mass communication theories, and qualitative research methods. She is a former newspaper reporter, including two years at the Boston Herald and 12 years on the metro news desk at The Dallas Morning News. She received her doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri.

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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.

It wasn’t until my second job as the bureau chief of the Silver City Sun-News in Silver City, New Mexico, that I learned I didn’t need an international platform to achieve these goals. I needed the basic journalism skills I’d acquired in college, plus a little extra – the practice of solutions journalism.

Fast forward several years and journalism schools are recognizing the need (and student demand) for solutions journalism, defined by the Solutions Journalism Network as rigorous reporting on how communities respond to social problems.

In my current role as the director of journalism school engagement at SJN, I evangelize the practice of solutions journalism in classrooms across the United States, reaching students who are pursuing this noble work in an effort to impact, engage and build trust with audiences.

The Solutions Journalism Network is partnering with #EdShift to host a Twitter chat exploring how the theory and practice of Solutions Journalism can be implemented into the J-School classroom, as well as its further application within the field as a whole.

The chat will take place on Wednesday, Jan. 31 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 12 noon Central / 10 a.m. Pacific Time using the #EdShift hashtag on Twitter.

Over the past three years, several universities in the United States and Canada have integrated solutions journalism into their core journalism curriculum and pedagogy. Some universities have built modules into existing curriculum, while other professors have chosen to offer semester-long elective courses that focus on one communal issue.

A few examples include Arizona State University, where since 2015, journalism students in every intermediate reporting class in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism complete a solutions journalism news story assignment which is integrated into their semester-long coursework.

Jillian Bauer-Reese at Temple University developed a course last fall called Covering Addiction Through Solutions Journalism and led a team of students to report the intricacies of addiction through a solutions journalism lens. She continues the reporting project this spring semester.

The University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs Fellowship in Global Journalism will partner with the Solutions Journalism Network for the second consecutive year. We will provide a month-long intensive solutions journalism training to its fellows, building on their education and work in investigative reporting.

Kathryn Thier, an instructor at the University of Oregon, takes part in a breakout session at the Solutions Journalism Summit in November 2017. (Photo: Samantha McCann/SJN)

Professors and lecturers attest to the power of introducing their students to solutions journalism, as they deeply believe it enhances student’s reporting, while also fulfilling their own philosophy of producing impactful journalism.

In her 2016 Journalism and Mass Communication Education article titled, “Opportunities and Challenges for Initial Implementation of Solutions Journalism Coursework,” Kathryn Thier writes that the five professors she interviewed believed themselves “to be part of a burgeoning movement.”

“Teaching solutions journalism differed from participants’ other experiences teaching journalism; they felt solutions offered more import or impact,” she wrote. “Rather than seeing their nascent forays into teaching solutions journalism as a response to a changing profession, participants viewed themselves as contributing to the change.”

The Solutions Journalism Network offers valuable resources for both journalism educators and media practitioners. Join the Hub and gain access to the Network’s Story Tracker (currently housing 2,500 solutions journalism stories), reporting toolkits, monthly webinars and a lively network of people devoted to telling stories that impact and engage audiences.

Holly Wise is the director of journalism school engagement at the Solutions Journalism Network. She is also a journalism lecturer at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, where she teaches advanced news writing and multimedia courses, and introduced a solutions journalism course. In 2015, she launched the Texas State Global News Team, which provides mass communication students with international service learning study abroad programs. 

The post How J-Schools Are Innovating by Reporting on Solutions 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.

At at time when so-called “soft skills” such as communication and problem-solving are in demand at major employers around the world, a new core curriculum represents the best chance for college-bound young adults to develop the intellect, attitudes and skills that will carry them into the future.

This new liberal arts core would be one that is civic-minded, interdisciplinary, adaptative and integrates journalism and media at every opportunity and in every course.

And we have to start now; we’re already behind the curve.

Why We Need a Liberal Arts Core Revision

General education requirements at most higher education institutions are emblematic of a system struggling to find its identity. Students often select from myriad courses to fulfill one area of the general core requirements, and universities tend to pride themselves on their variety of offerings.

The great hope, of course, is that for the first two years of college, students will cobble together a course load that is at once unique to their interests while also providing a sufficient foundation for a well-rounded liberal arts education. Absent advising from professors and academic counselors, however, many undergraduate students are tempted to choose courses that look easy or fit their sleep schedules.

At best, this approach is outdated. At worst, we’re offering our students a “cafeteria-style” approach to what should be a more thoughtful moment in their educational journey.

