To be clear, teaching AP Style or lead writing to students I can’t work with in person is definitely different. I like sitting next to students at a computer to go through edits, and I think explaining the nuances of writing and editing are best done face to face.

But teaching news writing online offers unique chances to interact with students, and to connect students to each other at the same time. For my Writing and Editing for Multimedia class at the University of New Mexico, I’ve been using Twitter as a space outside our discussion boards where students can talk and learn about journalism.  

These public posts put students in touch with new journalism education resources, they force students to read and analyze current reporting, and they teach students the value of having a professional Twitter account for discussing reporting in a way that a class-only discussion board can’t.

Here’s how I’ve used this approach so far.

A social media presence assignment

It all starts with one assignment that students work on each week throughout the semester. The idea is for learners to have a consistent (at least three times a week) presence on Twitter focused on journalism or journalism education. Students tweet about articles, videos or photos and then talk about the quality of the journalism — not the content. For example: Does their audience think the lead works? Do the photos help tell the story? Do multimedia elements distract from the piece?

This isn’t a social media class, and there isn’t much time to spend on the basics of using Twitter. But to help get them started, I go through hashtags, usernames and other beginner aspects. (I also provide guides like this and other information that points to the usefulness of Twitter in journalism.)

Once students realize we’re not tweeting about lattes and sunsets here, the work begins. Their first concern often is that they won’t have enough to tweet about. I address this by prompting them to post tweets about our weekly topics.

Here’s a lead to start off our discussion this week, #CJ278. What do you notice about the writing? What makes it strong? What specific details help tell the story? https://t.co/fl5FbMjT7n #newswritingonline

— Kate Nash Cunningham (@katenashnm) March 19, 2018

So when they study lead writing in class, they look for story leads, post them and talk about why they were effective. (Or not.)

This is a great example of when you would want to use a delayed lede instead of a direct lede. Here the lede allows the writer to take a more creative approach by setting a scene to tell a short story. #CJ278 https://t.co/Psj8rO2rWq

— Nicholas Aragon (@naragon97) March 22, 2018

When they study headlines, they look for examples and post those.

NPR’s headline in this article is effective. It’s condensed, to the point and follows the rules of headlines. #CJ278 https://t.co/4hJnezSRV0

— Lainey Jameson (@livewithlainey) March 6, 2018

These exercises get them reading news stories and thinking about the mechanics of how those stories came to be, something I think can only help them as they start to write their own stories.

I also tell students they can use Twitter to look for sources or to post their stories once published. To keep this all together (and to make grading easy) students use a hashtag for class. At the end of the semester, students write a short reflection on what they learned, what went well (and didn’t) and how they will continue to use Twitter in the future.

Quickly connecting to outside resources

Twitter users recognize the value of the breadth of resources available on pretty much any topic, and journalism and journalism education are no exception. There are ACES chats on editing to join, Thomson Foundation Facebook Live seminars on mobile reporting to watch, or other resources including the NPR training site to be consumed.

It’s much easier and faster to retweet announcements about those events than going into our learning management system and posting something students might not read in a timely manner. For some chats, I offer extra credit if students participate and tweet five things. This incentivizes students to log on often to see what’s happening and enriches the class beyond the materials posted. My hope is that they follow a variety of accounts they otherwise might not have known about, and they continue to fill their feeds with helpful material well beyond class.

Ten points extra credit if you watch and tweet at least five things you learn, #CJ278 #CJ375 #newswritingonline This could really help prepare you for upcoming assignments. https://t.co/JigkDE0YxK

— Kate Nash Cunningham (@katenashnm) February 12, 2018

Strengths and weaknesses of this approach

One thing I really like about this assignment is that students are learning a few things at once. They are looking for different types of news and thinking about what makes a story strong or a headline weak. At the same time, they also are building their professional social media skills. They also are thinking about appropriate ways to communicate in public forums. As they post, I emphasize that tweets for class should be professional and well-written, and for the most part, they are.

I also like that students who are new to Twitter (and even express reservations about using it) generally come to see the value of it. I’ve had students say they deleted their accounts when the assignment was over, but they still learned something from doing it.

One challenge — and it’s one I have in my in-person classes as well — is getting students excited to use social media for school. To many students, it’s still a place to show off with pics of friends or pets and not something they want their professor to read. I encourage them to create “work” accounts if that makes them more comfortable, and I create lists of each class instead of following each student. To keep students engaged on Twitter, I try to be funny and personable. I also post job ads that require social media skills, so they can see how all of this could come in handy after graduation.

Join us!

The beauty of having a class hashtag is that anyone can join in the conversation. I use #CJ278 for this class, but I also use #newswritingonline in hopes of connecting to other educators who teach news writing at other institutions.

Kate Nash Cunningham is the social media editor for MediaShift. She teaches digital journalism at the University of New Mexico. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post How to Use Twitter to Connect Online Students to News appeared first on MediaShift.

Because tech has become an integral part of reporting, many journalism instructors are now pondering how programs and faculty can innovate — quickly.

“We define news based on models that do not exist anymore,” said CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Associate Dean and Professor Andrew Mendelson. “That has defined us, it still defines us and that’s a really important thing to overturn.”

A study released during the conference by the International Center for Journalists found reporters generally aren’t keeping up with tech trends. This and other studies have led to a renewed effort by journalism educators to embrace and teach new tech.

To be sure graduating students are qualified for emerging jobs such as social media director or community engagement editor, Mendelson and others at a meetup and brainstorming session said educators must continue to learn new things.

“My answer would be to find ways to encourage everyone, all the faculty, to learn something outside their own tent,” said Sue Newhook, an assistant journalism professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“That can mean new skills, ideas and approaches,” she said.

Getting familiar with new tech – and being comfortable enough to teach it – can seem daunting, several instructors said.

ONA 17 took place in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 5-7 this year. (Photo: Kate Nash Cunningham)

But the job can be made easier if journalism educators band together, said Eric Newton, innovation chief of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

“Probably the best thing a professor can do is let go of the idea that one must master something before teaching it to someone else,” he said in an interview with MediaShift.

“There are times when all the students need to know is the existence of new tools, and they can learn them themselves. And then once they’ve learned them, you have a wonderful class discussion about the best ways to use them for journalism, which is the value added that any good journalism educator can bring, even if they are not masters of those tools,” he said.

Newton, a long-time champion of journalism at the Knight Foundation, said educators can get started by connecting to resources such as the ONA Educator’s Facebook page.

As more resources become available, the community of educators using them, and ultimately teaching each other, grows.

“If the entire weight of media innovation falls upon your shoulders, it seems impossible,” he said. “But if a group of 1,500 educators on the ONA Educator’s (Facebook) group organizes itself, or if a class organizes itself or a school organizes itself to find ways to keep current…it’s not really hard.”

Professors also need to give themselves permission and time to experiment, he said.

“When the number of new concepts is so great, it’s a false choice to think that you have to start with any one of those new things,” he said. “The best thing to do is clear the space for a steady stream of new things.”

The conference, where journalists comprise a growing number of attendees, served as a spot for educators and other presenters to share resources and classroom success stories.

Here’s a look at a few of the highlights:

Getting Immersive in the Classroom with 360 Video

For a while, immersive reporting (think 360-degree video or augmented reality) was not a part of the mainstream journalism landscape.

That has changed.

Two of the people who spoke on a panel about 360 reporting are employees of two of the largest news outlets, the Associated Press and The New York Times. Both do extensive work with 360 video, which means it should be a part of j-school curricula soon.

Panelist Robert Hernandez, associate professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, said journalism educators can get started with small and inexpensive spherical cameras to introduce students to this type of reporting.

See more about his 360 journalism projects here. Read this for reviews of equipment.

On to #ONA17‘s first immersive journalism panel! #ONA17VR
with @webjournalist and @Journalism_360 (Spoiler alert: don’t buy the new Samsung) pic.twitter.com/x1SELHo8CD

— Flavius Mihaies (@byflavius) October 5, 2017

Coincidentally, Hernandez and his students won an Online Journalism Association Pro-AM student award at the conference for their story on the Salton Sea, which makes heavy use of 360 video.

Knowing How to Search Social

Much of the public conversation about news happens on social media. That means journalists need to know how to search posts across many platforms in breaking news situations, and several parts of the conference focused on tools that make this job easy.

Crowdtangle, owned by and integrated with Facebook, has emerged as a powerhouse.

Those with a Crowdtangle dashboard in Facebook can join the “Crowdtangler” closed group. (Others with pending requests for access to Crowdtangle need to wait.) There’s also a Facebook Instagram Workshop for News and Publishers group for tips.

