JACC Blog

2011-07-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

JACC Blog has moved

2009-02-28T18:13:00.001-08:00

The JACC blog has moved.If you have bookmarked this site or its RSS feed you will want to change your records. The blog can now be found at www.jacc-blog.com, which forwards to jaccblog.wordpress.com.

What should a journalism student learn?

2009-02-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

What should a student who has gone through a community college journalism program and either got a degree or transferred to a university be able to do or have learned?

That's one of the questions California community college journalism programs will be having in the future as part of their Student Learning Outcome discussions associated with their college's accreditation.

Most California community college journalism programs probably already have developed Student Learning Outcomes for their courses, but the next step will be to develop program-level SLOs as well. Presumably, they will evolve from the course-level SLOs.

(Note: Some campuses, such as my own, are defining "program" much more broadly, such as "general education," or "transfer." But if you approach SLOs as more than a compliance issue and embrace it as a way to evaluate and improve your own programs, you may want to ask the question above whether your school requires it or not. It certainly will help come Program Review time. College programs must periodically review just what it is they are doing and where they are going.)

So, what SHOULD a student be learning? Can you articulate what you know in your gut? Can you define it to outsiders and do you have a way of measuring whether you've succeeded?

Let's start a discussion on this and see if we help those who may be having trouble articulating them. Here's my BEGINNING list of 10, in no particular order. It would be interesting to hear if there are others you think are important.

RICH'S LIST

1. Be able to take a list of at least five facts and write a news lead.

2. Be able to develop a story from idea to research/interview, to story, through editing and publishing stages.

3. To develop a basic awareness and understanding of media law issues, especially libel and copyright.

4. To develop an awareness of the operation of and history of traditional media and discuss the changing environment of mass media.

5. To develop a portfolio of written articles suitable for publication in a newspaper or for a news organization web site.

6. Be able to analyze the elements of design of a newspaper page, a magazine layout and a news web site.

7. Be able to write a cutline/caption for a news, feature or sports photo if given basic facts about the photo.

8. Be able to write a headline for a news, feature, sports or opinion article.

9. Be able to post a story or upload a photograph to an online publication content management system.

10. Develop a portfolio of multimedia projects that tell journalistic stories. The portfolio could include video, audio, visual storytelling (slide shows), blogs.

Editors Day at Cerritos College

2009-02-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

Thirty-three students from seven community colleges attended the Editors Day held at Cerritos College Feb. 7, 2009.

The purpose of the event was to give editors of student publications a chance to network and share common problems and seek common solutions. The format for the day was simple:

The students split up to assure diversity at each of seven tables and spent the first hour just talking about their programs. Then they were given a bit more direction and asked to prepare four lists:

3 Biggest problems at their publications
3 Things about their advisers (no names allowed and because of diversity at each table no advisers singled out)
3 Ways their publications could/should cover the recession
3 Things about being on newspaper staff

The topics were purposely a bit vague to give students widest latitude in answering them.

After lunch the groups were rearranged so that students were seated with others who had similar staff positions (editor-in-chief, news/other, arts/entertainment, sports, photo, online, etc.) so that they could discuss specific issues related to their jobs.

All Southern California schools were invited and nine responded, but students from two of the schools didn't make it. And because of the poor weather, even schools that did not attend often brought fewer students than they said they would (see budget notes at bottom). Schools that participated were Cerritos, Pierce, Glendale, Moorpark, Southwestern, Riverside and El Camino.

Best comment of the day: "I thought this (event) might be boring, but it is awesome." A key to that was scheduling almost all of the time for students just to talk to each other.

Here are some of the thoughts students came up with in their lists:

BIGGEST PROBLEMS

Intervention by student government (shared by almost all of the groups)
Getting staff members to meet deadlines (again, shared by almost all groups)
School staff not cooperating with the paper (an example of Theater not allowing photos during dress rehearsal)
Staff communication
Staff respect for each other
Determining when to cut stories/pages or to grant extensions when stories are late
Getting staff members to want to write news (as opposed to reviews)
Working with dedicated staff members vs. non-dedicated staff members
Whether or not there should be a newswriting pre-requisite to the newspaper: Most would like to see one, but fear they would not have big enough staffs
Getting students --especially new students-- to put in the time needed for the class
Getting writers and how to train them if they have not had newswriting first
Balancing writing, editing and production in the overall production cycle
Adequate editing while also trying to publish news quickly (example: stories posted online with lots of errors that later have to be corrected)
Staff attrition
Recruiting writers and photographers
Balancing online efforts with print efforts

ADVISERS (note: students could say good OR bad things about advisers)

Advisers need to back off and let students do the work
Advisers don't always fully appreciating the demand on students with full-time loads or jobs
Advisers pushing New Media too hard
Advisers not knowing when to step back: They can be pushy or hover too much
Advisers should be open to questions
Advisers need to be up to date with new technologies
Advisers should encourage staffs to interact outside class, both with themselves and other students on campus.
Advisers can be "bullet sponges," that is, they can be a mediating shield when people complain about content
Advisers sometimes push stories too much, stories the students are not interested in
Some advisers push design advice and then criticize the outcome
Some advisers intervene too much
Some advisers will not allow off-campus critical reviews
Some advisers review pages before they are sent to the printer and require last-minute changes
Students hate it when advisers skip after-issue critiques
Students like advisers who give them a free hand with the paper
Students like critiques
Some advisers cooperate with the editor(s) better than others
Students like it when advisers teach them how to do things
Overall, students are grateful for their advisers

COVERING THE RECESSION (again students were free to answer this any way they wanted; some listed story ideas)

Use infographs
Use photo illustrations
"Put faces to the stories"
Use multimedia packages
Write about cutting of enrollments
Do stories on alternatives to high book costs
Do stories on how campus businesses (i.e., bookstores) are impacted
Localize state and national news stories
Ask students how cuts have affected them
Cover school budget cuts
Monitor how well the college spends its money
Do features on job opportunities and how to apply for jobs and polish resumes
Use diagrams/bullet points
Conduct man-in-the-street interviews
Talk about unemployment issues
Talk about the future (and how the Stimulus Plan will affect the college)
Talk to Economics teachers
Do stories on how students are coping with cuts
One school is preparing a special "cheap" issue; how to do things more cheaply
Outline ways to get/keep jobs. Talk to those who have lost jobs
Write profile features of students and faculty, focusing on impact of the economy

BEING ON STAFF

Students need to balance school, jobs and the paper
You will make enemies on campus
It's fun
You get to create/establish new relationships
You broaden your horizons when you take on different kinds of stories (news/opinion/feature), especially when you came in interested in only one kind
You shouldn't join the newspaper unless they are dedicated
You shouldn't be afraid to take on new work/heavier workloads
You make friends/connections for life
You have creative freedom
It is a learning experience
You can make collective food purchases and save money (or just mooch off others)
You get to share your passion by covering topics of interest
There is too much gossip among staff members
Romantic relationships on staff always end up badly
Communication among students needs to be better
Staffs need to determine and communicate acceptable speech and behavior standards (and before the first production night!)
Staffs need to work out how they are going to deal with differing music choices (and before the first production night!)
You learn a lot
You learn responsibility
Working on the paper can be all consuming
It is good for networking
You get hands-on experience you would not get your first years at a university.

BUDGET NOTES

Total cost for running the day was about $400-$500. The bulk of that was in food. Our out-of-pocket expenses were minimal, though. We have a caterer advertiser who is taking out his advertising in trade, so box lunches did not take any cash. We ended up ordering too many box lunches because schools told us they were bringing more students than they did. If we do this again we might charge $5 a person, just to help offset cost overages like this. We have found in the past that "free" often is looked at as "I don't really have a commitment." Of course, we could have supplied lunch for half the cost if we had just ordered pizza. Other expenses were for sodas, juice, water, donuts and muffins. It helps that we do a number of events each school year that involve serving food, so we have already purchased many items such as good table clothes, coffee makers, ice buckets, silverware and name tags. The Journalism Association of Community Colleges donated notebooks and a couple of sweatshirts to raffle off as door prizes. The school has adequate meeting space that we have learned to book in ways that costs us nothing. We save on cleanup costs by cleaning up ourselves after events; we're just used to it.

Biggest obstacles in doing something like this:

Just deciding to do it
Supplying food (but as noted we've got that figured out)
Getting people to register by the food-ordering deadline. We had a school call the afternoon before saying, "We just heard about this, can we still come?" Yes, but the food ordering deadline was five days earlier. Those who don't plan/run these types of events don't appreciate that.
Getting people to show when they say they will
Signage on campus (because of the rain we didn't do anything; some people got lost, but eventually found their way).

The future of journalism education

2008-11-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

I gave a workshop last Saturday at the JACC SoCal conference on how community college journalism programs could enhance their online publications by aggregating content from other sources.

At the end of the workshop one student in the audience asked me a philosophical question about the alienation of geographical communities that the Internet causes and whether the newspaper industry had a role in that.

I deferred answering the question directly because it doesn't matter, especially at the community college level. What matters is that

Audiences the ages of our students typically do not read printed newspapers,
The newspaper industry is experiencing a transition that many in the industry are not comfortable with, but are powerless to stem, and
We in journalism education have a responsibility not only to serve our campuses with the printed publication they desire but train our students for this new world.

But how do we do that? What is the role of journalism education of the future? Despite all the negative news about layoffs in the industry and the deconstruction of venerable traditional media I remain optimistic for the future of journalism. Demand for news and information does not seem to be abating, just transforming. The question is what kind of product that transformation will lead to.

I believe it will involve some kind of electronic presentation, but it clearly will be more than that. It appears that traditional media outlets, long used to being dominiant content creators more and more will find content aggregation part and parcel of what they do.

Now, that's not a completely new concept. For almost 150 years newspapers, at least the bigger ones, have supplemented their locally produced content with wire service and syndicated content. What's different now is that these specialized media companies are being joined by micro-content providers, such as political or entertainment blogs. A column by Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub articulated it more clearly for me. He points out the growth of non-profit sector blogs and news sites. The future role of "newspapers" may be more steeped in aggregation of news than creation of news.

I find that exciting for journalism education, and a bit scary. It will be important to make sure we in journalism education do our part to train future journalists for this kind of role so that

There are trained reporters who can provide the content, and
The creation of news is not left solely to public relations operations who may give a biased look at the news.

How do we best prepare students for this new model of news? I wish more people had attended my workshop because far too many student publications still see their role as publishing only their own content. But even my workshop did not address the fundamental mindset changes that must take place. We need to unbundle our programs and encourage other groups on our campuses to help us tell stories, and we need to accept those stories. And we need to stop preparing our students solely to work for an odld-newspaper model and prepare them for entirely new careers in a new New Media model.

Carnival of Journalism: Incremental Changes

2008-10-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

A number of the journalism blogs I follow participate in a practice they call Carnival of Journalism. Someone comes up with a common question for each to discuss. This month's topic is "What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?"

In a student newsroom I think the biggest little step that needs to be taken is to stop thinking of the print edition as the tail that wags the dog. When I watch students they make assignments and set deadlines around the schedule of the print edition of the paper. That's got to change. Most often we refer to it as "post first, print second." But students don't do it very often or easily.

Don't get me wrong. The print edition is still the most significant product we produce. Especially at the community college level our programs exist because the college wants a print edition, not because of some altruistic belief that journalism is important to teach. They accept that it is worthy and goes along with having a student newspaper.

But if we look around at the industry and the revolution/evolution taking place we HAVE to consider new methods of production in what we teach. Up until now the effort has been with online publications, but even as some are still just now embracing that idea it is evolving into more, such as mobile delivery.

Both we and the industry have to understand that readers, especially younger readers, are going to want news and news delivery redefined. For some of us old dinosaurs, that is different to swallow at times. I saw that last weekend at JACC's annual NorCal conference as some of the advisers reacted strongly against a keynote presentation that focused heavily on deconstruction of traditional news into information bits that are delivered through a variety of technologies and involves the reader as a participant in the news creation process.

We must continue to teach the values of journalism, and even continue to teach some of the old methods. But if we gloss over the emerging technologies, we shortchange the education of our students. Most of us are continuing to focus on the traditional methods in our classrooms and reserving the new methods to "also rans." Hence JACC's (and my) continual push of online technologies, sometimes seemingly to the exclusion of traditional methods. Sorry about that if you interpret this to mean that we don't embrace the traditional values and methods in the overall process. News is new, otherwise it would be called olds.

So what incremental change would I make? As a journalism instructor and faculty adviser of a student newspaper I'd like to see big changes. But an incremental change that I think would help would be to help students understand that they don't have to wait until they have the whole story to publish part of it.

In a workshop I did at last week's NorCal conference I talked about a three-paragraph concept that I picked up from someone else's blog a while back. (Sorry to the originator, but I've lost track of where and don't give you proper credit for the idea.) If covering an event, which tends to be a large part of what my students do, post A story within minutes of the conclusion of the event. It doesn't have to be THE story; you can do a follow-up when you have had more time to flesh it out. But in the short term, follow this three sentence/paragraph format:

1. Summary
2. Secondary key point
3. Quote

As an example, in my workshop I created a three-paragraph story about my workshop:

College newspapers can do a lot more to enhance their online publications with quick stories, blogs, podcasts, videos and other interactive multimedia elements.

This was the main message from Rich Cameron of Cerritos College when he spoke at the JACC NorCal Conference Saturday.

“You’ve got to get beyond ‘shovelware’ and give your readers a reason to come to your web site,” he said.

Such a summary can be written in just a couple of minutes and posted to a web publication or blog easily. It could even be created on an iPod or cell phone and shipped out/posted immediately using mobile distribution technology, which I am learning more about (see a great article on easy-to-use tools at www.10000words.net/2008/10/6-ways-to-create-mobile-version-of-your.html), though this sample would be a bit long for something like Twitter or SMS messaging.

Is your online paper worthless? Pew Study results

2008-08-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

The last few years a lot of JACC programs have put more and more effort into developing online editions. But is it doing them any good? Probably, but not by much if you extrapolate results from the latest PEW Research Center for the People and the Press' study of public consumption of news.

The report showed that online papers only modestly boost newspaper readership. It also found that online-only publications probably are not a good idea.

The full report can be found here.

There are too many numbers in the report --boy, are there numbers!-- to adequately summarize the report. Plan to read it multiple times as there are lots of interesting factoids in there that you will want to sprinkle through your mass comm classes. But you are not going to want to print out either the full 121-page report or even the 54 pages of non-tables portion.