We can do better, and there’s evidence to encourage higher education institutions to revisit their gen ed requirements. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s 2017-2018 “What Will They Learn” study found that less than half of the colleges and universities studied required general education coursework in literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history or economics.

In the fight to appeal to incoming freshmen, many universities now offer either sweeping, generic core classes or such specialized, niche classes that comparing courses within a department or core domain might be impossible. The study found vague course catalog descriptions compound the problem, making it hard to discern the tangible learning objectives across core areas.

Grounding the Core in the Global

Sure, universities could tighten up their course descriptions or standardize their offerings, but today’s general education requirements still often overlook what should be a critical component of 21st century learning: global citizenship in a networked world.

The council’s executive report argues “American higher education needs to become serious about equipping students to be effective participants in global conversations and a global economy.”

While the study has some limitations (for example, it surveys course titles as they fulfill catalog requirements but does not consider a full syllabus, learning objectives or assessment tools for any individual course), it is not alone in its criticism of general education requirements across the United States.

(Photo: OpenSource.com through Creative Commons)

Though dated and funded by a conservative advocacy group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 2011 civic literacy study found college degrees failed to inculcate students with the motivation to participate in civic life.

“Said another way, among persons with equal civic knowledge, those having earned a bachelor’s degree do not demonstrate any systematic and added political engagement beyond voting,” the report argues.

Envisioning a New Core Framework

So what does this new college curriculum look like?

Instead of offering courses that align with subject areas, let’s focus on classes that build awareness and skill regarding essential critical mental and social processes.

Imagine, for example, if a university catalog were to shift its general education requirements away from the standard knowledge areas of language, literature, science, math, history, arts, politics and health and wellness and instead implement required classes in these domains:

• Media literacy
• Data fluency
• Citizenship and empowerment in the digital era
• Political systems, markets and the economics of information
• Social and personal wellness
• Communication across borders

These domains don’t preclude teaching traditional subjects, such as the hard sciences and foreign language, but they demand we do so in context with the media tools and technologies that shape every aspect of education, communities and the world today.

Many students already opt out of technically demanding options such as physics or chemistry, so why not restructure our core to present challenging materials and concepts within a framework that is accessible (and empowering) to digital natives?

Yes, our students need math. Yes, they need history. But students need those courses to be fundamentally restructured in response to the world we’re asking them to one day lead.

As an educator, I know the semantics of course titles matters little compared to the actual learning objectives set forth. In this new 21st century curriculum, then, what will our students learn in each area? Below are skills and topical benchmarks that could anchor each new discipline:

Media literacy

1. How to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication (based on the definition from the National Association for Media Literacy Education)
2. The role of journalism in a democratic society
3. Media law and ethics
4. Media creation and production

Data fluency

1. Statistics and data computation
2. Access to information and public data
3. Ethical issues in communicating data
4. Best practices in research and knowledge development

Citizenship and empowerment in the digital era

1. The First Amendment and freedom of expression
2. Effects of media on society
3. Technology as tools for empowerment
4. Civic mobilization through media

Political systems, markets and the economics of information

1. Media conglomerates and information integrity
2. Algorithms and filter bubbles
3. News and information as commodities
4. Power, politics and media spectacle
5. Entrepreneurship and innovation

Social and personal wellness

1. Developing empathy
2. Social justice and community-building
3. Habits of mind and technology for healthy media use
4. Issues of diversity locally, regionally and globally

Communication across borders

1. Power of language and rhetoric
2. Foundations of communication
3. Composition and technical writing
4. Marginalized voices in history
5. Communication across disciplines and languages

If we pull back the curtain a bit more, we can see how rethinking our undergraduate curriculum is an opportunity to provide a truly well-rounded education for our young adults who will face challenges we have yet to conceptualize.

The ideas I’ve outlined here are not meant to be (and truly, should not be) prescriptive—I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can rethink the undergraduate general education approach to better serve our global community. What did I miss? Which ideas are bunk or completely unrealistic? Where do we begin? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I welcome the conversation, which we can start at #thenewgeneds.

Megan Fromm, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of mass communication at Colorado Mesa University, where she advises the student magazine, Horizon. She is also the educational initiatives director for the Journalism Education Association and a former journalist and high school journalism adviser. Follow her on Twitter via @megfromm.

The post How We Could Radically Rethink the Core Curriculum in Higher Education appeared first on MediaShift.

Avoiding these issues is not an option for us right now. We are facing an environment where new revelations of men in our society sexually harassing or assaulting women, and sometimes men, seem like a daily occurrence. In fact, Time magazine named the “silence breakers” of the #metoo hashtag movement as persons of the year.