Crowdtangle allows users to show others the top social posts related to an event in real time. This can be handy for live TV broadcasts.

Some great @crowdtangle tips from @brandon33175 at @ONAConf. Including: Creating viral alerts + ‘turn on posts from one year ago.’ #ONA17 pic.twitter.com/1quudwVcNw

— Brenden Wood (@BrendenWood) October 6, 2017

Integrating Web and Design Tools

Knowing some web and design skills are a must for graduating journalism students, even at print organizations. Three panelists (all educators) shared the tools and tech they use in classes aimed at getting students coding, creating news games and designing.

Here’s a link to resources shared by Mindy McAdams, digital journalism professor at the University of Florida; Juli James, a lecturer at the University of North Texas who teaches gaming; and Katherine Hepworth, an assistant professor of visual communication at the University of Reno-Nevada. The resources ranged from easy ways to teach font pairing to methods of showing students how to use JavaScript and think about game design.

Overall themed in #ONA17teachtech – Game design is a low barrier way to get students into coding, which will draw them to interactives.

— Mary Willson (@mary_willson) October 7, 2017

Artificial intelligence: Taking News to a New Level

Amy Webb, left, speaks with ONA17 attendees during the conference in Washington, D.C. Webb’s Tech Trends report for 2017 was released to the public in conjunction with her session. (Photo: Kate Nash Cunningham)

Futurist Amy Webb, who gives an annual “Tech Trends in Journalism” talk at ONA, said as everybody is talking about the tech of the future, few news organizations are taking action.

“What’s about to happen is going to fundamentally alter journalism,” she said. “We’re going to wind up on the other side of this with a media landscape we don’t recognize.”

One example: We’ll be getting our news from post-smartphone services like Amazon’s Alexa and other technologies without any physical user interface. This could make it complicated for readers to understand where news is coming from.

Media companies that focus on technologies like artificial intelligence, however, will pull ahead. Her “trend clusters” this year relate to visual computing, voice interface and access to news.

Dawn of functional AI. The future of news is up to these companies if we don’t change course. @amywebb @ONAConf #ONA17trends pic.twitter.com/VQVMGaDjxt

— Dr. Syb (@drsyb) October 7, 2017

On splinternets and access it’s currently 50:50 between pragmatic and catastrophic scenario @amywebb #ona17trends #ona17 pic.twitter.com/fDEI8BTwzI

— Stine Eckert (@StineEckert) October 7, 2017

Regarding journalism education, Webb suggested grounding students in news literacy. Professors could use recent examples of sloppy and inaccurate reporting as examples to talk about “the appropriate time to send out information given that we have a proliferation of news sources…we are now news organizations that publish on the wire that is Twitter,” she told MediaShift.

In terms of artificial intelligence, Webb said “it would be very wise for professors not to teach AI, but to talk through what is it, what is it not, what can it do, want can’t it do and a brief history of it.”

Read the 2018 tech trends for journalism and media and see her folders of related information including recommendations and readings for professors here.

Watch the video of her talk here.

Build a Bot in Your Classroom

During one session, journalism educators heard from Quartz’s John Keefe, who led a hands-on session in bot building.

One example of news bots is the Quartz app, where users interact with an interface that resembles a text-messaging service, delivering summaries of the day’s top stories in SMS-like chat bubbles.

To demonstrate how bot newcomers could create something similar, Keefe, a bot developer and project manager at the company, guided attendees through the basics in chatbot script writing during the RSVP-only “Build-a-Bot Workshop.”

Participants created a basic Facebook Messenger chatbot using Dexter — a free-to-use tool for simple experimentation.

The step-by-step walk-through outlined in the session can be found on Keefe’s Github page. After users complete Step 1 — registering for Dexter by clicking “Make Your First Bot” on the site’s homepage — they can learn bot syntax and see publishing options.

Keefe said using bots as a means of information delivery is in its early stages, but it makes sense to go where the users are.

“If people are using Facebook and Messenger to communicate with each other and access other forms of information, it’d be wise for us to figure out how to best be there, too,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out what that means for journalism and storytelling and to see how it will work.”

With so much new tech to teach, educators at the conference spoke of new classes to add to their programs – although many said they struggle with a glacial pace for adapting new courses.

As journalism continues to dramatically change, Newton, who is updating his landmark journalism education book “Searchlights and Sunglasses,” said evolving will just become part of what educators do.

“It’s not that the future is any one technology or one particular genre of technologies; the future is ever-changing technologies and the capacity to be comfortable with that,” Newton said.

Kate Nash Cunningham is the social media editor for MediaShift. She teaches digital journalism at the University of New Mexico. Additional reporting by Matt Veto, professor of practice at Lehigh University.

The post #ONA17 Equips Educators with New Perspectives, Tools appeared first on MediaShift.

Any of us who use social media have seen the short, snappy videos that offer summaries of news stories, often with no sound. As these “social videos” rise in popularity, journalism educators are looking to incorporate this style of video in the classroom.

This style of social video marks a dramatically different approach from what many of us who teach multimedia reporting have emphasized in our lessons. (What, no audio?) The good news is it’s getting easier to find and use apps that can be used to teach students to create and publish short video stories. Apple’s recent release of Clips in another tool in this category.

Adobe Spark (free) is one tool that I first heard about during an Adobe Education Exchange class online last year.

Spark is part of a trio of apps that Adobe released last year. A second app, Post, allows mobile creation of social media graphics while the third app, Page can be used to publish simple webpages.

With Spark, students can easily and quickly create and publish short “videos.” I use quotes around video because although it can include video clips, a Spark also can include just still photos that are put into a format that plays like a video.

As they create stories, students can choose templates and background music. Some of the current choices here are more appropriate for posts on birthday parties or weddings than news stories — and Spark is aimed at uses beyond journalism for sure. Choosing the music can be a great place to start the conversation with students about the tone of the works of journalism they want to create.

A Tool For All Levels

I first used Spark to teach middle schoolers last year to create short stories during a summer camp class on digital journalism. It was our only publishing platform and we used iPads for collecting content. After some basics on what makes a good story and how to plan storytelling, I gave students an overview of the app and how it works. Students were eager to get the iPads in their hands and start shooting and were quickly fanning out across campus to take photos and videos.

Building a narrative with a group of 5th graders who are not studying journalism proved a bit difficult. They struggled some with the story lines of what they were trying to cover and the audio narrative they wanted to create. But actually recording the voice over with Spark was fairly simple once they knew what they wanted to say.

In just a few days, they got the hang of creating stories and were able to produce a few of them during the camp on a variety of topics. Several said using the app was among their favorite parts of the class. Others struggled with the audio recording (getting the right levels and lengths) and were lukewarm about it. Still, each group of three students was able to create something, and each student played a role. (One helped research a story idea and find people to talk to, another took photos and video while a third was in charge of the voice overs.)

If the creation process was easy enough for fifth graders, it could be adapted for the college students I teach the rest of the year.

As I wrote the syllabus for a 300-level multimedia journalism class at the University of New Mexico this spring, I stuck a Spark assignment in the video section of our class, about half way through the semester. We had just looked at the trends of social video, audio-independent video and the role of mobile tools to create stories.

Creating a Social Bio

The assignment came ahead of a section in the class on self promotion and portfolio building, so I decided to make the students’ bios the topic of their Sparks. Students were tasked with creating a short (less than two minute) piece that showcased the skills they have and what they dream of doing in their careers. Knowing that students had the material (i.e. photos and videos of themselves) already on hand for the most part, I made the assignment focus on narration and storytelling more than content collection.

(Spark video by UNM student Kevin Maestas)

Overall, students responded well to the app and its ease of storytelling. They liked the mobile factor and the way they could quickly pull together a project.

I had intended this work to be a one-day, in-class assignment where students brought the materials to the class, got an overview of the app and started piecing together their stories that day on deadline.

With no Android version then (it’s reported to be coming soon) and no tablets available to us, student had to use their smartphones, which meant non-iPhone using students were tasked with finding a computer to record the audio. While Spark does work on desktops, our lab is set up with older PCs that wouldn’t record audio to the app with an external mic. Troubleshooting that issue took more out of class time than I anticipated.

Because of the recording challenge, one student went for an all-text “narration,” hoping I would give credit for his thinking inside the new box of video without audio. I did.

(Spark video by UNM student Megan Aguilar)

In the end, all students completed the task within a few days and seemed excited about what they had created and how they could use the tool for future reporting assignments. I included a reflection assignment that asked students what they learned about mobile content creation as well as what they liked and didn’t about the app.