Major sections covered in the report include attitudes about wathcing reading and listening to the news, challenges for newspapers, attitudes toward the news, audience segments and media credibility (perceived as most credible: FOX news!).

And because the report was researching mainstream media, it is hard to extrapolate it accurately and apply it to college media.

But if you try, there is a lot of bad news and some good news. There are some interesting clues on what we might do to make ourselves more relevant.

For instance:

Even online news consumers who mention content as setting the internet apart focus on the speed of the medium. You can “get alerts as things occur,” said one, while others offered similar comments – the internet is "frequently updated," and “more up to date” than other sources."

Clear is the fact that those who are not publishing online are already irrelevant. Any colleges not putting effort into at least an online edition to supplement the print edition simply are behind the times. Likewise, if all publications are doing is presenting online only what they provide in their print edition, they also are behind the times.

The study showed that newspaper readership declines have leveled off some because of the addition of online versions, but that they are still going down. Those more likely to read online editions are those who are also reading the print editions, but of online-only readers, more are likely to be younger audiences. The number of young online readers is small, though.

What IS working is a multi-approach to delivering news: print, online, broadcast, cell phone/PDA, iPod, etc. While even that number is small, for college audiences, especially diverse community college audiences, there is some good news:

A relatively small number of Americans – about 7% of the general public – are getting news via one or more of these types of electronic devices, with just 4% doing so at least a few times a week.

But among some groups in the population, the numbers are substantially higher. For example, among young men (ages 18-29) nearly one-in-five (19%) report getting news this way, as do 15% of African Americans and 13% of Hispanics."

Some other interesting findings that might affect how we develop our community college publications:

The only sections of the newspaper that younger readers spend more time on than their seniors are features such as comics, puzzles, games and horoscopes.

Yuck, but it is one of the reasons we include comics in some of our Cerritos College Talon Marks print editions AND our online edition.
Roughly two-thirds (64%) who visit a newspaper website on a typical day go to a paper’s homepage to browse or look for something.

Four-in-ten (39%) report following links to specific newspaper articles from other websites or search engines, most of which bypass the paper’s homepage and go directly to the story of interest. Fewer (12%) report reading the newspaper yesterday based on e-mailed links from friends or associates.

Many who read newspapers online arrive there through more than one of these routes, though as many as one-in-four on a typical day read access newspaper websites only through links from other sites or e-mails, rather than going directly to a newspaper homepage.

Thank goodness for Web sites that have "e-mail this story" links and "most e-mailed" lists and for those with RSS feeds. (I reach about half of my online news through RSS feeds, especially blogs, though I DO visit home pages when I affirmatively seek out one of the major online news sites just to see what is going on.) BTW, the two-thirds of JACC publications online that use College Publisher have these features built in.
Blogs that discuss news events have become a destination for a significant number of young people, especially those ages 18-24. About one-in-ten (9%) in this age category say the regularly read these types of blogs, while another 10% say they sometimes do so.

Nearly a quarter of those who say they went online for news yesterday say they read news blogs regularly (10%) or sometimes (12%). Yet even among these online news consumers, 62% say they never read news blogs.

A New Model for News: AP study

2008-08-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press has released a 71-page pdf report called AP's New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption that has some interesting implications on how we might approach our mass media, newswriting and newspaper courses and how we prepare tomorrow's journalists.

The report is the result of AP's multinational study on how young people (18-34) consume news and what implications that has for the way the AP (and ultimately the rest of the media) prepares and delivers news.

The good news in the report is that there appears to be a strong appetite for news among younger audiences and use news as "social currency;" they just consume it in a different way than the mainstream media is mostly prepared to deliver it. Young people may check into news multiple times a day, but main-stream media are not their only or even main way of doing so. And young people use a variety of methods, from radio and television and Web to e-mail (yes, that one was strange for me to see, too) to PDAs and word of mouth.

"Younger consumers are not only less reliant on the newspaper to get their news; they also consume news across a multitude of platforms and sources, all day, constantly."

But the anthropological study approach AP took showed some interesting results about news consumption we can learn from, including the fact that news consumption can be compared to the fast food diets of a lot of people: they may be eating a lot, but their diet is out of whack...and sometimes that is partially the fault of the prevalence of "fast food restaurants."

Regardless of the fault, it is clear that we must look at news in a different way. Because of the variety of distribution and consumption methods the traditional inverted pyramid approach to story-telling might not --indeed, probably is not-- enough. Instead of looking at news in the context of a complete story, consumption habits require that we approach storytelling from a component approach: Facts, Updates, Back Story, Future Story...and then deliver it across all the channels these consumers use.

Further, young consumers are experiencing "news fatigue" as they end up gorging on the Facts and Updates components that the AP and other media tend to emphasize as the "above the fold" news. The report likened it to eating too many chips and not enough vegetables.

Instead of trying to put everything into just one story as we've done in the past, we need to treat the single story as multiple stories told at different times and sometimes in different ways. And there needs to be an emphasis on linking the elemental stories to its other components. Indeed, a new mantra for story-telling might be "Links.

Anyway, interesting and recommended reading. About half the report is on the methodology and results of the study, including a narrative of a DeAnza College business student who was one of the research subjects.

The First Amendment and Young Bloggers

2008-07-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Knight Foundation announced this week at the Unity '08 Conference a new book that, among other things, says that "high school students who blog and read online news sources and who chat regularly online are more likely to understand and support their First Amendment rights."

This, of course, is particularly important given the Knight Foundation's heavily reported 2004 study that found that three-fourths of U.S. teens surveyed didn't know or didn't care about the First Amendment.

I find this particularly interesting given the conversation I had with my student editors earlier this week about a new campaign we're planning at Cerritos College. Some of you will remember our campaign from last year that I touted at JACC conferences of "Think Online." It was an effort to get journalism students to think more about how to present stories online first and in ways other than simply repeating what they planned to (or already had) present in print. The campaign included a conscious effort on my part to include discussion of online in almost all newspaper class sessions and in other journalism classes. We even prominently displayed a "Think Online" banner in the news lab. We made small strides in changing the "print first" mindset, but still have a ways to go.

My latest idea that I discussed with the editors this week --even before reading about the Knight report-- and which they wholeheartedly bought into is called "Do You Blog?" It will be an effort not only to get newspaper staff members to think more about blogging themselves, but to seek out citizen blogs from across campus. We will actively seek out students and staff on campus who already blog about campus events or other topics that might be of interest to the Talon Marks readership. Links to their blogs will be prominently displayed on the Talon Marks site.

But we plan to go a few steps further than just linking to the other blogs:

We will monitor those blogs and give more individual prominence to particularly cogent posts, possibly even teasing them in the print edition.
We will actively encourage other groups on campus to blog. One of the first contacts will be with our student body president, who has not indicated much love for the paper. We will give him a forum to tell his side of the story. But we'll also encourage active clubs on campus to start their own blogs about their own events.
We'll expand on our very successful MyDemocracy partnership with our Political Science Department and incorporate blog writing training into our one-unit multimedia practice classes (Jour 106 - talonmarks.com) that is part of that partnership. While Poly Sci students will receive video editing training, some of our instructors will carve out slots to focus on how to write compelling news blogs and provide a structure for students to learn. This will be our way of "monotizing" the idea. Blogging is already a component in our three-unit Multimedia Reporting class that we've incorporated as a core requirement along with Mass Media and Beginning Newswriting in our Associate of Arts degree.
And I foresee yet another banner that can be displayed at campus events and hung in the newsroom in between events that will will serve as a daily reminder to journalism students.

Blogs are something to learn more about. I agree with the complaints about them that they can often be looked at as "navel gazing" and many blog writers do little initial reporting; instead they comment on other peoples' reporting. Worse, they sometimes seem incestuous in that they only point to other peoples' blogs as existing, adding little if any added value. Even much of what I've included in this post is information from other sources and I've done little leg work. I hope I've at least added value.

Blogs are here to stay and I think they CAN be valuable if handled properly. We intend to do our part in adding to the value of them.

I found the Knight report interesting and encouraging ... at least until I turned to today's NPR report on political blogging that included a point of view that the average age of political bloggers is between 40 and 50. Ugh! Did we miss the boat?

The Changing Newsroom

2008-07-21T16:15:00.000-07:00

As someone who has lived through downsizing and cutbacks (when my program was "eliminated" at West Valley College almost 15 years ago) I get sick to my stomach when I read Romenesko and so many other news sources about the continual cutbacks at American newspapers. The human cost is devastating. It would be easy to become discouraged about my profession and decide to retire from teaching.

But I also feel an excitement with change. I know as hard as it was for me to live through that change, I am much better off for having had to reinvent myself. I'm a better teacher today than I would have been otherwise.

So when I read through the recently released report "The Changing Newsroom" I chose to focus on the many positive things the PEW study pointed about the industry as it is being reinvented. It is a study well worth the read.

I especially noted the promising future for our students if we continue to train them correctly. And that means sticking with the traditional values, but mixing in the new technologies.

From the report:

New job demands are drawing a generation of young, versatile, tech-savvy, high-energy staff as financial pressures drive out higher-salaried veteran reporters and editors. Newsroom executives say the infusion of new blood has brought with it a new competitive energy.

The melding of the online edition with the print edition is heavily emphasized in the report. And new skills especially singled out were the ability to shoot and edit video, web-only editing and blogging the news.

From the report:

The content lost in the print version of the story doesn’t always disappear completely. Instead, much of it migrates to the web as beat reporters write these minor twists and turns of a running story either into their own blog or as short, stand-alone website stories

And:

Today, editors said they no longer ask reporters if they have time to file for the web before embarking on their story for the print edition. Filing first for the web is a given. Editors also noted that exclusive material is no longer kept off the web as it was just a few years ago to protect the print edition impact. Today, it is posted immediately.... All (are) encouraged to be “web-first” thinkers on breaking news and visuals.

Something I haven't thought too much about that made a lot of sense was the advent of micro-sites.

From the report:

Another change afforded by technology is the ability to target specific audiences with specific content. Much effort is aimed at shaping content for a range of very narrow, specifically tailored interests—giving readers news of their community, their favorite sport or their preferred leisure time activity. ... Often this is reflected in so-called mini or micro sites built as distinct pages within a paper’s main online website. They can be tailored to events in specific communities or neighborhoods or to other narrowly focused interests....One in three papers surveyed report they already have micro-sites and say they are planning to add more, while another 21% say they are developing them.

It was interesting to see that others are facing the same issues we face as we go online. The print edition is still the dog that wags the tail of online: Most editors (63%) say they still focus more of their time on the newspaper than the website.

One last striking note was the number of editors who, while staying somewhat optimistic, admitted that they had no idea what their product would look like in five years. That's a tough one. I know for us at the college level we likely will have print editions and given then fact that education has a history of moving slowly, our print editions will probably look a lot like they do today. But what is interesting is thinking about whether our online editions will look like they will today. I certainly hope not.

I found lots of interesting ideas in this report, some of which I'll share after I give my students first crack at them.

Producing better content: Blogs

2008-07-09T12:24:00.000-07:00

Blog writing is tough. Oh, sure, one can produce a simple blog entry easily enough. But is it meaningful to someone else? And can you sustain it? Having tried it, I have greater respect for columnists who produce material every day or multiple times a week.

How can we produce better online content, especially with blogs, in our student publications? I've run across an interesting format in the LA Times that I think could translate well. It is the paper's Dust Up blog. Each week the Times' staff comes up with a topic for a multi-day discussion. Two writers, not necessarily Times staff members, develop a new angle to the topic for each day and write pro/con entries that readers can then comment on.

Some semesters I've had enough talent on my student staffs that they could certainly adopt this style and produce regular content, but probably at the expense of other responsibilities in the overall operation. But what if we could use the Journalism Association of Community Colleges network to staff such a blog that we could all promote on our sites? The load could be spread among a larger number of talented students; all you'd need is one person to coordinate it all.

A big obstacle to overcome, which probably affects a large chunk of the news industry (ironic considering the reliance on wire service material), is the blinders of "my publication." We are all trying to fill our publications only with our content. Student publications, in particular, seem to shun the idea of thinking beyond their own publications. But the easy-flow sharing possible with online publications could make it easier for people to share without giving up valuable real estate in their print publications.

In past years I've floated the balloon of cross publication collaboration without much success. Maybe this one could fly. Success would assume, of course, that staffs care at least as much about their online publications as they do their print publications .... and I'm not sure we're there yet.

Website desserts

2008-05-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

My last JACC blog entry talked about the need to add more than the normal story fare to our newspaper web sites to give our readers more reason to come to our sites. See "All meat and no potatoes, veggies and desserts."

In the post I alluded to the real problem with that idea: Our students are all so busy covering our campuses and learning new storytelling forms that none of them have time to create even more content. My post suggested that they seek other sources of content that can be pulled into our sites with little extra effort.

What you need to do is look for tools like Google Gadgets. These free add-ons cover a lot of possibilities. I use them on the JACC site for the search function and for the RSS feeds for the JACC blog and the "JACC in the News" features at the bottom of the front page.

Here's another that you might want to add to your college publication sites: Daily Comics. This Google gadget automatically pulls in more than 25 name brand comics to your web site each day. Once you set it up you can forget
about it.

If you'd like to see a sample of Daily Comics, look at the JACC web site.

Google gadgets require little or no HTML knowledge. Just go to the tool's web page or just go to Google Gadgets and do a search for "Daily Comics."

Click on the button called "Add to your web page." Set the parameters and copy the code. Paste the code into your web site and you're done.

With this gadget I recommend setting the width to 625 pixels and depth to 250. This will allow the whole comics to be seen without any scrolling.

For the two-thirds of the JACC schools that use College Publisher, here are some options for using the code. Those not using College Publisher could, of course, use the code on their sites in other ways, too.

Paste the code into a regular story page. Set the story as a "rolling story" and use dates that will have the story staying live for, oh, two years. This will change, of course, for schools as they convert to the new CP tool.
Create a special page, like I've done with the JACC example. To do this, go to the Presentation tab and choose the "Create Page" option. You can then create a front page link to this page. This, of course, requires just a bit of HTML savvy.
Create an object with the "Page Designer" tool under the "Presentation" tab. Then the object can be place in various areas of the page, though the width will limit your options (see below).
Again, go to the "Page Designer" tool and select "Bottom Object" from the pulldown menu and paste the code into the template code.