As journalism professors who teach classes on gender in the media, we have been confronting these issues for years. We think it’s time that other professors get on board by addressing these topics in their classes as well.

Anticipating Challenging Student Questions

It’s guaranteed that sexual harassment and assault will come up in our media classes because they’re everywhere in the media we are studying. So, as experienced teachers on these topics, we’ve compiled a list of questions that we’ve heard from students when discussing media and intersectionality (the concept that that race, gender, class, sexuality and other social categories intertwine and contribute to systems of discrimination and oppression).

1. Why don’t we use victim/survivor names in news stories, but we use the accused perpetrator’s name?
2. Don’t a lot of women lie about being raped or assaulted?
3. I don’t even know what feminists want. Aren’t they just causing problems because they hate men?
4. What about men? Aren’t men victims too?
5. Why are we even talking about this in the media? This seems like a distraction from real issues.
6. Why don’t women who are abused just leave their abuser?
7. Why don’t women who are harassed in the workplace report it when it happens?
8. Why do women provoke men into abusing them? (Yes, this actually was asked in one of our classes.)

Student questions like these can be loaded and difficult to discuss in class. You may need to redirect with, “I need to think about that and get back to you later,” or, “That’s not an appropriate topic for class conversation, but I’ll be happy to work through it with you during office hours.” Otherwise, class can degenerate into a shouting match. However, there are important experiences and perspectives that need to be kept in mind if questions like these are raised.

The Why Behind Challenging Classroom Discussions

It’s important to remember that 1 in 4 of our students is a survivor of sexual assault and/or sexual violence. That’s an epidemic. Every conversation we have in our classroom affects those students in intimate, sometimes empowering, sometimes triggering, ways.

We should keep in mind that general discussions of these topics may remind students of their own experiences, which they may never have discussed with anyone. Even as there have been students who have never talked about their experiences, other students have come to us with their stories, asking for help. Because these topics are intimate and emotional, we also have witnessed students run out of classrooms after hearing content that spurred memories.

Infographic Courtesy of Ultraviolet

In one class, a student stood up and described to her classmates the unwanted grabbing and touching she endured in her job as a restaurant server. She’d finally had enough.

“This is my body, and it’s not anyone else’s property,” she said. “No one has the right to touch my body.”

In another class, one student confided early in the semester that she was a survivor and was going through the legal system, a brutal process. It forces survivors to be under scrutiny for every choice they’ve ever made, from taking a drink to kissing someone before saying that she didn’t want to go any further. This woman, however, chose to allow the media to report her name, a brave decision that exposed her to even further scrutiny.

Even though she struggled with the public scrutiny and the emotional stress that it caused, she thought it was important to say that she was not ashamed.

It’s essential that we discuss and confront these issues in the classroom. Students may have never had any other kind of forum to address them. Young women are now discussing openly what large percentages of women in the workplace have faced for decades. And they are standing up for themselves.

Baker, L., Pietsch, N., Straatman, A., & Etherington, N. (2015). Sexual & Gender-Based Harassment, Learning Network Newsletter, Issue 13. London Ontario: Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children.

It’s important to note that it’s not just straight women who are survivors. Our male students, transgender students, and LGBTQ students are all confronting these issues too, and they deserve our understanding and sensitivity as well.

Another point to make is that sexual harassment, abuse, and violence are not about sex; they are about power.

Entering into the #metoo Conversation with Students

Now that we have acknowledged that it is part of our responsibility to facilitate these challenging discussions, how do we broach these subjects in the classroom?

• First, remember that so-called “trigger warnings” are not weakness. Trigger warnings are an important way to tell students that you care and that the content may be difficult, but you’re willing to fight through it with them. As professors, we also employ trigger warnings to let students know that we care about them, and if they need to miss the class for their mental health, then they can make that decision. We have seen students relapse into eating disorders, PTSD and other mental health issues because they’ve chosen to tackle material that brought back horrendous memories. We are sad to say that in the past we have found more than one sobbing student in the hallway after class. Giving a warning that topics may be sensitive allows students who have difficult experiences to choose whether they want to participate.
• Second, it’s important to have an open-door policy. As professors, we are not counselors, and we are often bound by university rules to report a crime if we are informed it happened. However, it’s important that we listen to students who need to speak and try to find them help. After a difficult day in a class, we make sure to follow up with students who have told us they are survivors to ensure they are OK.
• And this leads to point three: We as professors should have a thorough knowledge of university and community resources available to our students. Counseling services are tight at all universities, but at some universities, professors have the ability to get students in crisis seen immediately by walking them over to counseling services or calling on their behalf. In addition, it’s important to know how to access sexual assault advocates and community services. If you don’t know where to find these services, start by calling your diversity or women’s centers on campus. They’ll give you phone numbers and websites to start your research. A great national resource with a counseling hotline and online chat, statistics, and practical information is RAINN, an organization that fights sexual violence. The number is 800-656-HOPE.

