Citizen Journalism, Do We Need It? webcast

Here is the webcast of the panel discussion I participated in at Moorpark College last week.

http://video.moorparkcollege.edu:8080/ramgen/onlinejourn.rm (requires Real Player).

Revisiting contest numbers

Among the most contentious issues in JACC over the years has been the emphasis on contests at our various conferences. The issue is still brewing and will be big topic of discussion at the organization’s annual business meeting at the March convention.

The issue is so contentious that it nearly split the organization in the 1980s and it could threaten a split again at this time.

In the 1980s, the issue was emphasis on contests over emphasis on workshops at conferences. Today’s issue is how many entries to allow in each of the mail-in competitions.

For more years than not in the organization’s history, that number has been three. A couple of times, including last year, it was rolled back to two. Last year’s vote was very close and the discussion passionate.

Twenty years ago there were fewer than 15 contests, but today there are more than double that. With the changes taking place in the industry and in our classrooms, the pressure to keep adding or splitting contests is intense. And once established you risk goring SOMEONE’S ox when you propose eliminating a contest.

Large-staff schools who either have better resources or more of the talented students tend to win lots of awards. Smaller-staff schools often don’t win as many awards and want to see opportunities for awards to be spread around. Often times Southern California schools prefer more contests and more opportunities to win them while Northern California instructors are sickened by the emphasis on competition and would like to see the awards and opportunities spread out. But that’s not the whole issue.

If 60 schools participate in contests and enter three entries in each (whether they have three strong entries or not), it doesn’t take a math major to see that we have some large categories.

“So what?” some will ask, it’s been that way in JACC for most of its 55-plus year history. What has changed is the number of contests. It is getting harder and harder to find enough judges, even in a state as large as California, especially when we find ourselves competing with other organizations looking at those same judges. Add to that that we ask judges to actually put comments on all those entries so students who lose can learn from the process, and you can see why conference planners are tossing their hands in the air.

I spent the last weekend in meetings with JACC’s board of directors, who are inclined to revisit the number-of-entries issue at this year’s general business meeting. There are serious pros and cons for allowing two entries or three entries. And both sides are passionate in their choices.

A compromise solution will be one of the proposals the board of directors will bring to the business meeting in March. It’s the 2.5 proposition. But even the board could not develop a consensus and will bring a multi-choice proposal to the assembly.

Along with the choice of remaining at two entries it will propose a return to three. Either decision is likely to create a rift. The innovative 2.5 proposal would allow schools to enter up to three entries per category, but only as long as they average only 2.5 entries overall; they would have enter only one entry in a contest for every contest they wanted to enter three. Sounds a bit complicated, but with today’s online registration of entries, it is something that could be checked early in the process. Schools who violated the average would see ALL of their entries disqualified.

There’s more to it than that. Not all schools publish magazines, so newspaper, broadcast-new media and magazine groupings would each have the averaging. It is possible, too, that the writing-editing, art-design, and photo areas of newspapers would each be calculated separately, though that hasn’t been decided yet.

If the organization embraces the 2.5 plan it would be a compromise for the two groups. The overall number of entries would increase only a bit over the 2.0 plan, but not as much as it would under the 3.0 plan. Schools with lots of potential winners in various categories would still have the increased opportunity to win.

I’m not sure I prefer the 2.5 plan personally, but I recognize it as perhaps the only true compromise between the two other camps. It does JACC no good to revisit the 2.0 vs. 3.0 option every few years and have so many hurt feelings in the organization. Some version of the 2.5 compromise deserves a chance..

For those wondering how it would work if adopted, the database-driven online registration of entries would count your entries for you. If you go over your limit, you would be prompted to eliminate some entries on your own or have all of your entries disqualified when they are mailed in. You would know as soon as you completed entering names on the entry form whether you were in compliance.

Do we need citizen journalism?

Had an interesting conversation last night as part of a panel discussion on “Citizen Journalism, Do We Need It,” sponsored by the South Coast Regional Multimedia Education Center and Moorpark College.

Joining me in the televised discussion were Joe Howry, editor of the Ventura County Star, and Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review out of University of Southern California.

Not sure we answered the question of whether we need it or not. Not surprisingly, we even had trouble defining it, though we pretty much agreed that citizen journalism is a lousy name. “Grassroots” journalism sounds better.

We discussed the changes occurring because of grassroots journalism and what it means to traditional publications and to education.

While at the school I was able to spend some time with a couple of staff members of the Student Voice, the newspaper that tries to serve Ventura County’s three community colleges. Most importantly, I was able to spend time with the paper’s online editor and give some tips on how better use the College Publisher tool the paper uses.

I was impressed by the multimedia news gathering I saw from students covering the event. But it was sad to see the roadblocks the student publication uses in its processing of news.

Moorpark uses a kludgey system to process its stories. Instead of using the power of its College Publisher tool as a submission point for stories –something crucial if the staff is ever going to adopt a post first, print later philosophy, students submit assignments through a WebCT server. This creates a bottleneck because only a couple of people, including the faculty adviser can access submissions for editing.

The reasons behind the WebCT submissions emerged a few years ago when the Ventura County Board of Trustees, against the advice of journalism educators and professionals, closed journalism programs at two of the district’s colleges with the mistaken administrator notion that the three campuses could be served by a single newspaper (which makes sense ONLY if you hire fulltime professional journalists, not if you try to staff it with students).

Because Moorpark adviser Joanna Miller was handed unenviable the task of trying to make the ill-conceived plan work, she turned to distance education methods to establish journalism relationships at the other two colleges. Hence WebCT. It made sense at the time.

But at about the same time the Moorpark paper joined College Publisher’s network and the program has yet to unleash the potential of a vital online publication by cutting out the bottleneck. Indeed, the disenfranchised journalists at Ventura College and Oxnard College, might feel more a part of the publication if they we posting stories directly to the online publication than submitting stories to an instructor through a distance education class. Advanced students at these schools might even be assigned editor privileges so that they can move breaking stories online immediately.

I should note that Moorpark is not the only California community college that has students submit stories this way, but the practice is not common.

By the way, when the Ventura Board made the decision to cut the two journalism programs, I wrote down my predictions, sealed them in an envelope, placed the envelope in an old mayonnaise jar, and buried under a Funk & Wagnels encyclopedia under my front door step that 1) the idea of one paper for the district would not work, that each school wanted its own identity, 2) that administrators desperate to prove they were doing the right thing would declare it an immediate success, though students at Ventura and Oxnard would forever feel disenfranchised, 3) that within 3-5 years the district would recognize its mistake and bring back journalism at Ventura College, 4) that it would take another 3-5 years for Ventura to bring the program back to its quality and enrollment levels, and 5) that it would take 7-10 years, minimum, before they would bring back a newspaper at Oxnard. From the rumblings I hear, I’m right on target with those predictions.