One problem with Daily Comics is that you have to make it about 650 pixels wide to show the whole comic, but the Main Content column of most of our College Publisher sites is only 48 pixels wide. So if you follow my instructions above, the page will get pushed out of shape a bit. See the JACC example and notice how the third column is shoved out to make room for the comics. The only option above that works without doing this is the "bottom object" option, though that might not be the most desirable option.

In coming weeks I'll share other ideas for "potatoes, veggies and desserts."

All meat and no potatoes, veggies or dessert

2008-05-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review is attending the "NewsTools 2008: Journalism that Matters" conference at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale this week and has an interesting blog item entitled "What's Wrong With Us?". One portion of his post really caught my attention. It's something I have written about before (my goodness, was it that long ago?) .

Niles says says:

As I discussed with several other conference participants over dinner, journalists need to treat their websites like a dinner party. You can't just dish out a plate of veggies. You need to invite your readers in, chat with them, serve 'em a drink and get them comfortable. Then you can start dishing out the food, including a main course, veggies and dessert.

and

It's a rare publication that rakes in the cash offering readers nothing but investigative pieces and serious, in-depth profiles. Even The New Yorker runs a hell of a lot of cartoons. Individual journalists may aspire to a career of hard-hitting reporting. But their companies also employ people who are shooting wild art at Little League games, publishing pages filled with comics and Sudoku, and running reader sweepstakes and giveaways.

If you're going to publish a website, you can't forget the gimmicks.

In looking at California community college online publications I seldom see much effort to go beyond the normal news fare that all ready shows up in print. We just don't do self-promotion well or play good party hosts. Below are some ideas. My apologies for such heavy use of the Cerritos College Talon Marks as an example. I do so not to brag on my own students' publication, but because it is the one with which I am most familiar. My (way) earlier post included some examples from other community college publications.

MORE PHOTOS -- One of my biggest pet peeves is news web sites, especially major ones, is that they don't show enough photos. You don't need a photo slide show with every story, but come on, show me the scene. Print stories that have photos with them, or probably should, too often appear online without the photo sauce. Even my own students do a poor job of attaching photos to anything but those stories that need it for the front page featured story.
LINKS TO OTHER STORIES -- Much has been written about this both here and in other blogs I regularly read, but our students still don't do it. It takes extra skill and extra work, but it can become habit if you work at it. Give your reader some spice with that meal.
EXPLAIN THE NEWS WITH BLOGS -- Today we can do more than report the news, we can report about the news. And we can explain the news process to readers. How and why do we make decisions? This is one role of blogs. Your staff members should be learning to news blog on a regular basis. They will actually learn to understand the news better if they have to explain more than the details of a story, but how they got those details and what they mean. It is easy to write, but hard to get into the habit of writing regularly. They should be learning while in your programs. So few of our papers have blogs. And at those that do, so few blogs are updated on a regular basis. Tip: Don't hide blogs or blog entries. Tease them on the front page. Take a look at Google's Custom RSS gadget to automatically update headline links. If the same links stay there too long, it becomes conspicuous. See talonmarks.com or the JACC Web site for examples of this handy and free tool in use. What good is a great meal if you aren't ready to hand out recipies?
CARTOONS AND PUZZLES -- Ahh, the sugary dessert of the meal. Ideally, you have your own cartoonist, but even if you don't you can find free or low cost syndicated cartoons and puzzles, some of which will update daily automatically. Give your readers extra reasons to stick around and enjoy your meal. If they just show up for dessert, perhaps they'll sample the meat and potatoes. Few JACC schools use cartoons and puzzles. And the ones that do make them difficult to access or even read online (make them bigger if necessary). I think this stems from a mistaken notion that everything on your Web site MUST be created by you. If you had a staff of 100, okay. But you don't. So if your staff cannot produce a balanced meal, have someone else cater part of it. I reluctantly can buy the "only our stuff" argument for the print edition, which has limited space to begin with, but online space is not a problem and you can and should provide a complete meal. For an example of what can be done, check out talonmarks.com's cartoon page. it and other cartoon and puzzle pages are teased at the bottom of the front page.
PROMOTIONS -- Suppose you gave a dinner party and no one showed? Is your Web site like that? You are right to focus on quality content, but it doesn't matter if no one shows up to enjoy it. Promote the hell out of your site. Promote in your print edition AND on your online edition. You want to get readers back. You want to show them that they are appreciated. While few of us are actively recruiting readers/customers, remember that in business it is far easier/cheaper to keep a customer/subscriber than it is to get a new one. Spend a few bucks and give things away once in a while. The Cerritos Talon Marks, for instance, has given away iPods, concert tickets, tickets to wrestling matches and more to attract online readers and thank subscribers. Our most recent promotion was a team effort with Paramount Pictures and the Iron Man movie. While it was not a good experiment for us --see my other blog for details-- at least it was an attempt. We need to do more than we do, but I don't see much evidence of other publications doing anything.
DIFFERENT WAYS OF TELLING STORIES -- Dinner is more than meat and potatoes cooked one way. Look for other ways of cooking foods/telling stories: Slide shows, videos, audio, pdf attachments, sprouts (not the Brussels kind), mashups and more. In JACC we know a lot more about Soundslides because of the Team feature contest we ran at our last convention, but there are lots of other tools. My most current favorite is Sprout Builder. My students produced their first sprout recently and already we see LOTS of uses for it. Be on the lookout for other exotic tools coming out. Not a gourmet chef? Take a quick look at services like Bravenet, which offers a host of free online tools for polls, forms, chat rooms, surveys and more that you can add to your site even if you don't have a tech wizard handy. There is no such thing as a completely free lunch and if you use these tools you have to put up with some distracting advertising. But if you like a tool, you can pay for it and lose the advertising. I know, that's hard to do on a fixed budget, but even meat can get dull after a while.

JACC schools, when you've prepared a particularly fine meal or dish, let me know and I'll unabashedly publicize it here for you. We all like a good meal and can learn from each other.

Wow! Sprout Builder looks neat

2008-04-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

Bryan Murley just posted an entry on his Innovation in College Media blog about an interesting new web tool some of us should look at. If you like the ease of use of SoundSlides to add to presentation on your web sites, your students should also look at Sprout Builder at http://sproutbuilder.com.

Sprout Builder is "the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more."

Basically, like SoundSlides, it creates a Flash presentation project for you without you having to learn how to use Flash. The difference here is that Sprout Builder's product is a multi-layered widget that can include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services.

Once you create the product through the online site, copy the code and embed it into your web site.

How would you use this? Well, my beady little mind is just starting to turn this over, but the first project that comes to mind would be an interactive multimedia project for those community colleges going through the president hiring stages. Got three finalists? Include photos of them, videos of campus forums, biographies, resumes, etc.

Imagine what kind of package you could put together for a sports team? Photos, video, audio, stats of top athletes. Or build something that tells a bit about every team in an athletic conference.

Oooooo, just let me think a bit more. Nope. Have too many papers to grade first. M-u-s-t grade papers. Must n-o-t take time to be innovative.

Seriously, though, we've been talking about the next step in online publications to post first and publish later. If that is true, the step after that is to create original online content that blows print content out of the water. Tools like Soundslides and Sprout Builder can make you look like a pro without having to be a code junkie. You just have to be a good journalist.

JACC just introduced Team Feature 2.0 at its recent convention. TF2 is a contest that requires photographer and writer to work together to create a multimedia slide show feature story using SoundSlides. There is already talk about TF3: where still photos are replaced by video. With something like Sprout Builder, though, TF3 could instead leap frog into a true interactive online feature.

Whether to go online only

2008-04-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

One thing I really like about Cypress College's Robert Mercer is that, if you'll give him the opportunity, he'll come up with questions that can really make you think.

On JACC's faculty-only listserve last week he did just that when he brought up a disagreement he is having with his program dean about the future of the Cypress College Chronicle newspaper, the print edition. Robert is really into online journalism and he's got a lot of right ideas about the future of journalism. He's at the point where he is arguing that he wants to eliminate his print edition and go strictly online or cut the print publication to a monthly magazine format and put news emphasis on the online publication. If you listen to his reasons, they make a kind of sense. I think he is wrong in his conclusions, though, and have said so on the listserve.

While out walking this morning I couldn't help but come back to why I think he is wrong. His wrongness can stimulate some good questions for community college journalism instructors to think about in defining their programs, especially if they are undergoing or about to undergo a program review at their colleges.

What is the purpose of your journalism program?
Is it to train journalists of tomorrow or serve your campus community?

The answer should be both. (My evolving philosophy/mission statement.)

I personally think there are other purposes just as important, such as developing critical thinking skills, leadership skills and media literacy, for example. But to keep the discussion simple, let's focus on those two questions and how they relate to print vs. online (or, better yet, print and online) publications and skill sets.

The follow-up questions, then, become:

How best do I train the journalists of tomorrow?
- Is the journalism student best served with a print publication? or
- Is the student best served with an online publication?
Assuming, of course, this is an either/or question.

How best do I serve my campus community?
- Is the campus community best served with a print publication?, or
- is the campus community best served with an online publication?

TRAINING JOURNALISTS OF TOMORROW
If one focuses on the print and online publications aspect of training tomorrow's journalists there is a strong argument that too many of us spend too much time teaching print journalism. We put a lot of resources in teaching students how to write for print and how to design for print. And some days it appears as though that is just what our students want. If you throw magazines into the mix, as some of our JACC schools do, you really see this. Students who sign up for Cerritos College's magazine classes overwhelmingly are more interested in design presentation than learning a magazine writing style.

I've long maintained that the role of a journalist is to gather information from a variety of sources, synthesize or make sense of that information, and then prepare so that it can told to others. The debate we're having --indeed the throes of the industry these days-- is over that last part: in what format will we tell the story or deliver the information?

In our community college programs we continue to overemphasize print over other media because that's the way it has been for so long and that's what we learned in school and know.

Despite overwhelming data that today's younger audiences --our primary reader demographic-- do not read print newspapers very often and are more likely to get news online over print we continue to emphasize the grand old print publications we understand and love. I get a lot of information online today. My computer is a close companion of mind. But I still start each day poring over a couple of newspapers in print format (though I could wean myself from that if the coffee shop I like to have breakfast at offered a wireless connection and an electrical outlet (no iPhone for me yet.)

Given the data about younger readers and all the news about the industry gutting itself of print reporters, Robert is correct in arguing that we are spending too much time training students for an industry that will look drastically different by the time they hit the job market, even if that is next week.

We need to be putting more of our efforts into teaching how to tell stories online. (And there is data to suggest that means storytelling with audio and video as much as or more than with typed words.) That's what Robert wants to do at Cypress. More of us at the community college level are moving that way, but Robert has his machete in hand and is cutting and slashing a trail so far out there ahead of us that we barely can see him in the distance. I'm not completely comfortable with where he's at, but somewhere down the road we're going to look at what he's done and perhaps be a bit jealous. (I've written about the idea of being a pioneer here before.)

SERVING THE CAMPUS
But where Robert is wrong in what he wants to do lies in the second question. Again, for many years I've said that the main reason we have journalism programs at about 70 of the 109 California community colleges is not because our schools are particularly concerns about training journalists of tomorrow. And thank goodness for that, because the constant news of journalist layoffs would cause our schools' administrators to argue that journalism is dying off and we need to stop teaching journalism and redirect resources. No, the main reason journalism exists at our campuses is that school administrators still want a student newspaper (and magazine in some cases).

It may be true that students do not generally read newspapers and that they get their news from online, but site statistics I see about the Cerritos College Talon Marks don't convince me that that many students read the student newspaper online either. Most the hits the Talon Marks get come from search engine searches...and most come from the east coast, not Southern California where we are located. (How many of us check into that on a regular basis; do we know who our readers are?)

Robert, in his listserve posts, reports that fewer and fewer copies of the print version get picked up these days and uses this as a justification for eliminating the print edition and concentrating online, but he offers no evidence that Cypress students get their campus information from CyChron.

Perhaps if any of us are seeing fewer copies of the paper being picked up the problem lies with us not covering news that is relevant to our readers. In such a case, simply doing what we do online will not help. At least with the print edition we have the benefit of the random pickup. I'm reminded of the old saying, "Out of site, out of mind." Without a print edition we are out of site, or rather we're hard to see amidst all the other online options. On our campuses we all still are pretty much the only newspaper laying around.

We still serve our campuses best with a print edition, but I think we can enhance the print edition service with online supplements. And we should. We not only enhance the print edition by doing so, we fulfill the training mission better. For now there is not only room for both, there is need for both.

As for Robert's idea of going to a monthly news magazine, there may be some room for thought. I'm still uncomfortable with being out of site with timely news updates, so I don't fully agree with his plan. Certainly there is precedent for what he suggests. I look first to the industry's leading magazine: Editor and Publisher, which after 100 years of weekly publication went to a mostly online format and a monthly, expanded magazine. There is no doubt that the magazine improved, and so did news coverage of the industry.

When E&P made the switch I religiously checked in daily for new news for months, but after a while I fell into the habit of going to the web site less and less. Today, it is out of site, out of mind until the print edition shows up. E&P offers a ridiculous "Most Read" RSS feed that keeps serving up older stories and does not offer a "Most recent" feed like it should. But even if it did it still begs the question, unless the online publication has a way of reaching me daily --something I have to request as opposed to seeing a copy of a print edition conveniently placed in a newsstand around my campus-- it is out of site, out of mind.

For the Cypress plan to work we have to:

Make sure our readers want what we have to offer at least enough to come looking for it,
Offer easier ways for them to stumble across it when they forget about us, and
Develop our corner of ubiquity in their lives.

Schools could help us do that if they were interested in doing so, but they aren't. One way that schools could do this is agree to set the default home page of every campus lab computer browser to the student publication. Another that Robert even suggested is allowing student web casts to fold into the ever-increasing video displays set up by commercial vendors; schools could negotiate that as a condition for placing plasma screens all over campus. (Imagine that, merging a commercial venture with an educational mission of the college itself!)

In the meantime, the monthly news magazine is an interesting concept, but falls short of serving the campus a timely news source likely to be utilized by students. Still, Robert gives us food for thought. It is good to challenge your way of doing things every now and then. Without those challenges, we get complacent and weak. And we get left behind.