With its beginner-level approach to macro-level editing, Spark can’t fill in for richer video creation tools like Premiere. But if portability is a need and social sharing is the goal, those downsides might outweigh the lack of more sophisticated editing tools as students (and educators) adjust to the new normal in social video.

Kate Nash Cunningham teaches journalism at the University of New Mexico. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post Remix: How to Produce Social Video with Adobe Spark appeared first on MediaShift.

One recent ad for a job in Auburn, New York, for example, asked for “someone who loves to dig into documents for enterprise stories, chase down leads to break news, shoot videos to supplement event coverage and post live tweets from the field.”

Another ad, for a reporting gig in Cottonwood, Arizona, called for the ideal candidate to have “clear, concise writing skills with an unwavering penchant for accuracy, strong photography and social media skills” and to “be familiar with Microsoft Word and Adobe Indesign programs.”

One thing the ads usually don’t say is that once on the job, new reporters might be expected to use all of these skills simultaneously on a single assignment. That means journalism students need training beyond the basics of just covering breaking news for tomorrow’s paper or the next website update. They need to know how to do so in near real time using social media and in some cases mobile and social video.

So how can journalism educators start acquainting students with newer ways to cover news?

Tweeting Breaking News

For several years, I have assigned breaking news to students in my 200- and 300-level reporting classes. After a few lectures on the fundamentals of writing in a rush, students choose a real event such as a meeting or speech and turn a story within two days. This has worked well, and deadline-drive exercises have been the assignments that students said taught them the most.

Milo spoke last night at #UNM about immigration, illegal immigrants,muslims, women and racial issues in the U.S #MiloUNM #CJ375 pic.twitter.com/NdnQZA4vnH

— Jazzy Zama (@jazzminlasel1) January 28, 2017

But this work seemed separate from the knowledge I wanted students to have about the professional and timely use of social media to deliver news. So for my 300-level students, I recently added a social media component to their breaking news assignment.

The assignment calls for them to choose a newsworthy event and to write about it within 48 hours. Along the way, they must use social media (usually Twitter, but they have a choice) at least five times. They also are required to use a class hashtag, which is an easy way for me to keep track of (and offer feedback on) what they post.

Protestors surrounded the SUB at #UNM during Milo's speech and guests had to be held inside for an additonal 30 minutes. #miloUNM #CJ375 pic.twitter.com/UcFUC72OnB

— Jazzy Zama (@jazzminlasel1) January 28, 2017

To prepare for the social media component, we spend about 10 minutes a day looking at how news organizations use Twitter in their reporting, and how students might use the platform to find story ideas. As part of a separate graded social media presence assignment, students also must post three tweets a week related to journalism or journalism education. This gives them an introduction to Twitter and a warm up on how it works.

A few weeks into the semester, the 300-level students practice live tweeting by watching a YouTube speech and crafting tweets in a Google Doc, without publishing them. I instruct them to think of the tweets as the key points they’ll use in a story, and to use hashtags and usernames whenever possible. We also talk increasing audience engagement by adding media to tweets in addition to text. Writing the tweets without publishing them gives me time to offer feedback on their general approach, and it serves as a place to reiterate the importance of using social media responsibly.

Protestors are yelling "Shut it Down" as anticipated speaker Milo Yiannopoulos is set to speak in the SUB Ballroom at #UNM. #MiloUNM #CJ375 pic.twitter.com/AqhB4n2HB2

— Jazzy Zama (@jazzminlasel1) January 28, 2017

Multitasking on the Scene

While the in-class work was valuable, student Isaac De Luna, who recently covered several local immigration-related events, said the real-world work helped boost his skills.

“Having the ability to actually go out and experience what is necessary to make a breaking news happen is an invaluable lesson for any young journalist. I definitely believe theory will give the right basis for any journalist on any situation on how to cover a story, but only practice can allow a student to grow and put the learned knowledge into practice,” he said.

For student Skylar Griego, having to use social media during an event made her realize she’d like to have more hands to help with tweeting on her phone while taking notes and and running a recorder.

Griego, who covered a panel discussion on open records, said she saw big differences between in-class practice and real life reporting.

“The most notable difference in practice live tweeting in class and doing it at an event was the pacing. In class, we practiced tweeting from a video, which we were able to pause and rewind. Or we would live tweet a guest lecturer, who would see us typing and pause at times to give us time to tweet,” Griego said. “At an event, no one slows down or pauses any longer than necessary — some don’t even pause at all. There is no rewind, (sometimes) no asking to repeat that last sentence, and no fixing tweets,” she said.

Black Lives Matter protesters have formed a human chain #cj278 #milounm pic.twitter.com/6DVVbeESX5

— Sarah East (@saraheast67) January 28, 2017

In my 200-level course, students undertake similar practice with an in-class, on-deadline exercise where they watch a speech on YouTube and have to write a short hard news story on the spot. They also are assigned to select and cover a real event during the semester. For them, the social media component is optional, but highly encouraged.

Covering a Controversial Event

Usually, when I go over this assignment at the start of the semester, students fret about finding the right type of event. Using common news values as a guide, we work to identify newsworthy events that merit local coverage. This semester we had easy pickings, with a campus visit early on from Milo Yiannopoulos, local protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and other politically-themed events. Students also chose scheduled events such as speeches and meetings, but still had to meet the 48-hour deadline.

The Yiannopoulos event came first, and I strongly encouraged students to attend.

It turned out to be just the kind of scenario I had hoped students would encounter. The controversial nature of Yiannopoulos’ speech meant hundreds of students were present, mostly to protest. The multi-agency police presence was large, and students faced the issue of having to secure access into the event. A small handful of students were able to enter the speech, while others were left outside to cover the protests — a breakdown of duties that mimics how real news organizations at the scene broke up the work.

Protesters now hitting windows and doors on north side of SUB #CJ278 #milounm

— Sarah East (@saraheast67) January 28, 2017

By and large, students did well handling the experience, which became chaotic and included arrests as the night wore on. Some students said they worked to overcome their nervousness at the unrest as they covered the event while others dealt with technological issues.

Student Jazzy Zama said she learned several valuable lessons on the scene.

“Covering this speech taught me to be on my guard because anything can happen, whether it was to look out for my safety or to watch what was happening amongst the people and get good footage. I learned to have my equipment ready before getting on the scene and to have multiple SD cards in case anything happened,” she said.

“It was helpful that my phone was fully charged because my Zoom (audio recorder) ended up not working for my interviews and soundbites, so I had to record the information on my phone. I realized it was important to have the camera batteries charged and the camera constantly rolling so I didn’t miss something (Yiannopoulos) said or an audience member said,” Zama added.

Police pushing protesters back #cj278 #UnmMILO

— Sarah East (@saraheast67) January 28, 2017

Student Sarah East said covering the event gave her a sense of what to do the next time she covers breaking news.

“I learned how to tweet while paying attention to the situation around me and interview people at the same time,” she said. “This ability to multi-task is very hard to replicate within a classroom. The only way to truly experience it is in the field. I now feel more prepared to cover breaking news in the future because I know what to expect.”

Kate Nash Cunningham teaches journalism at the University of New Mexico. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post Remix: How Students Can Use Social Media to Cover Breaking News appeared first on MediaShift.

The conference focused on digital ideas in an environment where journalism students and new employees with traditional storytelling skills are seen as assets to companies from CNN to NowThis News — as long as they also have the digital skills to take their stories beyond common platforms and approaches.

Outgoing ONA director Jane MacDonnell said the conference is known as a “super-sized petri dish for new ideas and innovations.”

This year’s gathering drew more than 2,100 people.

Here’s a look at nine takeaways for journalism educators and students:

The Snapocalypse is coming!

Students (and professors) who enjoy using social media will be excited about the trend of distributed content in news. One huge theme at ONA this year was that news is being published for specific social platforms to the point that some news organizations are doing away with their home pages.

One case in point is NowThis News. When users navigate to nowthisnews.com, they can follow NowThis on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Tumblr.

A screen shot of NowThisNews.com directs readers to the company’s social media platforms in order to find news.

Because each platform is different, the content has to be repackaged in a variety of ways, and that’s something students entering the field will need to know how to do.

One recent example is an interview the company did with Vice President Joe Biden, which was edited and used in a variety of ways.

“From one interview, you can get 60 pieces of content on 14 different platforms,” said Versha Sharma, managing editor of NowThis News.