We should believe and support our students when they confide in us. We also should help them get the professional help they need. We advise you to always approach your students with compassion and empathy.

It’s almost guaranteed that you have students in your classroom who are survivors. We as professors don’t always know what students have been enduring in their personal lives. If you don’t know how to handle these topics with sensitivity, then ask a colleague or your diversity and women’s centers. Organize a class discussion that is productive and caring.

 Candi Carter Olson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of media and society in the Journalism & Communication Department at Utah State University. Her research interests focus on women’s press clubs as agents of change, newswomen’s history, and women’s use of social media to build community and organize activist groups. She was the 2016 American Journalism Rising Scholar award recipient, a 2012-2013 recipient of the American Association of University Women American Fellowship and received a 2015-2016 Mountain West Center research grant. She has published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journalism, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journalism History, Feminist Media Studies, Pennsylvania History, and Media Report to Women. Carter Olson received her doctorate in communication from the University of Pittsburgh.

Tracy Everbach, Ph.D., is associate professor of digital/print journalism at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. Her co-authored book, Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology and Harassment, is being published in March 2018 by Palgrave MacMillan. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on race, gender and media, news reporting, mass communication theories, and qualitative research methods. She is a former newspaper reporter, including two years at the Boston Herald and 12 years on the metro news desk at The Dallas Morning News. She received her doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri.

The post How J-School Professors Should Talk About Sexual Harassment, Abuse in Class appeared first on MediaShift.

Dana Branham: When I got to The Daily, we published five days a week in print, and that was our focus. Now, we’ve dramatically changed the way we think about our work, and we’re truly a digital news operation.

Seth Prince: I’d been through something similar to this at The Oregonian. It’s tough, of course, but it’s doable. The particularly heartening part, I’d say, is that it’s an easier process in more nimble newsrooms like those we commonly have in college media, where students are already more digitally inclined and less rooted in tradition for tradition’s sake. However, here are some of the things that were holding us back.

Branham: We knew we needed to move past being bound to print, but we still had certain obligations to the way we always did things that made it hard to move full speed ahead.

Prince: So, first, here’s how we used to look online and in print.

Prince: This next sentiment has helped us orient people around the necessity of change. We, as a group, tried to free ourselves from fear of letting go of what was and instead embrace an experimental mindset. The goal, across that process, has been to grow an audience — who reads or views our work, who wants to buy advertising around that work — and generally to create something of real and measurable value for our community.

Prince: And this is where we are, all glow’d up.

Branham: Look at that shiny new website.

How OU Daily Started the Change

Prince: This question above was front of mind throughout. My old boss said it to me early in my career, and I’ve said it to students endlessly. I hoped the idea behind it helped them feel liberated to experiment by setting some goal for what that experiment would produce.

Prince: OK, here it is in one slide. Now we’ll go a bit deeper on some of these steps.

Prince: There’s this article I tell students about from time to time about a running phenom named Mary Cain and the idea of the progressive-overload principle.

Branham: Seth sent me this article sometime during the spring of my freshman year, and I remember reading it in my dorm and being like, “Whoa, I do not run and I don’t know how this applies to me, but I feel inspired.”

Digital in the Crucible of Breaking News

Prince: We had a series of escalating news events that first year that allowed us to practice progressive-overload and have students see the discoveries they could make. First, a student killed his whole family. Then, a rock star got really mad at us. And finally, a racist fraternity chant became national news.

Branham: It was the first time I remember that we truly treated news as incremental — we broke the story on a Sunday night, wrote updates literally through the night (Seth can attest to a 3 a.m. GroupMe conversation about a star football player’s Snapchat rant), and ran a live blog and live video streams of how things unfolded that following Monday, breaking out separate posts when the news merited it.

Prince: Beyond the students learning they could, in fact, own a huge national story, another cool discovery came about. They had no time to think about print. Editors naturally separated themselves in terms of digital-focused workflows and — this was key — we still had plenty to make terrific print editions.