Soundslides under pressure

2008-04-06T15:13:00.000-07:00

JACC completed its annual convention this weekend and one of the big changes was the introduction of our first on-the-spot multimedia contest. Student teams (2-3 per team) from 25 colleges set out on LA's colorful cultural icon Olvera Street to find a feature and develop it under deadline pressure using SoundSlidesPlus software. For about half the teams, this was the first exposure they've had to SoundSlides, much less editing audio. But the excitement for a multimedia challenge among our contests was high.

The students had one day to find a story and collect photos and audio, overnight to edit everything and one hour in a contest lab to assemble the final product. Most teams stayed up all night editing and not all completed the task. Unfortunately, four teams who DID complete a project, had their files corrupted in the save process and judges could not open them. (My mistake for not checking them as we collected them so that students could re-export! I learned something new, too, as I've never seen this kind of corruption before.)

Projects were judged on the spot and winning teams honored during the convention.

A lot of tired folks at the end, but they were stoked.

All completed entries, except for the corrupted ones, can be found on the JACC web site at www.jacconline.org. (Or jump directly to the story with links here.)

We called this contest Team Feature 2.0 as it replaced our earlier contest of a writer and photographer working together to develop a written feature plus photo. For the future we hope to introduce Team Feature 3.0 where the final project is video. We need to work out computing issues though and, quite frankly, I'm not sure we have enough time for good editing to take place even if we find a level playing field with computers.

A contest with a purpose

2007-10-07T17:39:00.000-07:00

One of the missions of the California Journalism Association of Community Colleges is to provide educational opportunities for journalism students outside of the classroom. That's a fancy way of saying we hold conferences with workshops. But sometimes it means something else.

A big part of many of JACC's conferences are contests that test students' skills. But last weekend the JACC board of directors changed one of its contests in a way designed to encourage programs to start teaching multimedia skills in their classes.

The board made an experimental change in its Team Feature contest. This high-profile contest brings together a reporter and photographer to create a feature package. Too often it has been a feature writing contest that just happens to have a decent photo entered along with it.

Enter Team Feature 2.0, which will be the format for the 2008 convention in Los Angeles next April.

Team Feature 2.0 provides an interesting twist to JACC’s venerable contest. In keeping with industry trends the contest will give the writer and photographer new challenges as they work together to create a multimedia story using SoundSlidesPlus software.

Writers will gather information and craft a story using text and/or audio while photographers put together a series of photos to illustrate the story. More than ever, the writer and photographer will have to work together to construct a compelling story.

In the end, the team will come together in a Macintosh computer lab to put final touches on the story using a simple-to-use SoundSlidesPlus software program that brings together audio and photos, or stories can be told through photos and text captions.

The simplicity of the software tools and the wide availability of digital cameras, from high-end single lens reflex cameras to low-cost-but-high-quality point-and-shoot cameras, will insure that even students from schools without regular multimedia journalism programs will be able to participate.

At next weekend's Northern California regional conference at San Jose State University I'll be introducing and explaining the contest to students and faculty from 20 or so community colleges so that they can spend the school year practicing for the contest and creating slideshows for their online publications. I'm also preparing a second workshop called "Think Online" where I hope to encourage students to change their thinking about their online publication and to encourage instructors to start their own in-classroom "Think Online" campaigns. I repeat the workshops three weeks later at the Southern California regional conference, where another 30-plus schools will probably participate.

We'll also do workshops at the convention on how to use SoundSlides and how to edit audio using Audacity: We're trying to use easy-to-obtain software available for Mac and PC, so even the poorest programs can afford to make this leap.

BTW: I love Ryan Sholin's latest blog entry on "Five Ways to Produce Online News Without Asking the Web Guy for Help." I plan to share it with next week's participants.

Student learning outcomes

2007-08-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

Note: The Western Association of Schools and Colleges has changed its accrediting standards to put more focus on student learning outcomes --a shift away from what we teach to what students learn. While we've known for some time this was coming and that our community colleges were going to have to show movement this direction, schools have often waited until their turn in the accrediting cycle came up to push their faculty into actually moving.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I've had several requests from other advisers in the last few weeks about sharing student learning outcomes. Even though we did a workshop on them at JACC Mid-Winter Faculty Conference in Morro Bay a couple of years ago some advisers are just getting around to them now.

I always am conflicted when people ask. I want to help, but I feel that each of us should develop our own outcomes based on what we actually teach. While we teach the same subjects, how we teach them varies from school to school, teacher to teacher.

As I was working with students in my newswriting class this morning --we're learning AP Style-- it dawned on me that the best time to write Student Learning Outcomes was throughout the semester as the class is being taught. This week I've introduced them to AP Style. What am I expecting them to learn and how will I evaluate that they've learned something? Seems like I should write an outcome expectation right now while I'm teaching it.

In my newspaper class we held our first critique this week. After 31 years it seems like I am always emphasizing the same stuff in the first critique of the semester. Seems like I should write an outcome expectation right now while I'm teaching it.

In my mass comm classes I just lectured on the expectations of the journalism major. Seems like I should write an outcome expectation right now while I'm teaching it.

And a lesson I learned from the Morro Bay workshop that has stuck with me came from Mike Reed, who co-taught the Blue Heron session: Outcomes should be written for more than just the individual classes. The sequence of courses I teach hopefully add up to more than the sum of their parts. There needs to be a set of outcomes for the program: what, additionally, would I expect my students to learn if they take a sequence of courses we call a major?

Just a thought....

P.S. Student learning outcomes are merely make-work if the only reason you do them is to comply with accrediting standards and school mandate. It is only when you truly use them to measure whether students are learning what you say they should be --and altering your methods/goals if students don't-- that they become meaningful.

Can the LA Times Be Saved?

2007-06-05T21:46:00.000-07:00

Just got back from an interesting panel presentation on the topic "Can the LA Times Be Saved" in downtown LA sponsored by the Zocalo Public Square Lecture Series. Sort of thought I might see a southern California community college journalism teacher or two in the crowd, but I didn't (it was on the JACC calendar!).

Zocalo sponsors a number of free lectures and panel discussions throughout LA each year, many of them centered on media and all of them free.

For those interested, there is a second chance as Zocalo records the presentations and broadcasts them on KPCC radio, one of LA's NPR stations, on Sunday nights and then posts them as podcasts on the www.kpcc.org website after that. I'll update this post with a link to the podcast when it appears.

Panelists were all from the LA Times management and moderator Kit Rachlis, editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Magazine, asked some probing questions about problems facing the LA Times, such as how does laying off 62 reporters, including six Pulitzer Prize winners translate to maintaining quality? The questions, I thought, brought out some interesting thoughts about strategy.

Some interesting tidbits:

There was discussion of whether the LAT would ever drop its Monday edition, which is its biggest money loser. Seems that readership drops significantly at the beginning of the week and picks up as the week progresses. Interestingly, the readership of the online site is exactly the opposite.
Should the web operation be separate from the print operation as it is with the Washington Post? No, in fact by separating the two operations from the start, the Washington Post got a quick start on the web, but now it has hit a wall. The LAT, which has described itself as "web stupid" has a lot of ground to make up. The paper's online executive editor was asked if the train has left the station as far as developing a significant presence on the web.

There was a lot of positive talk about the print edition and its future, but there was a lot of enthusiasm for the online potential. But poo-pooed was the idea of simply shoveling content from the print edition to the web. Online content needs to be different than simply writing stories. Telling stories with other formats, such as video, audio, blogs, interactive graphics, etc. is where online is going to grow.

The editor of the paper kept proudly mentioning that while the paper still stresses national and international news, it is edited locally by people who live in LA (and breathe LA air and drive LA freeways). He was making a point, but I wanted to ask him why the Times doesn't hire reporters from LA or help train LA reporters, it is a destination paper. Didn't get the chance, though.

What is the role of the publications adviser

2007-06-02T17:01:00.000-07:00

What is the role of the faculty adviser with a student publication? This is an important practical and philosophical question in the college setting. And if it is important, it is also a difficult question to answer.

The question was at the heart of a student publication adviser survey conducted by the Journalism Association of Community Colleges in late May and early June 2007. The survey mirrored a 2003 survey conducted by Mary Mazzocco of Solano College.

In that survey 22 faculty advisers overwhelming reported that they become hands-on in most areas rarely or when asked by students. The one exception was that they opted for newspaper critiques AFTER publication.

JACC’s 2007 survey asked the same questions. This time the 39 advisers who responded anonymously to the survey once again reported overwhelming results that suggest they help mostly when asked to by students.

See the report of the survey at www.jacconline2.org/pdf/07_adviser_survey.pdf.

A snapshot of California community college journalism

2007-05-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

Student publication web sites and more emphasis on them were major highlights of California community college journalism programs during the 2006-07 school year. It was also a good year for programs to upgrade the equipment they use to produce student publications.

These were among the results of JACC’s 2007 Snapshot Survey of programs.

The online survey’s 48 questions examined a multitude of aspects of community college journalism programs. Fifty-seven colleges, or approximately 75 percent of the 76 community colleges with a newspaper or journalism program, participated in the survey, creating a fairly accurate snapshot of the state of the programs in the state.

JACC’s Snapshot Survey attempts to capture a snapshot of the programs around the state at the time of the survey and can be measured against earlier snapshots taken during the 1995-96, 1997-98, 1998-99, 2000-01 and 2001-02 school years. JACC attempted a survey in 2003-04 but did not get enough participation from schools to be meaningful. In addition, Toni (Allen) Albertson, now at Mt. San Antonio College, did a similar survey of California community college programs as part of a masters project in the early 2000s. Summaries of those surveys, as well as this one, are available on the JACC web site at www.jacconline.org.

The 2007 survey was broken into five sections: General information about the journalism program, information about the student newspaper, information about the online student publication, information about non-newspaper classes, and information about the college magazine.

Sweet music

2007-05-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

The Long Beach (CA) Press-Telegram today contained an article about dead rabbits showing up on the Long Beach City College campus. Anyone who follows news about LBCC is going to hear, sooner or later, about the rabbits than run wild on the campus.

But the Press-Telegram story contained a paragraph I'd like to see more often:

The Viking Newspaper, the school's student publication, reported online Monday that the discovery had been made by gardener Jeff Kyle early that morning.

Unfortunately, like many other papers, the Press-Telegram story did not include a link to the Viking news story, but the mention is sweet music.

Here's a link to the story and to the Viking story.

What students need to know: Academic Summit

2007-05-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

What do 2007 graduates need to know to succeed in journalism jobs?

That was one of the overriding questions of today's day-long California Journalism Education Coalition (Cal-JEC) Media Industry/Academic Summit held at the Orange County Register. Twenty media professionals and educators with a respect for tradition, but open to change were invited to participate.

Wow, is there a lot to digest from the meeting and I can't do it justice this quickly; I've got pages of notes. But below are a few of the thoughts that I marked with an asterisk as we went.

Jay Harris makes a point while Linda Bowen watches on.

The assumption of the day was that the industry is changing rapidly, so we focused on what current graduates need, not what they will need three years from now. But that snapshot look can point us the right direction. And while the assumption was to consider the four-year graduate, I think there is a lot in the results for community colleges to think about.

Students need to know more about the Constitution and about how city's work. They should know about our legal system, civics and "cultural touchstones."

It is not that they need to be experts on everything. Jay Harris made a telling comment:
"We have to realize that young reporters are human. They still have to grow up. (There are some things they don't know and have never known when they start.)"

A lot of good experience comes from students working on our student publications, but they'll always be learning as they mature.
Students/reporters need to understand better and to connect with their readers.
Students need to understand that they need to develop enterprise stories, not just wait for assignments. It would be a good idea for them to learn how to develop and cover beats.

It was pointed out that younger writers more and more are writing to older audiences who actually are more likely to read newspapers. Someone suggested that for students to better connect with the readers they need to be paid well enough to buy homes.

I already require my returning students to create blogs if they want to be in line for an A (returning students need to be challenged, not just keep doing the same stuff). I think I'm going to alter that in the future to require them to develop a campus-related beat as the subject of their blogs.
Students need coursework on what to expect with their first job. Sure, internships can help with this, but students need more, including understanding the economics of the businesses they will be working for and how to deal with office politics.
As educators we need to be emphasizing community journalism more. Students need to understand their communities and how they work. Specialty reporting can and should come later.
Ethics and values are important and need to integrated into all courses, not just added on as separate courses.
We need to break out of some of our rigid writing styles we teach and look at how our students and their peers consume news; we need to include those forms in what we teach or what they practice on our papers.

Jeff Pelline listens as a point is made.

We tried to put together one cohesive statement or set of skills/values that encompassed all this and more. We started with the list that comes from the 2006 Carnegie Report on "Improving the Education of Tomorrow's Journalists" and it went wild from there. A later report will try to put it all together coherently. But here are some of the things discussed:

Basic reporting and conveyance skills. We liked the word conveyance more than writing because there are different ways to convey the story and students need to know them. They must know how to gather not only the standard information for writing a story, but how to gather video and audio and photos and how to edit it all. But they also need to know the best way to convey the information; it is more than just the tech skills, it is journalistic skills of what is the best method and what needs to be included that counts. The term infosynthesis was coined by Holly Heiser. All this is important, but text still is the most important conveyance.

Of course, the basic interviewing, writing and editing skills apply here, as does developing deep Internet search skills: getting beyond Google and into public records.

One area that probably should be included here, the group felt, was more instruction on writing from public documents. A lot of discussion took place about understanding budgets, too.
Understand citizen and community journalism.
Understand cultural touchstones. Understand the mechanics of civic organizations, understand the Constitution, understand history of journalism and role of journalism in society, understand analogies from literature and pop culture. Understand that perhaps journalism is not mass media any more, but instead you are reporting for multiple smaller audiences.
Understand what is news. This definition may be changing today.
Develop personal characteristics. Be open-minded, be eager to learn, be curious. Bi-lingual is a big advantage; be able to converse and write in a second language. Have a broader perspective of the world. Learn math basics and HTML basics.
Develop ethical values. Ethics is like muscles. You need to continually flex them in all courses. Areas we discussed included plagiarism, attribution education, how to treat sources, respecting your community, situational ethics, avoiding conflicts of interest and focus on overcoming who you are not.

There was so much more we discussed, too. For instance, we discussed constraints colleges face, some imposed by AEJMC accrediting standards. Maybe that's another entry, though.