The trend also means journalism students should begin experimenting now with each of these platforms.

At CNN, production work is broken into teams depending on who is good at which platform, said Ashley Codianni, director of social media for the cable giant. This means students can “specialize” in a platform such as Snapchat.

“We’re able to make special content and deliver it to people on their platform,” she said.

Silent video is trendy

It used to be that journalism professors who teach video spent as much time focused on audio as they did on the moving pictures. 

While high-quality audio is still a must for students to learn, many mobile video users are consuming video with the sound off. (Think crowded train commutes or sneaky looks at Facebook during work.) Fidji Simo, director of product at Facebook, said during a panel that about half of video on Facebook is consumed without the sound on.

That means students need to know how to package video for social, said Misty Montaño, digital content manager for 9News in Denver.

“Videos right now really are non-audio, specific for Facebook, 30 seconds or shorter and visual, very visual,” she said.

Broadcast students also should be able to adapt to various editing platforms and always understand the fundamentals of storytelling.

“You (have to) know what’s behind editing. It’s knowing basic skills,” Montaño said.

As they work on storytelling, students “really need to focus on finding their voice and their passion.”

“We are looking on the digital journalism side for not just your stuffy AP writers, we are looking for journalists who are able to craft and weave a story that is even different from what you see or hear on TV,” she said.

The other journalism skills — and how to teach them

Many journalism professors likely have the general sense that there are skills students need to know that aren’t anywhere on a syllabus in their department.

Those skills include things on the technical side of storytelling, said Tim Wong, senior director of UX architecture at Gannett.

“We have social interns and engagement desk interns and it’s interesting to poke and prod them to think about ways to use these platforms in ways they (usually) don’t and to look under the hood,” he said.

During a class he taught at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, his assignments revolved around student projects that included creating new news platforms and tools.

“I just feel like learning by doing is such a huge value for journalism schools,” he said.

So how can professors add new courses and topics into what they already teach, especially when getting approval for new courses can be time consuming and logistically taxing?

Holly Wise, a lecturer at Texas State University, said she’s had luck teaching two-week classes during interim sessions. The offerings at her university have included drones, sensors and solutions journalism.

“What I try to do is focus on elements of good, compelling stories, no matter what the platforms is,” she said.

Jody Brannon, a former adjunct professor at American University who serves on the ONA executive board and coordinates its Education Committee, said the conference helps educators starting learn about the skills their students will need.

“We all know how long it takes for curriculums to change,” she said, so it’s key that educators have a space to collectively brainstorm ways to make journalism programs less traditional.

Already, she’s seen educators become change agents on their campuses.

“How many Snapchat classes are offered in America this semester? I would say not many, but maybe after spending the week here, there will be next term — if there’s that flexibility and some change agents on campus to make that happen. I’d like to think that people who are here and make that effort to come are those change agents,” she said.

It’s raining robots!

Students who plan to work in journalism should know a bit about artificial intelligence and its intersection with news. News outlets including the New York Times, BreakingNews.com and the Today Show already have deployed bots to deliver news and information while BuzzFeed has a bot that gathers news.

And more bots are coming — both of the type that interact using text and those that run on voice recognition.

While much of bot creation requires substantive coding skills, several platforms exist to help would-be bot makers build and test bots, including ChatFuel, RunDexter and Motion.AI.

For students interested in learning more about bots, one place to start is an environment like Slack, which uses bots inside its platform, said Stephanie Clary, managing editor of Breaking News.

“Students have a sense of what do I have in this space and what can I build?”

Bots and artificial intelligence were big topics during the Online News Association conference in Denver last week. Here, futurist Amy Webb shows two recently created bots during her talk on top tech trends. (Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham)

Keeping tabs on tech trends

One easy way for journalism professors to stay up to date is to check out futurist Amy Webb’s top tech trends. Webb presents the trends every year at ONA and her talk is always a fascinating look at the future. This year, Webb showed off two robots. One, named Akira, was created to answer questions about ONA, while another named Amy answered a broader range of questions.

This year’s trends include object recognition, crowd learning, mixed reality, conversational computing and augmented journalism.

Read this wrap up by student journalists at the conference to get the lowdown on what all that means — and to check out the five other trends in Webb’s report this year. See Webb’s slide deck here.

During her presentation, Webb also spoke about the future jobs in journalism, which include augmented reality producers, public editors for code and a data and algorithms investigative team. Stay tuned for next year’s ONA to undoubtedly hear from people doing some of those jobs.

Broadcast storytelling has evolved well beyond TV

Journalism educators who want to show students examples of experiments in innovative storytelling can use CNN as one source.

A panel of CNN directors and editors said the company uses a variety of platforms for broadcast, including Facebook Live. One reporter stationed in Rio during the recent Olympics did 32 Facebook Lives, said Codianni, the director of social media. Another reporter used Facebook to go live from a dangerously overcrowded prison in the Philippines.

“Being big is just not good enough. We need to be engaging and really modify and create content that people want to consume in the places they want to consume it,” she said.

CNN reporters also used the messaging app Kik, Instagram Stories and Snapchat to report and connect with audiences.

Each platform is different, said Codianni, noting that Instagram is more about “mood and scene” while

“Snapchat is much more produced.”

Kik, she said, is for a much younger audience, and has a different voice and style from other platforms.

In short, students should specialize in a social platform they enjoy and could end up with jobs, such as Snapchat editor. They also should be savvy with mobile technology and could end up working at places such as CNN’s first mobile-first bureau in Nigeria.

Along with being able to work in a high-tech environment, students should be able to write well, said Amanda Wills, senior editor of CNN’s digital news desk.

The company is looking for “people who are not afraid to write with voice,” she said.

See other parts of the CNN panelists’ presentation here and check out CNN’s current job listings to get a sense of the skills needed in today’s marketplace.

Students are doing amazing stuff

If you and your students are ready for some inspiration, check out the ONA’s 2016 online journalism award winners.

The winning student work includes projects by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, NYU Journalism, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

Educators can apply for online news grants

The biggest announcement in the journalism educator world at the conference was that more funding will be available for another two years for the Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education. Nearly $1 million will go to fund between 15 and 20 student journalism projects around the country that aim to produce “live news experiments.” See more here.

ONA’s student newsroom provides real-time opportunities

It seems every year the choices between all the great panels at ONA become harder and harder. Check out the coverage of other panels that may interest you on ONA’s student newsroom site. The student newsroom program is an opportunity for journalism students to attend the conference for free while they work with mentors to cover the event.

Kate Nash Cunningham teaches journalism at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of the New Mexico News Port, a collaborative student journalism lab. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post Major Trends at #ONA16: Robots, Social Video, Distributed Content, and the Snapocalypse appeared first on MediaShift.

Click the image to read the whole series. Original photo by Flickr user Richard Ha used here under Creative Commons.

When most journalism students think of the topics they’d like to cover as reporters, the business beat is not high on their lists. For some, it’s not even on their lists.

And let’s be honest: covering job reports and unemployment trends and the opening of the latest chain store can be a grind.

Still, there’s fun to be had on the business desk, and at the New Mexico News Port, a student journalism lab at the University of New Mexico, we decided to focus a recent year-long project on our state’s “creative economy.” (That’s code for interesting people who make a living using their imagination.)

By the end of the two semesters, students who had bemoaned having to write about something so boring said they had actual fun. They covered people including local brewery owners, app developers and the owner of a cat cafe — all part of a group of folks who slowly are diversifying the state’s economy.

Stories for the project, called Creative New Mexico, ranged from an entrepreneur who makes unusually flavored popcorn to local tribal students who are exploring Mars to virtual reality practitioners.

We met female woodworkers, minorities who are training in computer science and coding and two men who craft barrels for aging alcohol. Other story subjects included an immigrant cake maker, a woman with a clothing boutique in an Airstream and people involved with New Mexico’s Space Port.

We also spoke to filmmakers, digital scoreboard creators, app builders, investors and other dreamers for written stories, videos and audio pieces that we published online.

Over the course of two semesters, we produced more than 100 stories. Along the way, News Port interns produced five related live talk show-esque broadcasts on the internet by using Periscope and Facebook Live to broadcast them to our followers.

A screen shot of a page on the New Mexico News Port’s website, where students spent a year chronicling the state’s creative economy. The project looked at ways New Mexicans are working to diversify the state’s economy, which relies heavily on oil and gas extraction but is seeing an uptick in technical and artistic start up companies.

The lessons we learned were many and apply to student project reporting as well as any newsroom willing to examine a topic in depth.