Demolishing Newsroom Silos

Branham: Then the best part of my career at The Daily happened: I signed everyone up for Slack.

Branham: Seriously though, Slack was a game-changer for us in the way we handled breaking news. We had all the right people in one place, could get in touch easily and quickly on all of our devices, and in breaking news situations, we had channels set up for just editors, just the news staff, the entire staff, and so on. It became a place for us to yes, share fantastic GIFs, but also to have real-time ethical debates and talk through our values even when we weren’t all together in the newsroom.

Resizing, Rethinking the Purpose of Print

Branham: Daily staff had wanted to cut down on print days since I joined as a freshman, and my sophomore year, we got the OK to move down to two days a week. We’d promised the student body, the pub board and alumni that they’d be seeing a dramatically different Daily, not just the same one they were used to but less.

‘Legos Not Bricks’: Innovating Through Engagement

Branham: I think some of our best digital strides have been thanks to the addition of an engagement desk and an enterprise desk. We started with the engagement desk — I was its first editor my sophomore year, which was great. We learned to be better listeners, more tuned in to the OU community, which made our coverage smarter and more reflective.

We started 9 a.m. Slack meetings — those have evolved from a conversation about what people around campus were talking about and how we could make sure our daily coverage was reflective of that — to now, where we workshop smart SEO headlines as a group. We thought hard about how to get news to OU students in a way they’d want to read it, which means we’re not bound to writing traditional stories, and we’re better for it.

Prince: Shortly after taking this job, I went to ONA14 in Chicago. It was on the heels of the NYT Innovation report, and one of my favorite quotes from that was, “We have to build the newsroom out of legos, not bricks.” That thinking informed a lot of the spirit behind these moves — formally creating engagement as part of the operation and trying to find a digitally sustainable version of enterprise.

Regarding enterprise, in particular… It happened in three drawn-out phases. First, we kind of broke some bad habits through understanding via metrics that readership was poor when we did things certain ways. Then we took on more of a producer mentality where we went harder and faster online. As that grew audience, we then came back around and began to more consistently build in enterprise work that originated online.

Also, we wanted to Snow Fall (an online design concept that originated with The New York Times) but didn’t know how from a presentation standpoint, and we had to quit building our best stuff for print. That led us to find a partner on campus, Adam Croom, a former Daily student who now works as the director of digital learning at OU, to help go back and reimagine how one of our best enterprise stories could be presented. Dana and I sent him the pieces and a rough concept we had in mind and asked him to just run with it. He came back, wowed Dana and I with what he’d dreamed up, and we swiftly called a meeting of the editorial board to show them where we could go next. I remember seeing face after face light up at the thought of their best work being presented in more compelling, immersive ways.

Months later, we launched our projects site on WordPress and dropped our first attempt at Snow Fall, on wait times to see a mental health professional at our campus health clinic.

As the newsroom began to find a rhythm of getting projects published in that space, we circled back and redesigned our main website — run on TownNews’ CMS — for the second time in three years.

Focus on Addressing the Audience

Branham: This part feels pretty simple once you’ve added up all the other parts: we’re trying to take advantage of big news moments while consistently growing our core audience. For us, that means OU students, faculty, staff, alumni as well as people who live in and around Norman, Okla.

Prince: One other detail here: knowing how vital social is to our success, we’ve not let that grow organically. We have made a conscious effort to go into certain platforms and especially with certain stories to invite people who liked one piece to come back to get our coverage more regularly.

Prince: These past few years have been some of the most fun I’ve ever had in journalism. Not because of where we wound up, or whether we can stay at this peak. But because of all the people and energy and enthusiasm that contributed to getting here. Because of what we learned in the process, both for The Daily and its audience. And most important, because of what our students walk away with as they go forward in their careers and remember these moments and what went into making them happen.

Branham: It’s been so rewarding to look back at what The Daily used to be and just be blown away with how far we’ve come. The things we’re trying now are things I never could’ve imagined when I started here. I hope y’all are able to have those moments — where you just look back and think, ‘wow’ — then keep pressing on.

Dana Branham concluded her career at the OU Daily and started in January as a one-year breaking news intern at the Dallas Morning News. She’s previously interned at the Tulsa World and the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Seth Prince is the digital adviser at the OU Daily. Now in his fourth year at the University of Oklahoma, Prince is working in the newsroom he started in as a college student years ago. In between, he spent 14 years at The Oregonian in a variety of roles, from copy editor to sports editor.

The post How the OU Daily Transformed into a Digital-First Newsroom appeared first on MediaShift.