SMS your students

2007-05-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

For several years now I have been administering tests for my mass communications survey class --both the traditional and the online/distance ed versions-- online through Discovery.com. That way I do not take up valuable class time with tests where some students finish in 10 minutes (and usually flunk) and others take 90 minutes (and still flunk). Because students have varying work schedules I usually give them a three-day window to take the tests.

The tests are multiple choice and I allow them to be open book, open note. I long ago got over the fear of cheating or the student who tries to look up answers as he goes because he hasn't read the text. If my students are cheating, most are doing a pretty poor job of it.

A reoccurring problem, though, has been students FORGETTING to take the test. Yes, I know it is college and they should take some responsibility, but I am interested in student success and look for ways to remind them. I have been trying e-mail, but more and more students tell me that they check e-mail only a couple of times a week. Instead, the other day students suggested that I text them on their cell phones. A dinosaur like me start texting? Not likely.

But I found a way to do it through e-mail, something that is called Short Message Service, or SMS. You can type in the students' 10-digit numbers in the e-mail address and the appropriate service provider domains and send a text message to your students in one fell swoop. Of course, it takes a little bit of preparation.

You have to 1) collect all those phone numbers and 2) find out which service provider the student uses. I'm used to collecting e-mail addresses at the beginning of a semester, so that shouldn't be too much extra work. Next you need to know what domain address to send the messages to. I checked Wikipedia and found a pretty good list. Common ones are Cingular (@cingularme.com), Verizon (@vtext.com), T Mobile (@tmobile.net) and Sprint or Nextel (@page.nextel.com).

Of course, typing all those numbers and addresses is just asking for human error. I store all my students' e-mail addresses on an Excel spreadsheet anyway, so I'm just going to add a few new columns. In the first column I plan to type in the cell number (if they choose to give it to me). In the second column I'll type "A" for Cingular users, "B" for Verizon users, "C" for T Mobile users, "D" for Sprint or Nextel users, etc. In the third column I'll let Excel create the address for me by creating a formula (for my spreadsheet, I'll be counting Column C for the phone number, Column D for the Service provider and Column E for the calculation).

=IF(C1="","",C1&"@"&IF(D1="A","cingularme.com", IF(D1="B","vtext.com", IF(D1="c","tmobile.net", IF(D1="D","page.nextel.com")))))

If you don't know how to use Excel's "Fill" function to duplicate the formula for as many rows as you need, learn it; it is one of the most useful functions in building Excel spreadsheets.

Now, every time I want to send a text message I can select and copy Column E and paste it into the address field of my e-mail program.

I've only run some preliminary tests on this because it is near the end of the semester and I haven't collected those cell numbers yet, but it sure looks like it will work. Sometimes you can learn by listening to your students.

JACC Converge

2007-03-23T07:10:00.000-07:00

Day one of the 2007 JACC annual convention is in the books. Some 600-plus students and advisers from 51 California community colleges are meeting in Sacramento for the 52nd annual event.

Multimedia is a big theme of this year's convention. The Sacramento Bee's Manny Crisotomo opened the convention with a keynote presentation on a series called "The Weight" that he worked on about America's first (and only) residential high school for obese teens (located in my hometown of Reedley; I may have been the only Reedleyite in the room). Well done and inspiring. I saw some of my students analyzing what was shown and thinking about how we could use some of the techniques for our own publication. Ahhh, the next step, one of the things I love about teaching.

Also interesting to note is that a group of students and one faculty adviser is working on a multimedia project covering the convention. Take a look at JACC: Converge. To say I'm especially proud that the students come from Cerritos College and are being advised by adjunct Cerritos instructor Amara Aguilar (a former student of mine) would be an understatement.

My successful SoundSlides project

2007-03-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

Once again, thanks to the folks at SoundSlides for helping me get my editor recognition project back on track. I've now successfully completed the project. See it at here. When it works, it is really slick.

My failed SoundSlides project

2007-03-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

UPDATE:Kudos to the folks at SoundSlides. They got back to me (see comment below) and we worked it out. I was working with an older version of SoundSlides. But after updating, running a couple of tests, discovering an anomaly with one of the images, etc. we got it to work. Now I've just got to find time to do the tweaking for the final version.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Soundslides is a great program for creating slide shows for the web. I have been training my students and encouraging them to use it at talonmarks.com.

And while I have practiced with the program so that I could teach it, I didn't have an opportunity to create a project of my own until this weekend. And I failed.

Twice each year the Journalism Association of Community Colleges honors California community college student publication editors for their leadership by presenting them with certificates of merit. Many schools change editors every semester, that's why we do it twice a year. The students work long hours and are the backbones of our publications. And in most cases, the editorships are non-paid positions, though most receive academic credit. (Credit that does not transfer to the major if they transfer to a four-year university.) It seems the least we can do.

At this year's JACC state convention --next weekend in Sacramento-- we thought we'd do something else a little different and put together a visual salute to the editors, too. A PERFECT PROJECT FOR SOUNDSLIDES! For the last four weeks I've been collecting images for the project and sat down this weekend to put it together.

For sound I thought I'd play some music. I thought this would be the hard part because I needed to merge the three pieces (two-plus, actually) into one file. Apple's iTunes and GarageBand made that amazingly simple.

So I was ready for Soundslides. I imported the audio. Then I imported the jpeg images: 62 of them! It seemed to go quickly and then the tumbling boxes did their thing with a message indicated that it was still importing Image No. 62. I waited. It took a while. "Not a problem," I thought. "It's got to resize all those images." So I waited some more. I waited one hour, two hours, four hours, eight hours! The boxes kept churning away. I went to bed. When I woke up in the morning it was still churning away on the last image. So I cancelled.

"Must be too many images for it to handle at once," I thought. So I removed half the images and tried again, thinking that I could add the rest of the images one by one later. After two hours of churning on Image No. 31, I cancelled. I tried again with 10 images. Same thing. So I gave up.

But I had worked so hard to collect the images. I turned to iMovie and within a couple of hours had put together the video for the JACC web site. I also imported a larger version for the presentation.

If anyone can help me figure out why the program couldn't close out the last image let me know. I don't know if I'll have time to redo it for next weekend, but I'd sure like to try. The upside? While waiting for all those images I kept taking walks. Instead of the normal 3.5 miles I try to get in each day, I clocked 11!

Will college publications all be digital in 25 years?

2007-03-04T17:02:00.000-08:00

Robert Kuttner, columnist for the Boston Globe, predicts in the Columbia Journalism Review that newspapers will all be digital within 25 years. Despite gloomy forecasts and a late start, most newspapers have engaged into a viable transition to digital.

An easy prediction to make. If he's wrong, who 25 years from now will remember that he predicted it?

But it is an interesting notion.

Will college publications all be digital in 25 years? There's a good chance. Maybe sooner.

Bigger universities seem to be having luck in drawing large student audiences to their current web sites. For California community colleges it seems to be a bigger challenge. Sure, we can build an audience and it IS true that students spend a lot of time online. That doesn't mean that community college students are gravitating to online student publications. I still maintain that one of the real reasons many of our publications exist is that schools want to give students a way to communicate. Our biggest number of campus readers probably comes from pass-by readership. That is, the students who read our print edition most often DON'T seek out the publication, it is just handy as they are walking by the many distribution points we have on campus. We haven't learned yet how to get them pass by our web sites out there on the whole World Wide Web.

Of course, I have some thoughts. If we could just campus computer labs to set our sites to set the default URL of browsers to the campus publication, that would jump start things. But college are more likely to set the college web site as the URL.

The bigger answer, of course, is that we have to stop simply repeating the print edition and put new content on the web site that students WANT to seek out, something they can't elsewhere.

What makes the prospect of all digital publications at colleges most likely is the cost that is involved in printing. As school budgets shrink and print advertising shrinks, the inexpensive printing of paper-based publications is going to rack up the pressure to go online only.

But advertising is also going to slow down the process a bit. That is until local advertisers see more value in online advertising than print advertising. And that's not going to happen until student publications build LOCAL audiences. At the Cerritos College Talon Marks, for instance, clearly two-thirds of our online readership comes from the East Coast or Europe.

I've predicted in the past that California community colleges are about to see their first online-only student publication. Cypress College would like to be that first publication, but LA Harbor may give it a run for the money. Or it may simply be a school that currently does not have a student publication and sees online as the only option to starting one. And it may happen sometime during 2007.

JACC is poised to accept an online-only publication in its various competitions. Currently, in all writing categories, schools may enter any story as long as a version of it did not run in the print version of the publication. That's a stupid limitation, but better than the alternative that no online version of a story may be entered. As for photos, the rules are different. Only printed versions of photos may be entered in photo competitions; there is a separate online-only photo competition.

Web Watch - Feb. 25

2007-02-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I did a Web Watch of JACC online publications. I forgot how long it takes to look at the 45 or so active sites. Whew! But here's a summary of what I see.

NEW, M.I.A. AND BEST OF SHOW
Three schools have started online publications since the last time I did one of these. They are the San Diego City Times, the College of Sequoias Campus and the Solano Tempest. Golden West College's Western Sun has also gone online, but as a pdf presentation.

One of the most innovative approaches to an online edition is Los Medanos' Experience, which uses a Filemaker interface like JACC's conference registration system. But the Experience has been Missing In Action all school year.

And by far, the most improved site I've seen since November is the Shasta Lance with its expanded list of stories and addition of photo slide shows.

BEST HEADLINE
The best headline I saw in my search as Riverside College's "Castro resigns as president." No, it's not THAT Castro, but made you look. I also like Riverside's custom page concept listing awards it has won. Needs some design work, but maybe that's something more of us should be considering.

DOES THE FRONT PAGE MATTER?
I think so and have said before that I think your front page needs to stay clean and simple, but needs to list as many stories as possible from your current edition. A lot of schools don't. My theory is that few people will navigate through your site looking for stories that they don't know are there.

This last Friday I attended a community college journalism day sponsored by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times. A speaker from the Times made a comment in one of the workshops that got my attention. He said that a lot of effort went into the design of the front page, but that the front page was not the main pathway for most of the site's hits --search engine sites and links from other external sources, such as blogs, were. Interesting.

I watched as I went through the sites. Many of the schools that use the College Publisher tool use the "Most Popular Stories" object that CP offers. About half the time the most popular story, and sometimes all five listed, WERE NOT on the front page. See today's current editions of the Bakersfield College Rip, Cosumnes River Connection, or the Palomar Telescope, for instance.

And one of the curious phenomenon is that the lead story of most sites IS NOT the most popular story at all. We've seen that a lot at talonmarks.com where the crossword puzzle we purchase from a syndicate is outpacing the second-place story two to one. Yikes! What does that tell us?

DO PHOTOS MATTER?
In today's pictoral-don't-read world I would think so. But few JACC schools do much with photos and perhaps none do it well. Most sites are designed to either include too many photos or not enough, photos that take up way too much space or are displayed so small that they are difficult to read. And not enough schools bother with cutlines. I DID see some good examples, though.

I think LA Valley Star has some of the most intriguing photos. For instance, the publication has a story about baseball: The Rights of Spring. Okay, a baseball feature calls for a shot of players, right? No, try just a closeup of a hanging jersy. Simple, but nice.
The Pierce Roundup has some good photos, even if some are unexplainably in black and white.
Santa Barbara's Channels does a good job with front page photos.
Moorpark's Ventura County Student Voice has a good Iraq photo taken by a returning soldier student.But photos need to be presented correctly. Moorpark's photos don't fit the front page template.
Santa Monica has a photo gallery of an anti-war rally, but again, the photos are too big for easy viewing.
Mt. San Antonio's Mountaineer also has good front page photos.
The Cerritos Talon Marks has small photos on the front page, but does a good job with design balance.
The Las Positas Express has a pretty interesting women's basketball photo, but it would have looked nicer bigger on the story page.
The Sacramento e.Press makes you look for photos, but nearly every story page has a photo you can actually see. And the EPress has a tradition of photos with rich color.

Photos don't have to be static, either. Some sites are putting together slide shows to show off multiple photos, a great idea!

Cosumnes River puts its issue's photos into a slide show, but the images are too small.
The Pasadena Courier has a Flash-based slide show with some really good images. The slide show would be better if it was self-running, though.
The best slide shows I saw, however, were SoundSlides-produced efforts at the Shasta Lance.

PODCASTS AND VIDEOS
Some sites are starting to experiment with other multimedia, too.

Cerritos has several news videos, but has included a front page promotional video of "What I like about Journalism" on its front page. Each week a new video featuring another staff member is featured. Talon Marks also includes a number of blogs. See the bottom of the page.
Citrus College's Clarion includes both blogs and audio podcasts. Citrus needs to make its story page headlines larger, though.
Cypress College's CyChron includes weekly video podcasts of campus news that rate as the most-popluar stories.
DeAnza College has featured a series of good online videos.
Las Positas has weird YouTube video worth watching. What's unclear, though, is whether the video is a campus video, perhaps even an Express staff video. Videos sometimes need stories, or "cutlines."
Mt. San Antonio's online editor promises blogs and more, but has delivered none yet. I always tell my students to do before you promise.
Riverside's Viewpoints is experimenting with blogs.
Laney College's Tower includes a couple of podcasts.
Santa Barbara City's Channels includes weekly news podcasts, but the latest issue "has gone to the dogs.
The Solano Tempest may be new to online, but is already experimenting with videos, mostly in the area of sports.

An improvement on any of these sites would be a custom page archive of just multimedia. Cerritos does this semester-by-semester and archives blogs semester-by-semester as staff come and leave. Solano has a single link to all its videos, too.

OTHER INTERESTING ELEMENTS
One of the marks of the best papers in the state is that they cover important off campus stories in addition to covering campus issues. Fullerton College's Weekly Hornet has a "Local" section devoted just to this.

A new report came out a few weeks ago lamblasting California Community colleges for not doing their jobs moving students along. Right or wrong, it deserves attention, but few publications seem to have stories. Some that do, include Bakersfield, Cosumnes River, Ohlone (pdf) and Sacramento through a "chat with the president." Modesto Pirates' Log former editor Ericka Langdon, might agree. She pens an all-too-familiar goodbyebefore leaving Modesto after dropping too many classes in favor of working for the paper.

Does your publication include a local weather report? Orange Coast College's Coast Report even includes a surf report. Cowabunga, dude!