1. To choose a topic, think broadly

Students from a handful of journalism classes were going to be participating in the project, so we needed something broad enough to contain stories from a variety of students over a year.

In the end, the very loosely defined creative economy topic was a perfect fit. It included techy folks, artisans, and those in between. We had some story pitches in the second semester that overlapped on topics covered in the first semester, but by and large, we had enough material to cover from a variety of angles for a year. We also considered other broad topics like water in New Mexico, local veterans, and crime.

2. Plan and get organized AEAP (As Early As Possible)

We met early on with our public media and other partners to see how we could work together, and we scoped out topics of mutual interest and areas of collaboration. It was crucial to the project that we had professional expertise from our local public TV station, where students got help with video production, as well as our local public radio station, where students were mentored in audio production.

From there, we set out to build a story budgeting system. We looked at a few paid programs, but given our limited budget, Google Docs came in handy here. We worked off simple spreadsheets, and our system evolved. We gave Slack a try, too, but giving up on the email habit proved tricky for students and faculty alike.

Coming up with and keeping track of story ideas was equally as challenging, and we started a master document with potential topics to cover. Students were tasked with generating story pitches on the areas they would like to cover, and from there, they got assignments from either a professor or the News Port directly.

In the end, simple documents for planning — although not perfect — served us well.

3. Get student reporters excited about the topic

As for those bewildered looks from students when they learned they would be covering the stories about the economy, they began to dissipate. (Not completely, however, and some students voiced concern about the limited focus of the project in their class evaluations.)

Slowly, many began to see that we weren’t in this to write about the latest bankruptcy or the futures market. We were in this to cover really cool stuff happening around town — some being done by people close to their age. Students also began to appreciate that writing a business profile — much like covering cops or the state fair parade — is part of being a new reporter.

By the end, students had a blast writing about a local “fail” night where entrepreneurs told tales of startups gone wrong, touring sustainable “earth ships” in northern New Mexico and covering a host of interesting speakers. One student said she landed an internship and then a full time job at a local business weekly because of her specific experience at the News Port covering entrepreneurs.

4. Connect to the community

It just so happened that many of the people we were reporting on spend a good deal of time on social media. Because we’re an online news organization, we also live in that same space, relying on the organic parts of our social media strategy to help spread the word about potential stories and published pieces. This made it easy to connect with our community virtually. I’m not sure we would have generated the website traffic we did had we been covering a less techy community.

In person, students connected to the people they were covering by attending events during the semester and doing interviews face to face. For one writing class, local business owners agreed to allow students to practice their interviewing skills on them as business owners worked to pitch stories to the students.

5. Show off behind the scenes

Some of our more successful efforts on social media involved showing the world what we were doing behind the scenes — and how we did it. For our live shows, we tweeted about some of the technology — in our case an iPad mini and a microphone — that we were using to produce the show. Students showed interest in that and stopped by our lab to check it out.

We also used Snapchat and Instagram to show off our newsroom or give a peek at our show rehearsals. These platforms seemed a perfect fit for students who are already comfortable in selfie mode, as well as for other students in the department who weren’t involved in the project, but wanted to know more.

In the end, the students who took some time to warm up to the topic felt at home using social media to show the audience that they were traveling on assignment, or to solicit questions for an upcoming interview — taking a “boring” topic and having some fun with it.

Kate Nash Cunningham teaches journalism at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of the New Mexico News Port, a collaborative student journalism lab. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post Remix: 5 Tips for Managing a Year-Long Student Journalism Project appeared first on MediaShift.

With a little planning and practice, getting set up to go live can be a rewarding experience for journalists and journalism students who want to tell video stories on the go. So far, apps like Periscope largely have been used to broadcast events like rallies, speeches or concerts. But there are ways to bring the immediacy of live streaming to other non-breaking news events, like interviews.

At the student journalism lab New Mexico News Port, we decided this semester to try to live stream a series of TV-talk-show-style interviews from campus.

As we planned for the series, we first considered shows that would feature our guests being interviewed as they walked through campus while live on air. That idea didn’t last very long, given our windy weather, boisterous middle-of-the-city location and bright Southwestern sun. (Think noisy audio and squinting guests — not to mention trying to figure out how not to trip over each other as one of us walked backwards as we filmed). So we settled on a studio in our Communication and Journalism building, although the setup we used could be deployed in a variety of locations.

Early on, we considered using the Blab app as our platform. But it seemed more suitable for people in various locations and too much like a Google Hangout for the style of show we were hoping to achieve.

In the end, we chose Periscope, in part because it works with Twitter, where we have a decent-sized audience. By comparison, building an audience on Blab seemed like more work.

Our goal was to use mobile equipment — in our case, an oldish iPad mini we already had — and to try to get the quality of the broadcast to be as high as possible.

In the end, we produced four live shows using Periscope and one with Facebook Live. The students were excited to experiment with a new way to reach our audience through Twitter followers and Periscope users, as well as on Facebook. The students are walking away from the semester with the expertise to set up and run their own shows.

An iPad set up in a studio with one mic and minimal lighting was all it took a group of students with the New Mexico News Port to start a live broadcast from the campus of the University of New Mexico. Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham.

Here’s a look at what we learned, along with the pros and cons of the equipment we used.

Pros of Using Periscope on an iPad Mini

Going live is the selling point when it comes to using a mobile setup. The fact that Periscope and an iPad can stream live to Twitter (no satellite truck or website required) make up for the fact that the image and audio quality aren’t yet on par with more traditional broadcast equipment.

Affordability

The beauty of the mobile setup is its price. For this project, we spent about $115 on a microphone and its cable. We used lights that are built into our studio, but you could do a cheap lighting setup or use natural light, depending on the situation. We had an iPad mini 2 ($270 or so when they were new) and a $13 case that mounts the iPad on a tripod. The Periscope app — which is tightly connected to Twitter — is free.

Learning curve

The student who ran the camera for the show had been introduced to the iPad and Periscope just days before. With simple explanations of iOS and Periscope, he did fine.

Portability

Many students and journalists have smartphones and tablets in their purses and backpacks. Adding a tripod and a case increases a journalist’s load slightly, but is not as cumbersome as large video cameras or even DSLRs.

Conversation starter

Students hanging around our news lab were curious what we were doing with the iPad on the tripod. We also found that the small and familiar nature of an iPhone or iPad wasn’t overly intimidating to our show guests because the equipment is so commonplace.

The set up needed to broadcast live is relatively simple and affordable. Pictured are a Mikey microphone, an iPad mini and power cords. Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham.

Cons

On-board audio quality is low.

Many of us have watched Periscope broadcasts where it’s hard to hear/understand what’s happening. But for less than $100, you can get an external mic for your iPhone or iPad. I recommend getting one like the Mikey.

I have played with low-end external mics for the iPad mini and haven’t been impressed. The Mikey did well during our tests and our show. It has three settings, a simple interface, and can be set on or taped to a table. We also experimented with taping it to a boom hooked on to a light stand, which was O.K. except that in order to get it close enough to all our guests, it showed up in the frame. Depending on your setup, and your ability to hold the boom just out of the frame, a boom might be a good way to go.

If you go with an external mic, be sure to get a six-foot cord that’s going to allow you to put your mic close to the person speaking. We taped ours to the table, just out of frame.

Video quality is not super

We tested our studio lighting setup extensively with the stock iPad photo/video app. Because of the ability to control for focus and exposure, we had our video looking sharp and well lit. That wasn’t the case when we went into Periscope to test the live stream. The auto-focusing and exposure were thrown off by the studio lighting against a black backdrop and the image quality was terrible.

This quality issue was the only thing that caused me to panic ahead of the first show. In the end, we used studio lights (dialed down a bit from our tests to provide less contrast) together with the overhead lights. This boosted the image quality and helped the camera with its focusing and exposure.

Battery life is a concern during live broadcasts

Knowing that live streaming video eats batteries, I made sure to leave home the day of the first show with the wall charger for the iPad, and I had already set aside an extension cord in the studio so that the iPad could run on power from the outlet. I even had a backup portable battery charger, just in case.

My plan was foiled when I remembered that the Mikey uses the same (and only) lightning connection on the iPad. I was forced to chose between good audio and a shorter show. I chose the good audio. And because our live show turned out to be less than 20 minutes, our battery life was fine. But streaming anything longer could prove problematic.

Inability to add graphics

Periscope lacks the ability to add graphics or titles as is done in a more traditional broadcast setup. We thought about name tags or signs for our guests, but in the end we decided if the show went long, that we would pause and just reintroduce them. The ability to add names to the screen was one thing we liked about the Blab app.