Pierce College does a pretty good job addressing a failing football program that has seen only one win in two years. The various stories and online poll are worth the read.

Speaking of online polls, Rio Hondo has turned an online poll about campus crime reports into a story. Interesting idea, but it only give percentages, not numbers and it fails to report than an online poll is anything but scientific. Nice try to generate online traffic, though.

Citizen Journalism, Do We Need It? webcast

2007-02-13T19:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-02-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

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.

JACC Programs' Resolutions for 2007

2007-01-04T16:08:00.000-08:00

It's a new year and new semester (for most of us) and I've been reading a lot lately about New Year's resolutions for newspapers. My favorite/most useful ones so far have been Steve Outing's "Some Advice For Small Newspapers" column at the Editor and Publisher site and Bryan Murley'scollege publication annotation version of Outing's suggestions at the Innovation in College Media site. (Also see Lost Remote's Your Newsroom New Year's Resolutions and Small Business Software's "Free Website Content - 2007 New Year's Resolutions".)

Thought I'd add to the din with a few suggestions of my own for JACC programs and student publications.

1. Post first, print second.
It's 2007 and time to stop setting deadlines to correspond with the print editions. This is doubly true for those papers that publish only every other week. This is the world our students will graduate into and it is time that we start training them for it. One caveat, though, is that once students turn in stories, we'll be tempted to encourage them to take on another assignment right away. While that can be good, we need to make sure we don't overwork the students to the point they don't pass their other classes (see below).

2. Be innovative.
It is also time to grow beyond shovelware. Your online site should be more powerful with content beyond the print edition. Let the print edition more closely resemble shovelware. Time Magazine thought it was important enough to recognize the impact of video sharing sites like YouTube, social networks like MySpace and FaceBook, and photo sharing sites like Flickr, groupthinks like Wikipedia, etc., by naming YOU (the readers who now provide content instead of just consuming it) as Person of the Year. I blogged on this a week ago or so with a simple idea for involving your campus audience in providing content. I ran the idea by my own students who balked at it. "They'll write terrible stories," one of the editors said. The editors said they were uncomfortable with giving up control of the content. That's an attitude that a lot of newspaper people seem to have, and one that needs to change. This is the year to be innovative, even if it means starting off small. If you are not already adding new content to your web publication, think about photo slide shows, blogs, podcasts and more. Start reading Mindy McAdams' Teaching Online Journalism blog about all the papers in the country adding "electronic infographs."

3. Forge alliances for additional content.
Doing more with the same staff does not have to be a problem if you forge alliances with other groups on campus to provide content. Start with your broadcasting program, you know, the one that you have not worked with in the past because it includes little or no journalism. It needs to change, too. Take the high road, for both your sakes. Look to art programs, photo programs, film programs and animation programs. And look to your study body, don't expect the students to come to you. Innovate (see No. 2).

4. Share
We all have the same goal in mind: Improve our journalism programs and the work our students do. We can learn from each other, but so many don't share. I'm talking about sharing in at least two ways.

First is something I've been harping on for nearly 25 years. At conferences many of us are willing to schlep bundles of our papers along to put out on the newspaper table. Our students love to pick through the piles and collect samples of stuff they really like or really dislike. Our papers themselves can be supplemental textbooks for our students and even for the advisers. But JACC holds conferences only every three or four months, and only once a year when all schools are together. Why not share year-round by mailing out copies of your issues EACH WEEK (there's nothing as useless as an envelope with copies of all your papers at the end of a semester or, worse, end of the school year!). You SHOULD be sending out copies of your papers to local high school programs for recruitment purposes anyway (consider sending a duplicate to the head counselor at those schools).

I hear from a lot of advisers that they can't do that, that their schools won't let them. But have they really tried. Just wrap a handful of papers and address them to your local high schools. IF anyone questions your practice, let them know you are recruiting. With community college enrollments down these days, you are most likely to hear, "What a great idea." After a few weeks, add local legislators and area colleges. Over time add more colleges, the ones you'd like to return the favor. It's only when you start hitting 100 or so a week that someone will question what you are doing, and mostly likely they'll ask that you double that number so they can be bundled properly and shipped by bulk mail at a fraction of the cost.

Each week, on production day, one of our class rituals is to set up assembly line style and fold and address our papers for mailing. It takes 10 minutes. We print out Avery labels to snap on the papers.

The second type of sharing is to share online content (see No. 2). Those in the College Publisher network will be able to do that very simply in the near future. I've asked the folks there to put together one of their new aggregate headline tools for us. It will automatically grab the most popular stories on all our individual College Publisher sites and create a page of links to those stories. Once it is developed (which should be just a few more weeks at the latest) you will have the option of including the page on your web site. Your readers will be able to read the most popular stories from all the JACC papers in the state. Lots of new content without extra work! Of course, only College Publisher partners will be included and will be able to use the tool. Yet another reason to consider joining the critical mass and get all JACC papers in one network!

Another way to share is to create a Flickr account and upload hi resolution photos your photographers take. Share the URLs with the rest of us and open up the possibility of schools borrowing photos from each other (with proper controls, of course). Flickr has a built-in slide show function that you can link to on your own sites. Just think sports photos and you'll immediately start thinking about how this could benefit all of our programs.

Just think SHARE.

5. Blog
Like it or not, blogging, and to certain extent podcasting and videocasting, are becoming mainstream. It is easy to create a blog account, but just try journalistic blogging and you'll see that it is difficult to sustain. Advisers should try it simply to learn. How many of us would try to teach newswriting in the inverted pyramid method without having tried it ourselves? There are subtleties to blogging you get only with practice. Next, students should blog. I've decided that all veteran staff members on the Cerritos College Talon Marks will be required to create a blog with one news or other theme and generate at least 12 posts (same number of print issues for the semester) this semester if they want to earn an A in the class. They're repeaters, so the challenge should be there to produce at a higher level. This, of course, will be in addition to the normal course load expected.

6. Students must pass their classes.
And speaking of course loads, more and more I believe we must take some responsibility for our students passing their non-journalism courses. If we weren't benefitting so much from students pouring themselves into our publications I'd agree that it is simply the students' responsibility to pass their classes. But often they are sacrificing their other classes to work for the journalism god. Society rebelled against athletes doing that years ago and, quite honestly, we should consider tightening up our programs, too. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the prosperity of the fifth-year student in a two-year program. Those students make my life much more pleasant. But the day of reckoning is coming when we will be judged by more than numbers of enrollments and quality of publications. We will be judged, and funded, by completion rates: How many of our students complete our programs and move on in the system or into the workforce.

And we all know the No. 1 class that our students struggle with to transfer is the math requirement. I've blogged before on ideas for addressing this problem. My ideas might not be the right ones, but they are better than burying our heads in the sand. We need to establish accountability within our programs --and do it statewide-- before some outside group imposes it on us.

For all the issues we have with our student government, one requirement they place on us --keep in mind, that much of our funding comes from student government-- is that before I can spend a dime on taking students to conferences, those students must meet minimum academic requirements. They must be enrolled in a minimum number of units, not be on academic probation and not have flunked a class the previous semester. I don't use those requirements in selecting an editor, nor do we apply them to other editors on the staff, but perhaps we should move that direction. And students should be required to finish a minimum number of units each semester if they are to continue with the paper another semester.

Together, we all should take our students' poor matriculation rates seriously and agree that we'll impose some standards. Maybe we'll do that before I retire in seven years.

7. Read my CNPA College Publisher article and tell me you like it.
And finally, over the Christmas break each school that is a member of the California Newspaper Publisher's Association got a copy of the organization's quarterly news magazine/newspaper California Publisher. This month's issue has a story on the front page I wrote about community colleges and our progress in moving to online publications. Read it and tell me you enjoyed it.

New laws in effect

2007-01-03T09:40:00.000-08:00

Two new laws that affect the college student press in California went into effect Tuesday. There was much ballyhoo of the anti-censorship bill that the governor signed last August, but perhaps more important was one he signed a couple of weeks later that made it a crime to steal or remove from stands freely distributed newspapers.

Let's face it, while the censorship bill, also known already as the Leonard Law, is potentially more important, there was not a lot of censorship, depending on how you define the word, taking place at college papers around the state. Sure, the Hosty v. Carter decision could result in more college president's cracking down on student newspapers, but you don't get to be a college president by being stupid. Outright censorship or punishment for what is written is rare. And when it happens, it is the adviser, not the student who gets disciplined. There are already some chinks being reported in this law, such as a student losing standing to sue when, for whatever reason, is no longer a student.

Prior restraint, also mentioned in the bill, is more common, but again is done subtly. An adviser may insist that he/she be allowed to review copy prior to publication as an educational step, or may be required by school administration that copy be reviewed. And who among us, if reviewing copy, isn't going to do some editing, even if it is to fix a comma error, correct a misspelling or remove a factual error. It's a slippery slope from review/editing to censorship; best to keep hands off, train students and then trust them, as DeAnza's Warren Mack used to say. If an administrator --dean on up-- tells an adviser to review copy and the adviser doesn't, it is the adviser who is punished, not the student.

There have been at least two incidences in California since the governor signed the law that advisers have been rebuked for allowing students to exercise their free press rights. In one case, the president, in a rare case of temporary stupidity, immediately had newspapers removed from stands, even yanked out of the hands of readers.

Which leads to the other law, which is probably more important for the student press, even though the law applies to all California newspapers that are freely distributed. The law makes it illegal for anyone to remove more than 25 copies of a freely distributed newspaper from stands with the intent to

Recycle the newspapers for cash or other payment.
Sell or barter the newspaper.
Deprive others of the opportunity to read or enjoy the newspaper.
Harm a business competitor.

While we've seen item a. be the reason for removing papers from the stands at Cerritos College, it is item c. that will come into play most often at the college campus. We've seen it happen frequently in the college press here in California and it happens frequently, perhaps more frequently each year, nationwide. Someone is unhappy with an article in the paper and removes them from all stands. At Pasadena City College last spring, one disgruntled reader was so bold as to shred the stolen papers and return them to the newspaper office in trash bags. At Glendale College it is suspected that campus police may have been ordered by the college president to remove papers from the stands. And at Fresno City College earlier this school year the first issue of the year was removed from the stands when the president didn't like the banner headline and story on the front page; the paper was redistributed after being reprinted without the offending story.

With the law going into effect, it might be a good time to think about what your publication will do about it. One suggestion would be to post a note on all distribution stands indication that California law now makes it a misdemeanor to remove freely distributed newspapers from stands with one of the four intents in mind. The Student Press Law Center also suggests other steps you might take to protect your products if you haven't already done so. One in particular, I think is important for us to do, and that is to establish ties with campus and police officials and discuss what will happen when papers are removed and reports are filed.

At Cerritos College, for instance, we have a student court system that college officials would rather use than involve outside legal authorities. And what happens if the offender is a college employee and not a student? Or what if the college employee responsible for the removal is the college president? How anxious are campus police going to investigate fully that crime? And what if a college decides to electronically block an off-campus student publication (i.e, a College Publisher site) from all campus computers with intent c. in mind?

At Cerritos we've asked for --but have yet to be granted-- a meeting with the vice president of student affairs and the head of campus police to talk about this issue. If papers are removed from the stands by a student or an employee, we're not so much interested in legal action as a reversal or prevention of the crime. If we can get together ahead of time and work out what steps will be taken immediately when a removal is reported, we might be more successful than if we wait until the removal has taken place to educate the campus police about the new law. In our case, I don't think it is a reluctance to do that, simply a matter of priority and time in the last few months. But now that the law is in effect, there is more leverage to ask for such a meeting of the minds. We need to be reasonable, not defensive or demanding.

College Publisher tip

2006-12-30T21:33:00.000-08:00

Ever want to create a headline in your College Publisher site and have it actually go to another site or to a custom page within your own site?

In earlier versions of the College Publisher tool you could get away with putting a hyperlink in the headline, but the current version goes crazy when you try that. Instead, use the following code as the body of your story:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1;URL=http://put_URL_here">

Replace the 1 with how many seconds you want the browser to wait before going to the new page; a zero will work, too. Change "put_URL_here" to the URL you want to go to. It's probably best to put a blank space or another phrase in the summary field.

Who will go online in 2007?

2006-12-30T12:54:00.000-08:00

Wired News has predicted that a major newspaper will abandon print and go solely online in 2007. A bold prediction that leaves out a definition of "major."

Some other sources I've been reading suggests it may be the Washington Post.

Surely some newspaper somewhere will do just that. Indeed some smaller rural newspapers have already done so. Bryan Murley at Innovation in College Media blogs that it could happen at the college level next fall. A couple of student publications across the country have already done that. He even goes so far as to suggest conditions that would allow it.

A small advertising base
A majority of funding from student fees
A small staff
A visionary editor
A forward-thinking adviser
A fully wired campus

Wiill any JACC publications go solely online in 2007? Maybe.

Cypress College would like to be the first, and that could happen. But it seems unlikely. I think a key component is lacking from Murley's list that affects JACC papers like the Charger Chronicle. That component is readership. Which of us has found the solution to drive our student audience to OUR web sites in large enough numbers. If schools would set all campus computer browsers to default to the campus newspaper it might work. Or we need to find another solution. Remember, one of the key reasons colleges have a student newspaper is to reach the campus' students. They're spending time online, but not necessarily at our sites.

Who else might go online? The first online-only JACC paper is more likely to come from a school like Allan Hancock or Evergreen, schools that have flirted with school publications, but have been unwilling to devote enough resources. Such a move is likely to be student-driven.

For the rest of us getting online, staying online, growing online and understanding online will be the watchwords for 2007. Most of the JACC schools are either online now or in the process --West Valley, LA City and Diablo Valley being the most prominent in their absence. Also AWOL is Los Medanos, which has one of the most innovative self-grown sites in the state with its Filemaker backbone. But campus server problems have kept it offline all fall semester. Missing schools who are in various stages of going online, from just barely starting to almost there are:

Canyons
El Camino
East LA
Fresno
Reedley
Saddleback
San Jose
Santa Ana
Southwestern

Most are looking to the College Publisher platform as the answer, though some refuse to go that direction and a couple of schools (such as Santa Monica and Santa Rosa) are abandoning that platform. You've got to love diversity, but the potential of an integrated JACC network through College Publisher is enticing, too. That'll happen in 2007, too, but major schools will be left out because of their independent route decisions.