One-camera limit

Periscope is really set up for a hand-held, one camera situation. In our case, we crammed our guests and two interviewers into one frame and made it work. For this type of broadcast, it would have been more ideal to run a switcher between two or more cameras, but I’m not aware of a setup for that using an iPad. I would love to know if anyone has found a workaround for this. (Hint, hint, Periscope.)

No direct communication with show hosts

One of the great things about Periscope is that viewers can send their questions or comments live through a chat function. This works well when you’ve got the phone or tablet in selfie mode and can see the screen up close. But for a setup in a studio, it gets tricky. The show hosts can’t see the questions, so it takes someone to keep track of the questions and then get them to the host in near real-time. In our case, we used text messages to convey the audience questions. It was a bit strange to have students look at their phones during the live interviews, but the audience engagement was worth it.

New Mexico News Port intern Angela Shen interviews Elan Collelo about virtual reality during a show on April 20, 2016. Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham.

Quick Look at Facebook Live

By the end of the semester, Facebook Live was becoming a thing. So for our last show, students used it instead of Periscope.

Overall, we used the same technical setup in the studio, although we found a stash of casual chairs and went for a “living room” effect for this particular show.

Getting set up with the Live section of Facebook was a breeze for students, who seemed to know that they create a new post first, and then click the icon for live streaming, which is a person with radio wave-esque lines around their head. We wrote a post describing the show and were rolling.

In terms of glitches, the Facebook app crashed on us twice during the show (and our mic came untaped from the table and went sliding through the bottom of the shot.) The app crash gave me time to tape the mic again, but made for an interesting few minutes as I wondered whether I should walk into the shot to fix the mic. Because we had students in another room monitoring the audio who said it still sounded ok, we opted to leave it.

To interact with the audience, we worked to get people to write comments on our Facebook post with the stream, but we didn’t have the same luck we had when engaging the audience with Periscope. I think with time and promotion, we could build a following for the show on Facebook, as well. Students plan to try another series of shows about the election in the fall.

Kate Nash Cunningham teaches journalism at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of New Mexico News Port, a collaborative student journalism lab. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post Remix: The Pros and Cons of Periscope, Facebook Live appeared first on MediaShift.

Demonstrations at the sold-out conference in Los Angeles included software that creates a geofence for targeted social search, sophisticated mapping software and hologram-creating machines.

Much of the technology has applications for the newsroom and the classroom. But how can journalism educators begin to incorporate such new and expensive tools in their college curricula?

Futurist Amy Webb, who wrote this piece on improving journalism schools, said educators can do a lot just by studying up on a variety of digital trends.

“The biggest take away for educators is to broaden their sphere when it comes to digital media,” she said in an interview after delivering her 10 tech trends for journalists presentation at the conference.

“Today I didn’t really talk about anything traditional. I talked about cognitive computing and remote robots and peer-to-peer publishing, and so probably the most important thing is to sort of broaden that definition. That’s going to be the best place to start.”

J-School professors also can experiment by adding little pieces of technology to existing or ongoing projects, Webb said.

Students doing investigative reporting, for example, should incorporate online fact-checking while other students can get started with programs that mine photos for data, she said.

Robert Hernandez, associate professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, spoke about introducing digital media in the classroom during a panel for journalism educators at the Online News Association conference Sept. 24 – 26. Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham.

Along with staying current on digital media trends, professors slowly can make themselves (and their students) more digital, said Robert Hernandez, associate professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Hernandez said educators should work to train students on things like content management systems such as WordPress that are commonly used by news organizations.

“In them creating a post and having them upload something into the media library, they are getting to use a content management system that the real world uses, not the classroom,” he said in an interview.

Hernandez, who has taught classes using virtual and augmented reality, said professors also can take advantage of free and low-tech platforms for every class project they do, such as buying domain names and setting up Twitter, YouTube and Gmail accounts.

During several panels throughout the event, other educators spoke about how they have incorporated tech and digital media in larger ways.

Matt Waite, a professor of practice at the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said he has experimented around the edges of his department’s core classes.

“What I have done is try to build things outside the core and not even in the building in some cases,” he said during a panel about building digital culture in journalism schools.

Apart from incorporating tools like drones into his classes, Waite said he believes in giving students a space to experiment with digital tools and tech — things that often need space beyond the traditional physical classroom.

He found a room that previously was used for still photography and turned it into a maker space where students can tinker for a few hours on Friday afternoons. Projects so far have included 9-foot kites with cameras attached.

“It’s the idea of ‘hey, come on down, try something crazy … try something new, see if it sparks your passion,'” he said.

At the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, associate professor Cindy Royal has introduced digital media into her program on a large scale, working to create a major in digital media innovation.

Trying new things along with students is key, she said.

Royal told other educators to not “be afraid to teach something you have never done.” At her school, she’s preparing for a class that uses sensors to collect data for storytelling.

Key apps to try

But even without maker spaces and sensors, journalism professors can open their App Store or Google Play and download, try and then show students a few apps discussed at the conference.

Snapchat
One place to add digital media to the classroom is in multimedia courses where students have room to experiment with different platforms.

Snapchat provides an easy way to create and share short stories in a space many students already are using. Using the “my story” function, journalists can piece together a slide show or video that will stay online for 24 hours.

“Journalism students should definitely use Snapchat,” said Gerald Lane, a platforms producer for NowThis News, who gave a hands-on training for the app.

“If you are trying to tell stories that really get on the ground and make your audience feel like they are there, Snapchat is key.”

So far, big news outlets like CNN and ESPN publish to Snapchat’s Discover section. But many smaller organizations and individual journalists not included in Discover publish their stories as well. NowThis has used it to cover international stories include Syrian refugees.

Snapchat is free and available on iOS and Android.

Uldis Abolins and Kristina Jackunaite, left, learn from Gerald Lane of NowThisNews, right, about how journalists can use Snapchat. The social media app was one of several discussed during panels at the Online News Association’s annual conference Sept. 24 – 26. Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham.

Periscope
Professors looking to teach students how to live stream events or create and distribute their own newscasts can have students download and try Periscope. This tool allows anyone with an internet connection to show the world what they see. This is a great tool for students on both sides of the camera to learn.

In less than a minute and with a steady hand (or better yet, a tripod) students can be broadcasting live from the campus or local event. Because broadcasts can be saved, students can return to the classroom for critiques of their videos.

Periscope, which is integrated with Twitter to spread the word about your broadcast, is free and available on iOs or Android.

The virtual reality viewer Google Cardboard was a popular item in the Midway showcase area of the Online News Association’s annual conference Sept. 24 – 26. Cardboard works with an app to allow users to see 360 video. Photo by Kate Nash Cunningham.

Google cardboard (the viewer and the app)

Virtual reality in a news context is coming. It’s actually already here. Several of the panels that drew large crowds at ONA focused on virtual reality storytelling and 360 video.

But journalism professors don’t have to talk their department heads into buying the still-pricey Oculus Rift goggles. There’s a cheaper way.

One of the freebies in the goody bag for conference attendees was the coveted Google cardboard viewer. (Sign up here to learn more about how to get a viewer and about Google’s virtual field trips project.)

As journalists start to think about building narratives and story lines with 360 video, it’s key for students to become familiar with the technology used to view it. Cardboard does that, and a time when 360 video is poised to hit the masses, including during the upcoming Democratic debate hosted by CNN.

Already, Facebook has announced it will support spherical video.

Aaron Luber, head of partnerships with Google Cardboard, said now is the time to join the trend.

“The launch of spherical video on Facebook … we’ve got spherical video on YouTube, a lot of people are just beginning to see and experience (it),” he said.

The Cardboard app is free and available on iOs or Android.

Kate Nash Cunningham is a journalism instructor at the University of New Mexico who spent almost 15 years as a print reporter. At UNM, she also works as the editor of the journalism collaboration lab @newmexiconewsport. She has a master’s degree in digital journalism and design from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post How to Take Small Steps and Experiment to Make Students More Digital appeared first on MediaShift.

As UNM students returned to classes this spring, many brought the new confidence and ideas they earned last fall by launching the New Mexico News Port, a collaboration spawned by the Online News Association’s Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education.

As described in an earlier post, the two of us designed a live news experiment that seated itself in the journalism school curriculum, involved various external partners, and took aim at statewide election coverage as its initial content focus. It was a radical and ambitious undertaking for a small department divided by communication and journalism studies.