Web 2.0 idea for College Publisher sites

2006-12-26T14:36:00.000-08:00

Part of my Christmas vacation reading has been the special edition of the e-magazine Newspaper Techniques called "The Publisher's How-To Guide to Web 2.0." And from it I got an idea for those JACC schools that use College Publisher.

You might have heard the term Web 2.0 and not know what it means. Wikipedia describes it as:

A perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

Not really a very helpful definition.

Web. 2.0 is not a new version of the Internet, but rather a new way of using it. Think of putting your student publication online so others can come to your Web site and read what you've produced. For newspapers Web 2.0 would include letting the reader decide what is news. The publication might present some data that the reader chooses how to sort (such as a search engine or a mashup) or it might mean letting the user contribute to the news.

Well, here is a Web 2.0 (really more of a Web 1.5) idea for those JACC publications that use College Publisher. One of the advantages of a content management tool like College Publisher is that it allows you to have multiple producers (your reporters) of the news. They can all post to the database, but content does not go live until an editor okays it. One of the issues we've faced as long as I've been a publications adviser is giving campus clubs as much coverage as they like.

Well, how about giving each club a reporter status account in College Publisher? Let them post their own stories. If you are nervous about abuse, you still have some control because it will still need an editor to approve it before it goes live. That makes it more 1.5 than 2.0, but it is a step the right direction. Perhaps over time we'll become more comfortable opening the gate. And at the same time, you could build some good will on campus (unless, of course, you reject too many contributions or are slow to approve them).

We currently offer free classified ads to clubs. We've added the New Digital Group's INK classified tool to our College Publisher site. It's an enhancement to the built-in classified ad tool of CP. And we give each campus club that wants to to post club announcements as classified ads, which we then run in our print edition as a separate classified ad section. But the idea above would allow them to get beyond 25 words.

CNPA awards internship grants

2006-12-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

SACRAMENTO, December 19, 2006 -- After interviews in Northern and Southern California, 10 students from CNPA-member colleges have been confirmed for CNPA Foundation internship grants.

Three are from the community colleges.

The students, who demonstrated an exceptional interest in pursuing careers in the newspaper business in California, will receive a roster of CNPA-member newspapers, a letter of recommendation and an educational grant to be awarded upon securing an internship. The finalists came from a group of 17 original grant applicants.

After starting an internship, each student will receive a $1,500 grant. Three finalists who displayed exceptional talent are designated as the Darell Phillips, Lillian McPherson Rouse and Philip N. McCombs scholarship winners and will receive an additional $500.

The students, their colleges and their planned summer residences, are:

* Ashley Gebb, California State University, Chico (recipient of the CNPA Darell Phillips Memorial Scholarship);

* Ian Hamilton, California State University, Fullerton (recipient of the California Press Association Lillian McPherson Rouse Fund scholarship)

* Jeremy Herb, Santa Clara University

* Nichlaus Hulsebus (photography), El Camino College, Torrance

* Erica Jolley-Meers (digital media), California State University, Sacramento

* Travis Mason-Bushman, Contra Costa College, San Pablo

* Farin Montañez, California State University, Fresno

* Cindy Ryan, California State University, Fresno

* Jennifer Scholtes, California State University, Chico (recipient of the California Press Association Philip N. McCombs Fund scholarship)

* Alexis Terrazas, College of San Mateo

The CNPA Foundation is a nonprofit corporation organized in October 1993 to raise funds through tax-deductible contributions for internships and other journalism education activities. The Foundation’s mission is to provide financial support to California students who have demonstrated an interest in pursuing a career in the newspaper business. This goal is accomplished by providing financial assistance to college students seeking careers in journalism, advertising or marketing, and to campus newspapers that need new production equipment.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association is a nonprofit trade association representing the daily and weekly newspapers of California.

For more, click the Foundation/Outreach button at www.cnpa.com or contact Joe Wirt: (916) 288-6021; joe@cnpa.com .

New Media Lecture series from Berkeley

2006-12-20T20:45:00.000-08:00

The University of California, Berkeley graduate school of Journalism last week presented a New Media Lecture Series that was part of a week-long multimedia training workshop for mid-career journalists sponsored by the school. Each presentation was Webcast live and is available as an archived QuickTime stream. Find the links to the lectures listed below at http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=359 .

BUILDING THE MULTIMEDIA NEWSROOM
* Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Cason, Tom Kisken, Ventura County Star

SMART MOBS
* Howard Rheingold, "Smart Mobs" author

APPROACHES TO MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING
* Robert Hood, msnbc.com
* Travis Fox, Washington Post

MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING FROM START TO FINISH
* Seth Gitner, Roanoke Times

NEWS SITE INTERFACES AND USER EXPERIENCE
* Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business

ONLINE BUSINESS MODELS 2.0
* Al Bonner, Lawrence.com

Are you worthy?

2006-12-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

Time Magazine has declared YOU as Person of the Year. That you includes both you and me. But do you feel worthy of the grand title? I'm not sure I do.

Time broke from the tradition of naming a single outstanding individual who shaped the world this past year and decided we all shaped the world. Among other things, the magazine reported:

Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Have you done any of that? This all has a major impact on what we do and teach in journalism. You, and I, need to learn it.

I've checked out Wikipedia and, Lord help me, seen my students over-rely on it as a reliable source of facts. But I've never contributed to Wikipedia or created a wiki. Don't even know how.

Okay, I've got a MySpace account. My students hang our there all the time. Even my young teen daughter has an account (against my ruling on the subject!). But I haven't spent much time there and haven't spotted the fascination. Haven't actually logged in for the longest time. JACC students, 71 of them, have a group there, but not much happens.
I've seen the Mentos display on YouTube and caught the Colbert roast of Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner. But I've never posted anything there. Not sure how to do it because I haven't felt the need to try.

Time goes on to mention creating avatars in Second Life (never visited it and don't quite understand it) and ordering books and other media from Amazon.com (Whew! Have done that, at least!).

And I'm a relatively web-savvy kind of guy.

I'm still working just to help JACC schools establish online publications (most are either there or in the works). But most of the schools are still just shoveling content from the print to online. Shoot, most schools that print every other week only shovel every other week. What's with that? It's so 2004. Every-other-week is a financial excuse more than anything else. We've all got to get past the shovel stage quickly. Our industry is in rapid transition and we've got to prepare students properly. Content has to go online NOW. It needs to include links to outside source material. (How many of us are teaching ANY HTML, much less how to create links? How many reading this post even know how to code a link?) But even that is so 2005.

We've got to think about podcasts --know how to create one? I do -- and blogs. Our students know how to do MySpace blogs, but we've got teach them that blog journalism is about researching and telling stories, not just creating a diary. And focusing on a general topic and writing on it on a regular basis is hard. I've been on hiatus from this blog for about a month and a half because I've been ill; now that I'm feeling better and have time, it has been hard just to sit down and start again. I have some students who "wrote blogs" this semester and made all of two posts all semester. I've got another who posts twice a day (in addition to writing four and five stories for the Talon Marks weekly; she gets it.

But even that is too little. It's almost 2007. 2006 was the YouTube/MySpace/SecondLife/Wiki year. Now that we are declared as Persons of the Year we've got get our heads out of the sand and start teaching new paradigms for story-telling as part of what we do. Blogger Matt Waite writes about developing a wetlands story for the St. Petersburg Times and describes both the old way of developing a story and a suggested new way.

The old way:

Find, develop, report story.
Somewhere during the writing of it, start talking about photo and graphics.
Oh yeah, crap, we should invite web to some of these meetings we keep having.
Take print graphic ideas, try and mold them into graphics that work online.
Publish.

A better way:

Find and develop story. No matter how many doodads and geegaws you add, it’s still all about the story.
Decide — divorced from any thought of where it is going and what the limitations are — what is needed to tell the story in the most complete way. Do this very early in the reporting. Adapt as you go.
While reporting, be thinking about the end product. Going somewhere? Take a video camera. Interviewing someone? Record it. Maybe you’ll use it, maybe you won’t. Better to have it and ditch it than not have it and wish you did. I have somewhere in the order of 30GB of audio and video that is on the scrap heap.
Develop and plan web graphics first, then adapt them to print. It’s much easier to go from interactive to static than it is to make static interactive.
Publish.

Note the significant changes in the middle steps. It reminds me of those times when students discover late on production night that they really could use a photo with a particular story. If only they had thought of that earlier when it was possible to get one. (Bryan Murley over at Innovation in College Media talks a bit more about Waite's list and suggests that the current Christmas break would be a good time to think about re-engineering what we do.

And blogger Ryan Sholin asks the question, should we become the MySpace of our campus? Ummm, how would we do that? Well, the Bakersfield Californian and others are doing that. If the industry is adopting that idea, shouldn't we? Scares the hell out of me thinking about how one even does that or makes sense of it all. And don't even get me started with the idea of mashups on our campus sites. To an old dinosaur like me, mash up is what one does to potatoes.

Let's see, how long until I retire? Nope, too many years. I'm going to have to learn all this stuff. And so are you.

Back to Time's article on Person of the Year: Not mentioned, but implied was citizen journalism. If everyone becomes a journalist and no one needs any training, then what --beyond the meaning of copyright-- do I teach in my classes until I DO retire? Forget the newspaper class for a minute. Do we even train people to use the inverted pyramid or other story forms any more? Blogger Paul Gillan is just the latest to spout the impending doom of the old way of doing newspapering. MediaShift predicts that three major U.S. dailies will fold during 2007.

I think so. There is a lot of crap the YOUs out there are posting. While we need to learn and teach all this new stuff, for now anyway, there is still room for learning just to tell a story.

What online skills to teach

2006-11-07T17:50:00.000-08:00

Just finished my second read of a really interesting academic report on The Roles of Journalists in Online Newsrooms, a new study by a Medill School of Journalism student, produced in cooperation with the Online News Association.

The report admittedly has some methodology problems, but provides a snapshot look at "which skills and intangible characteristics are most important in online newsrooms." The author of the report points out that educators, especially, can look at what they need to do to prepare students for future online publication careers.

Educators might be surprised that they are doing a lot of right things already.

The report looked at four areas: Attitudes and Intangibles, Editing and Copy-Editing Skills, Content Creation and Online Production Tools. You might think the latter is most important. Not according to the study.

Attitudes and Intangibles

Read the full report to find out what skill sets were assessed. Here are some of the implications of what was found:

This set of skills is the most important to online journalists. It is also the most imprecise. Students must be taught to think like journalists -- attention to detail, ability to work under pressure, communication skills-- but they must also be able to "think online."

Students should be encouraged to publish online.... Students should be encouraged to become engaged with online journalism by reading news Web sites (and) blogs.

New media journalism programs should have features that replicate the experience of working online with a daily deadline or multiple daily deadlines.

We can do that with our student publications, but not if we publish print editions every other week and then just shovel content online. The online has to come first and often. Start by doing mid-issue updates and pre-issue versions of the print stories.

Editing and Copy-Editing Skills

We spend a lot of time teaching writing, which is important, but how much effort do we put into copy-editing. Does everyone get trained, or only a few "literate" types.

One conclusion that can be drawn (from this study) is that online journalists should be prepared to be copy editors. A program designed to trained online journalists should be weighted in favor of teaching editing and copy-editing skills.... News judgment should receive a great deal of attention.... As much as is possible in an academic setting, online journalism students should be well-trained enough in this area that it becomes second nature.

Hmmm, sounds a lot like JACC's copy-editing competition. Again, I think we do this to varying degrees with our student publications, as well as in our writing courses.

Content creation

Okay, admit it. This is the Holy Grail for us. We teach students to produce stories. The editing is spice. (But spice is important to a well-cooked story.) Actually, the report found that while some organizations have their online journalists produce content, particularly at small publications, others expect them to manage it.

Content creation skills are important for online journalists, but as part of a set of skills, not a primary focus.... Students aspiring to work at newspaper sites should not expect to do a lot of reporting and writing.... On the other hand, students who hope to work at or start their own unaffiliated sites should expect to report and write often.

I have problems with this message. If online sites are to become big at newspapers, SOMEONE has to do the reporting and writing. Or are we really to prepare two sets of students for the workforce?

Online Production Tools

I was a bit surprised at this outcome. Seems that while SOME mastery of technology is good, it is the least important. Shoot, it seems to have minor importance, to a point.

Editing and copy-editing skills and content creation skills should be at the core of online journalism curriculum, not online production skills. However, students should master HTML, Photoshop and content management skills.... Experience with any content management system while in school will likely help students more easily master the systems they will encounter as professionals.... Other technology skills --scripting languages, JavaScript and database design and administration-- appear to be of more specialized importance and should thus be part of online journalism curriculum only on an elective basis. (emphasis added)

Oh, okay, I can go along with that. I still think writing, editing and news management are most important. But learning Photoshop and content management skills are pretty important, too.

Those papers that post PDF only or use non-content management systems are cheating their students. College Publisher is the cheapest, but not only content management system available. But perhaps more important, those schools that are not emphasising mid-issue updates and pre-issue versions of stories --in other words, online first, print second-- are also cheating their students in preparing them for careers in our ever-changing industry.

Still, there is a lot we journalism educators are doing right. We just need to move a little deeper into the pond.

What would Benjamin Day do?

2006-11-05T12:04:00.000-08:00

This last weekend's JACC Southern California conference marked the JACC conference where the keynote speaker focused entirely on online media. It won't be the last, I'm sure. Louis Amestoy, assistant managing editor/interactive of the San Bernardino Sun and Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., talked about his and others' publications that are giving greater emphasis to online delivery of news content.

During the question and answer period, which was hard to follow because even the speaker had trouble hearing questions, Cypress adviser Robert Mercer kept passing notes to me with things suggestions that he would like to rename the print edition of the Cypress Chronicle to CyChron.com Digest.

One note he passed me, got my attention for sure. He asked, "What would Benjamin Day do?"

Day, of course, is the historical figure most often associated with the establishment of the Penny Press era of journalism by popularizing content and lowering the price of the paper to make it affordable to the common person.

Robert and I have had discussions before on how fast the conversion of the print publication to an online-only publication might take place. While the technology is here today and papers such as the Eastern Connecticut State University Campus Lantern has made the leap.