We have lived to tell of it. By the end of the term, some 50 students from six classes had contributed more than 100 stories, produced more than 25 videos, carried out a Twitter Town Hall, and sustained an active social media engagement effort.

So what new knowledge did students acquire? And what did we journalism professors learn? We’ve been sorting that out, and some of the answers surprised us.

The first five insights are from Mike Marcotte, the project’s coordinator, while the second five are from project editor Kate Nash Cunningham.

MIKE:

1. The sudden implementation of a “teaching hospital model” can temporarily overwhelm students.

Our “learn by doing” philosophy exposed a rather sharp contrast to the “learn by watching, discussing and practicing” approach more typical in journalism classrooms.

This sudden shift in the curriculum shocked some students. Suddenly, the the deadlines were harsher and the bar was higher for the rigor of their work. To deliver publishable content, they had to summon a good deal of will, time and effort. Had the News Port existed previously, students would have seen it coming up ahead in their curriculum trajectory and that would have provided them some advance notice. As it was, in debuting something this fast, they had to sink or swim.

Take away: Was this a one-time shock only? Was it amplified by the nature of election coverage? I think the answer is yes to both.

2. Why was I exhausted by December? Because the “teaching hospital model” requires more editorial leadership and editing capacity than a typical academic course.

Kate and I realized how daunting it can be when some 16 assignments go out at a time. You see, it wasn’t that 16 stories came back for edits, it was more like 48 — three edits per story! Our goal wasn’t to grade stories as a matter of feedback, but to lift them up to the point of being fully publishable, with multiple sources, verified facts, strong quotes, and crisp photos or other multimedia elements. Some stories required fourth and fifth edits. We tried staggering the deadlines, which helped to relieve the bottleneck but only barely. Kate joined Mike in picking up edits, which helped a lot. (Initially, Kate did final edits … but to speed things up, I began to take on initial edits too.)

Take away: Train good student editors to help edit. (Peer edits by themselves don’t do much good.) Also, look for editing assistance from the professional partners. Sadly, as a last resort, we relented on the notion that all stories must clear the publishing bar, and we allowed less motivated students to opt out of publishing by settling for a lower grade and skipping extensive rewrites.

3. No pain, no gain.

It’s true, the more you demand, the more you will get. For the students, that means the greater the struggle, the greater the triumph. At the start of the semester, there was widespread student concern over the real-world expectations of the News Port. Kate and I calmly watched and endured spasms of fear and panic. Gradually, that gave way to satisfaction and confidence. Almost all students ended the semester feeling gratified that they had prevailed. (See sample comments below.) They got those hard-to-get interviews. They actually got stories published. They really did meet professional standards. And though they started out with large gaps in knowledge of politics, they filled those gaps and became well-informed “experts” on their beats.

Take away: One of the hardest things to teach in journalism is the value of persistence, unless the student experiences both the challenge and the pay off. Set a high bar and remain encouraging despite the initial whining.

4. The gap between students and professional partners is still pretty wide.

Despite our best efforts to close the gap, it’s not easy to bridge the work of aspiring journalists with all the needs of our publishing partners. We found very good connection with the Daily Lobo, the independent campus newspaper, because it shares so much in common with the campus culture. But our supportive friends at founding partners KUNM, KNME and New Mexico In Depth remained somewhat distant from the classroom efforts. We can’t blame them for taking a back seat as we figured out how to drive the car. Plus, we are thankful for the ongoing encouragement they offered, not to mention the content sharing they provided the News Port. But, our goal should be to close that gap, and I think getting our professional pals more involved, early on, in planning and execution of student work is one way. Not that we’d expect a lot of student work to end up on their platforms, but that we’d identify select students and select works that the partners actually supervise through to completion … even if it takes longer.

Take away: Bridge the classroom-partner gap with targeted opportunities worked out between faculty, pros and students themselves.

5. Allow for checks and balances between the classroom and the publishing platform.

If I were both classroom teacher and News Port editor, not only would I have gone mad but my editor self would probably concede shortcuts to my teacher self. Fortunately, I didn’t face that problem because I was able to hire an excellent editor in Kate. This allowed me to keep my eye on the classroom students and their activities, while Kate kept an eye on the publication and the needs of the community, the audience.

Also, it just helped to have the additional expertise. Kate’s combination of journalistic, design and teaching sensibilities were instrumental in moving the project from concept to reality. It took a lot of work, and that took high levels of motivation and commitment on her part. I’m exceedingly grateful for that.

Take away: The more we can specialize in our roles, the better we can balance the needs of pedagogy with the needs of industry, and of public service.

A look at the key lessons students learned as part of the New Mexico News Port project.

KATE:

1. There is a need to fill any non-journalism knowledge gaps early on

Our topic, the statewide and midterm elections, was pretty specialized and in retrospect not a theme to which many students were attuned. Early on, students needed coaching on the differences between the U.S. House and the state House and how campaign finance laws and other election minutiae work. Turns out such topics generally aren’t on the radar screen of students, as some mentioned in class reflection essays at the end of the 16 weeks.

One helpful speaker during the semester was Eve Byron of Followthemoney.org, who flew in to talk to students about using the group’s website to understand and report on campaign finances.

We should have dedicated more time to having political scientists or candidates come to class, and we probably should have assigned more reading dedicated to the democratic process. We also might have provided many more examples of the types of political journalism we were seeking, so students had context for the standards and quality for which we were aiming.

Overall, though, we chose the election not only because it was the biggest story in town during the semester, but also because it’s a topic many beginning journalists will be asked to cover during their time with news organizations. Throwing them into something they know little or nothing about is par for the course in journalism. In the end, several said they were glad to have learned more about the political process while others said they still didn’t love politics, but were grateful for the experience of covering something about which they knew so little.

Take away: Gauging student interest in a topic ahead of time is key, as is making sure students have an academic understanding of the theme on which they will be reporting.

2. Hire more people, however you can

A thanks here to ONA and its funders for providing us the money to run the grant. And thanks to our local public radio station news partner, who provided funding for a work-study student. As generous as our partners were, we could have used more hands on deck to help with several points, including a full-time web developer and assistant editors. We already are doing more to recruit credit- and internship-seekers going forward.

Understanding what we could do with a staff of a few also is helping us plan as we write new grant proposals to keep our project going.

In terms of the work that we would have liked to focus on more, key topics include our website. A shoutout here to all those folks designing news web sites and doing it well. We faced design challenges including how to think about story placement and how often to change the front page, and how to treat breaking news on election night to keep our site lively and competitive.

We also grappled with technological logistics and may have underestimated the need to ramp up students’ tech knowledge about document management, data visualization tools and video editing and compression. As with many techy things, we needed to be more explicit and explain best practices for the tools we chose, including Google Docs.

Take aways: Knowing what you can do and what you can teach helps diagnose where outside resources might be key. If you want a custom website, for example, find a way to chip in for a smart graduate student in computer science.

Looking ahead, we might require students to use software tutorials such as Lynda.com outside of class, as well as providing more hands-on training.

University of New Mexico students Robert Salas, left, and Travis Gonzales, contributed election night content to the New Mexico News Port. Photo by Micaela Eldridge-Lane / NM News Port.

3. Faculty involvement and partner collaboration are crucial

Because we hit the ground running so close to the November elections, we could have used more time reach out to fellow instructors in the department. We could have spent more time recruiting partners across the state and in Albuquerque. But we lucked out with a fantastic core of supportive faculty and of local partners including the public radio and TV stations, the independent student newspaper and an online investigative reporting site. All of our partners were dedicated to our core mission of teaching journalism by doing journalism.

Because we coalesced around the election, it was quite easy going in and identifying content we could share. But cross-newsroom collaboration is tricky when many newsrooms themselves struggle to plan for big events. On our end, we could have planned our story schedule a bit better and communicated more than we did. One of the challenges we faced was knowing exactly when we could provide student-generated content we had planned out because of the need for revisions and additional reporting. We also lacked an easy way to build a unified story budget document that easily shared, described and organized all upcoming content from partners.

Post-election meetings with partners revealed a desire to publish more stories that could have been reported and worked on by more than one news outlet, instead of each outlet producing content that was shared on another partner’s site.

Take away: The question here wasn’t so much what to communicate about the project, but how. We searched for but didn’t find a software or a system option we liked for planning and budgeting stories three or four months out. We stuck it out with Google Groups and weekly updates, meetings and phone calls, but this was a sticky wicket in the overall workflow with students and partners.

4. A lot can happen in a short time period — but a lot can’t

This is in the obvious category for sure, but it’s worth mentioning, because it helped keep us humble when things didn’t go perfectly. We all know real newsrooms are not the stuff of movies. (Although some newsrooms would make interesting sitcoms.) Instead, our train moved slowly along the track a few more times than we would have liked.

At times, we got detoured by simple workflow issues. Sometimes we had two editors in a piece at the same time, while at other times we had students creating different versions of the same Google Doc and creating a confusing mess of old and new versions. Other times we suffered from bottlenecks of too many stories due at the same time.

Other times, we got rerouted by student deadlines that weren’t met, which we used as learning opportunities to explain that deadlines missed in the real world might mean a job lost.

Other factors that slowed us down were the expectations that students produce work just as professionals do, and get in-person interviews, for example, and not quotes from other news outlets or YouTube videos.

Several of the challenges we have mentioned might have been solved with more time. But that’s no excuse. Instead, we saw it as a chance to choose what to do — and what to set aside. We didn’t have an animated logo or the fanciest website in town, and we didn’t get each student proficient in WordPress, and that’s OK. We oversaw many students being published for the first time and saw our budding journalists grow their skills and confidence.

Take aways: Study up on what successful newsrooms and other startups do and have done. But don’t get bogged down in your missteps and missed stories. Give yourself permission to try new things and pivot when they aren’t working. With flexible minds, we were able to triage our immediate tasks such as getting debates covered while trying to plan ahead on the side.

5. Actively seek out and listen to student input, both along the way and at the end

Along with the debriefs we held with our partners after the election, we sought feedback from the students in our core participating classes. The lessons they learned were key to how we envision the second semester of the project.

Our approach to student feedback was one of encouragement and openness. Mike would often open his class period with the question, “How are we doing out there?” (Which sometimes led to a spate of venting, such as “we’re not professionals” and “no one is calling me back!”) It was freely acknowledged that we were embarking upon something new and different, and that we were all in the discovery process together.

Other feedback came that at the end of the semester showed that the students grew in personal and professional ways. Some said they came to understand the political process better, while others developed more self confidence and many strengthened their reporting and writing skills.

Kenneth Ferguson, a senior and journalism major, said he walked away with a stronger knowledge of politics.

“When I voted this year, it was the first time I could look at the ballot and recognize most of the names on the ballot,” he said. “In years past, I only recognized a few names and only the large races. Also the ideas on the backside of the ballot were familiar to me as well. This class being saturated in the election taught me that great time and effort is put into what does end up on the ballot.”

Rachael Rivera, a journalism major, said she learned about what to expect when working with a professional editor.
“It’s taught me that journalism is a true collaborative process and that it takes strong communication skills to achieve, high quality, informative, true to fact work. It has taught me what to expect from an editor, that you can’t be attached to your work after the first draft. Journalism is a process and that process involves second, third, and fourth drafts. This course has also taught me about the importance of deadlines. It has taught me about building confidence in yourself when it comes to contacting politicians and people with influence at UNM and in Albuquerque.”

Michael Warren, a senior, said he really enjoyed the work of election night.
“I cannot speak highly enough about election night. It was a valuable experience that honestly, I doubt most people in this class will experience again. That kind of real deadline work, working with real, important figures…it was an incredible experience.”

Mia Clark, a senior, said she learned about pride in authorship.

“The News Port project gave me the chance to experience what it is like to be published. Everytime I saw my work published on the News Port I swelled with pride. I literally shouted to my finace every single time, ‘Look!! Oh my gawd I’m published!’ He would laugh and say, ‘Isn’t that the point of your class?’”

Kate Nash Cunningham is the editor of the New Mexico News Port. She spent almost 15 years as a newspaper reporter in New Mexico and now teaches at UNM and works as the writing coach for the independent newspaper on campus. She has a master’s degree in digital journalism and design from the University of South Florida and is interested in the intersection of journalism and technology.

Michael V. Marcotte is the project coordinator. He joined the UNM journalism faculty as a professor of practice in 2014, after an extensive career in public media news, management and consulting. He is the 2012-2013 Reynolds Chair in Ethics of Entrepreneurial and Innovative Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a 2011 Stanford Knight Fellow.

The post 10 Takeaways From Building a Startup News Lab in Less Than 16 Weeks appeared first on MediaShift.

Our news site was born this semester, and while it’s been populated with stories on all the local races, the site didn’t seem the best place for meaningful political dialogue. We wanted to host a debate that could connect people with the candidates.

So as our student journalists set out to cover our elections for governor, U.S. House and U.S. Senate among others, I began to think about the best ways to provide that interaction.

I focused first on high-profile races, but I figured that candidates including sitting Congress members might be too busy to come to campus for an event with students. But would they have an hour to interact from wherever they may be using something like Twitter? They might. So in partnership with News Port coordinator Michael Marcotte, we invited candidates to a debate during class times for two upper-level journalism courses.

Our invites to the gubernatorial candidates were declined, but the candidates for the state’s First Congressional District here agreed to take part in a debate during one of our class times. Our Twitter town hall was born.

The News Port promoted the Twitter town hall around campus and online in hopes of getting audience members to participate.

Lesson plan

Many of us have seen the #EdShift chats about journalism education, and I used those as a starting point for the format of the chat.

I created an outline of what I had in mind and shared it with the students, not all of whom are Twitter rock stars yet. Still, I felt that using social media as the conduit for the conversation would be familiar and comfortable to students who may not be well versed yet in politics and who might hesitate about in-person interaction with candidates.

We started by having students come up with questions for the candidates. Using Google docs, we shared and collectively refined them to be sure they were relevant to students. Many questions were solid and showed curiosity about meaty national topics. I only wish we had time to ask the candidates the suggested question about their most embarrassing moment in college.

We divided the class into four teams for the event, each with a mission. The Twitter feed monitor team, for example, looked for the audience questions that we had been soliciting and monitored the hashtag we used for the debate. The team also made sure to look for answers or questions from candidates and audience members who forgot the hashtag.

Another team worked as fact checkers. Each time a candidate gave an answer, this group scoped it out and provided information to support or rebut what the candidate was saying. This worked well to get students thinking critically about political speech.

A third group worked on follow up questions for candidates. They had to be nimble and compose them quickly to keep the up the pace of the debate.

Our last team curated the event using Storify (see the whole thing embedded at the bottom).

I ran our @NMNewsPort Twitter account, through which we asked all questions. In the future, I think a student with Twitter experience should give it a try.

University of New Mexico students Robert Salas, Dominic Aragon and Isabel Gonzalez served on a team that created follow up questions for the Twitter chat. Photo by Aaron Anglin.

Ground rules

As for the ground rules of the debate, we had to outline those pretty clearly.

For starters, we asked that candidates tweet a photo of themselves at their computers, so we could be sure there we weren’t actually chatting with some astute interns instead of the candidates.

The Republican candidate in this case seemed to understand where we were going with that possibility and he dutifully tweeted a photo of himself, along with the warning that he “has two thumbs and had used Twitter less than a dozen times.”

Some students, too, were new to Twitter, and the leader of the curation team worked to bring them up to speed. Those students made this curation of the event.

Speaking of speed, the worry I had that we wouldn’t have enough questions to ask was for naught. We only made it through four questions before our hour was up. The flow of the conversation, especially during candidate opening statements, was bulky. Because we had allowed three tweets per answer, we were kept waiting to see if the candidate was done “talking” and more than once I interrupted the congresswoman, who wasn’t done with her response. We also allowed rebuttals, which further lengthened the time spent on each question.

On other occasions, the answers just took a while to come. In those pauses, we prodded the audience to tweet us their questions, but the delays felt pronounced. We didn’t have the spirited back and forth of a conversation in the way a traditional debate may have, but again, this wasn’t that traditional debate.

To gain exposure for our event, we had a student from another class cover the event for the News Port, while another wrote about it for the student newspaper.

Student feedback included suggestions that perhaps we create our own hashtag (we co-opted the widely used #nm2014 tag used for statewide elections) and that candidates should be better primed ahead of time to quickly move through their opening comments and then be given a time limit to reply or rebut.

I would try this assignment again for sure, perhaps to hold a chat with the candidates who were elected, so students can ask them about their jobs.

Kate Nash Cunningham is the editor of the New Mexico News Port. She spent almost 15 years as a newspaper reporter in New Mexico and now teaches at UNM and works as the writing coach for the independent newspaper on campus. She has a master’s degree in digital journalism and design from the University of South Florida and is interested in the intersection of journalism and technology.

The post Remix: Creating a Twitter Town Hall for a Real Political Debate appeared first on MediaShift.