The problem is that while young audiences, such as college students, spend a lot of time onlne, it it hard to attract them to our online editions. And I say this knowing were just a few subscribers away on the Cerritos College talonmarks.com site of matching the number of subscribers with the number of print copies of the Talon Marks that we distribute on campus. It is largely a different audience, however, and an unusual number of daily visitors to talonmarks.com come from the east coast of the United States, not the west coast, the territory we cover. With the print edition, we reach our own students who pick it up while wandering across campus and not sitting in front of a computer screen, even when the online edition contains practically all that is in the print edition and more.

What would Benajmin Day do to attract local readers to the college onlne publication?

Perhaps the answer is that he'd pay you a penny to read the online version. Okay, maybe not a penny. Maybe it's points you can cash in for prizes, or frequent flyer miles. Today's technology should be able to capture subscriber's names who at least look at stories on the site and can tally points of statistics that add up to monthly or quarterly dividend checks. Sure it would cost money, but that cost could easily be offset with the advertising income that would follow when you show advertisers your site is being viewed.

I wouldn't forget that popularization of content angle, though. A lot of that is being tried already.

The right accent

2006-10-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

Does your online publication have this problem?Sorry to pick on Cypress College, but the example was convenient. There are a number of community college papers experiencing this problem. Sad thing is, the CyChron.com staff is trying to do something good.

Editor & Publisher online this week posted a story about whether papers should use accent marks or other special characters. most commonly with Spanish words. In some cases, leaving the accent off changes the meaning of the word. For example,

The name Pena, without the tilde over the "n," means shame. The Spanish word for year without that squiggle becomes anus.
...
Many papers blame The Associated Press for going accentless. The wire service‘s 2006 stylebook says accents shouldn‘t be used "because they cause garble in many newspaper computers."

It's nice to see college papers picking up the trend of including the special characters as needed, especially in multi-cultural California. The problem is that modern word processors have spoiled us with the most common ones. Know the right keystroke combination and it is easy to type in the correct character and include it in your print edition.

But web sites are not WYSIWYG word processors. And those codes get misinterpreted by most browsers. You end up with examples like above. I've worked with some content management systems that make the conversion for you, but most, including College Publisher's don't. Some browsers will convert the characters on the fly, but most do not. Instead, you have to insert special HTML code to get the desired effect.

A quick Google search on "HTML" and "special characters" will yield a number of sites where you can find charts that will help you. I kind of like this one, but this one actually has a list of characters you click on and it generates code you can copy and paste into stories.

Web Watch 8: The Missing Link

2006-10-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

In last week's Web Watch I outlined five stages college publications go through to create an online publication. In brief, they included:

Get online. Start a site and get used to updating it on a regular basis.
Shovel content from the print edition to the online edition.
The online becomes important. You start to produce some web-exclusive content.
The online is fully integrated into the process. Stories are told in forms designed for online
The online prevails.

Innovation in College Media's Bryan Murley caught my post and suggested that something was missing. You might call it the missing link. It is linking to other sites.

It would take very little to encourage (student journalists) to turn in stories with a “for more information…” addendum at the end of the story that could be converted into URLs on the site. Likewise, scanning or otherwise putting original source documents onto the web site doesn’t tax the definition of “web-exclusive” in my mind.

Good point. A simple path to get away from shovelware is to start adding value. Add links.

Where is the missing link?

But this is a problem plaguing the entire industry, not just the college media. Online journalism guru Steve Outing, who writes for Editor & Publisher, has been harping that for years. Only recently have a few publications been risking sending their readers to another site with links.

I searched California community college sites and even expanded my Web Watch to California State University sites (private schools and UCs to follow) and had little luck finding ANYBODY linking to other sites. Admittedly, I did not check EVERY story on every publication, but I looked for likely stories.

My web experience shows me that bloggers have been fastest to adopt the concept of linking to other sites. Let me point to the work of my students' blogs as examples: No Man's Press Box or General Education and the Community College Try.

But blogs are not the only place for links. Do your students use web sites as sources for their stories? Add a bit of code to the online version and make it easier for the reader to check the site. Any movie review, music review, book review, etc. could probably find a site to link to give the interested reader more information. Start there. But don't limit efforts to entertainment. The web is a treasure trove of information. Sure, you might direct your reader away from your site, but if you're good enough, the reader will come back. What's the old saying?

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was, and always will be yours. If it never returns, it was never yours to begin with. -- Anonymous

If you've built reader loyalty, the reader will return.

Also try to add other source content.

Those of you doubting whether your students can/will do this, I like Murley's title for my five stages. He refers to them as the five stages of grief.

Getting beyond shovelware

Few California community college publications are beyond the shovelware stage. In fact, the five California community college and two California State University sites that continue to post PDF-only versions of their print publications are the epitome of shovelware. There is nothing wrong with posting the PDF of the print version as an option for the reader, but when it is the ONLY option, that is not an online pubication, it is a publication online.

But most of us are firmly entrenched in the shovelware stage with our online publications, too. Only a few schools are breaking out of the mold with content in new story forms: video, slideshows, podcasts, etc.

Even more important than these new story forms --at least given our stage of development-- is the mid-issue update. Very few of the community colleges are doing that, and first glance at the four-year schools looks like few of them are doing that either. This is especially egregious with those schools that publish the print edition every other week. Two weeks and nothing new of importance has happened on your campus? At the very least, post updated scores on sporting contests. And feature those updates prominently.

You might not have the staff or money or energy to publish a print edition more often, but news does not take the week off. Why does your coverage? Train students to update sites regularly. Yeah, I know the arguments for and against scooping yourself. Get over it if you want to make your online publication relevant.

Lecture v. conversation

Murley made another good point about my five steps that we can discuss later: changing journalism from lecture to conversation. Most people might put that in my fifth step. He suggested it needs to start in Step 2.

Observed this week

Welcome Pierce College Roundup to the online world.
Cabrillo College seems to be stuck in a long-term "under construction" stage.
The Chaffey Breeze has part two of a pretty good series on obesity. The lead is fantastic: Reading, writing and arithmetic are the true causes of obesity." Better yet, failure to read the writing and do the math is the cause of obesity. Note: This article would be a strong candidate to a link to Part 1.
Las Positas great headline: Red Bull gives wings to San Francisco. But the story is hard to read because it lacks spacing between paragraphs. A number of schools fail to follow that web convention.
Mira Costa's Chariot paper (pdf) contains a sex advice column. While sex advice columns pop up in community college papers from time to time, they seem to be more prevalent at the four-year level. See Chico State's feature on sex as a form of exercise or Sacramento State's Sexcapades section
Pasadena has a story more schools should be writing about because a lot of community colleges are affected by the state's equalization funding this year. An even more compelling story would be the politics behind the equalization story.
I've written a lot about Chico State's outstanding publication this week. One more detail we could all copy: live e-mail links to the reporter at the end of each story.
CSU, Fullerton's Daily Titan includes an interesting feature. While we're in the news business, we also build our own history and culture in our programs. The Titan has a page dedicated to its own history.Check out San Jose State's Photos of the Week slideshow. I also like its "From the blogs" summary in the right-hand column. An idea worth copying.
And speaking of good photo slideshows, check out the San Francisco State's XPress.

Papers should stay offline

2006-10-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

The worst decision newspapers ever made was giving free access to their articles online. The best decision they could make would be to yank them off.

So says Greg Finley of the Chico State Orion. Read his arguments online.

Some of his reasons are things we should think about as we develop strategies for our online publications.

I'm working on my next Web Watch and this time around I'm also looking at some university publications. Chico State has a pretty good publication with some interesting stories.

Which is better for you? Jogging 75 miles in a year or having sex three times a week?
Midterms stressful? Five students pass out on campus in three-day period.

The Game of Life 2

2006-10-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

On the edge of the universe, a tiny speck of light catches the attention of a Sarbonian colony ship. But then the unexpected happens, and now the economics of survival is all that matters.

That's beginning narrative of a new class on microeconomics that just started at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. From there, the students jump into a video game. The entire class is a video game! NPR's All Things Considered reported on the class today. The page has an audio link to the story that requires Real Media Player.

I've been intrigued with the idea of a game as a class or as part of a class since I first wrote my City Council newsgathering simulation in 1989. The web version that I still use as part of my beginning newswriting class, and is used by a number of instructors across the country in college and high school journalism and political science classes, is quite crude with compared with a game like this one, or even the Second Life game that I wrote about here the other day.

I wish my imagination and energy would take me to the level that would develop an entire newswriting or mass media survery course in game format. It probably would be highly marketable and popular with students. I write here often about the online publication associated with our newspapers. But I'm also interested in the concept of distance education. My online mass media course that I've been teaching for the last eight years was one of the first online journalism courses in California. I wish more instructors would look at distance education. While it clearly is not something for all students or teachers, we could serve a larger audience if more instructors would try. Indeed, you'll recall that one my earlier posts on this blog suggested focused distance education as a solution to our ever-increasing problem of community college students struggling with math courses.

The Game of Life

2006-10-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

In some of my previous posts and in a lot of my lectures I speculate that if young people are spending so much time playing computer games then perhaps the media will have to inject their content into games. Seems like the folks at Reuters have the same idea.

CNet news service is reporting that the wire service is opening a virtual news bureau in the popular online game "Second Life."

I've been so busy living my first life that I haven't delved into Second Life yet, but it keeps coming up in the news. Even politicians with presidential aspirations have held news conferences in this make-believe world. For those unfamiliar with the game, it is described as "An online society within a 3D world, where users can explore, build, socialize, and participate in their own economy." (Here's the Wikipedia entry on Second Life). I think of it as Sims on steroids.

The Lost Remote blog reports that you can see the Reuter's virtual news without joining Second Life by going to http://secondlife.reuters.com.

Web Watch 7: Not enough time, not enough design

2006-10-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

I've had the pleasure of talking to a number of California community college instructors and their students in the last couple of weeks about their online publications. I've visited schools (and have more on my schedule) and hobnobbed with folks at the recent JACC NorCal conference. I got a lot of positive feedback on these Web Watches.

Not enough time
The No. 1 excuse I hear from advisers as to why their student publications have not gone online or are AWOL in updates is lack of time. Their students are spending all their time simply putting out print editions. But when I talk to students and share the concept of having staffs submit their stories THROUGH the online site --something you can do with a content management tool such as College Publisher-- and cutting the online production effort in half, they totally get it.

If you treat the online publication as something you do AFTER you do the work for your print edition then, yeah, I understand not having time. But if you make working on your online publication something the whole staff does as part of the whole production process you'll find that you have lots of time.

Of course, that is difficult for those schools still producing HTML sites. Then you have to find someone, usually just one person, to handle the online site alone. I'm still amazed to hear of schools without online sites still planning to go that direction.

Not enough design
I figure there are several stages we have to go through to get our online publications to the stage where we are effectively training our students for the future.

Stage One -- Get online. Start a site and get used to updating it on a regular basis. I've identified 48 California community colleges that have made it to that stage. Twenty-six either haven't or used to be and have abandoned their sites. Six of those 26 are in the process of re-establishing sites, most through College Publisher. Of the forty-eight colleges online, 31 are through College Publisher. Of the eleven of the 48 that are inactive thusfar this semester, three of the College Publisher sites and eight are independent.
Stage Two -- Shovel content from the print edition to the online edition. This is where most of us are. It is how we manage to stay online.
Stage Three -- The online becomes important. You are comfortable enough to consider design (as opposed to those in Stage One where design draws the techies and journalism takes a back seat). You start to produce some web-exclusive content.
Stage Four -- The online is fully integrated into the process. Stories are told in forms designed for online, including blogging, podcasting, videos and more. Updates, exclusives, etc., are common.
Stage Five -- Who knows? At this stage the online prevails. Some suggest that it will replace the print edition. I don't think so. But clearly the online publication dominates the thought process in story-telling. Print becomes a convenient way to reach other audiences instead of being the main audience.

Let me talk a bit about that design issue, because it is an area I think many of our colleges can start working on, once they've acheived stablity, that is. Too many of our colleges apparently are not looking at their own publications. Photos don't fit, they're either too big or too small. Odd ASCII characters appear in stories because they did not translate well or errant HTML codes. They've forgotten to put extra space between paragraphs to improve readability. Etc. To see a well-balance front page design see Cerritos College talonmarks.com. Okay, it is my students' work, but its an excellent example of design balance, horizontally and vertically. They still have a bit of problem with making headlines fit, but we're working on it.

One of the first things online editors need to do is watch the design of their front pages. Make sure that you avoid large open white spaces you would never consider in your print edition. This is caused horizontally by undersizing online photos for your page design. It is caused vertically by College Publisher sites by editors not balancing lead story columns and feature story columns; they either have too many featured stories or too many lead stories.

Other thoughts

Do you include links in your online stories? Not many of us are doing it. Start with simple links, such as to official movie sites when you do movie reviews.
The De Anza La Voz publication has a nice video about the opening of a new student success center on campus.
The Oct. 11 issue of the Fullerton Hornet has a number of provacative and interesting headlines: "Verbal Masturbation," "Pop and Circumstance," "A Side-Splitting Store," "A Prayer to God," "Science vs. Romance," "Utopia Lost" and "Double Plus Bad."
Glendale's El Vaquero contains a story on tattoos that includes nude photography, though the print edition has more photos than the online edition.
LA Valley's Valley Star tackles the issue of students and teachers having sex.
Long Beach's Viking continues to followup on a story about a motorcycle-car collision that happened within site of its newsroom. Long Beach has had several opportunities this semester to cover big stories with followup stories many of our papers might not cover. Good journalism!
Mt. San Antonio College hired 42 new fulltime faculty this year. Yikes! That's a lot, even for the state's largest community college. One of the new hires is the journalism instructor, who has been given a 100% load advising the student newspaper. (The story, at least the online version, should list the 42).
Orange Coast College stinks, literally, according to a story in the Coast Report.
Congratulations to the NorCal schools that won Online General Excellence Awards this last weekend: Cosumnes River, De Anza, Sacramento, Skyline and Yuba. I won't spoil the secret naming the SoCal schools that will be named in a few weeks.

View the sites yourself on a regular basis. Look for story ideas. See what's working and what's not. The JACC site has a pull-down menu that links to all the California Community College online publications. We try to keep it up to date.

Update: Bryan Murley of Innovation in College Media has added some interesting comments to my arguments above. I especially like his analogy of an HTML-based site to printing a print edition with hot lead.

What is the most important thing to learn?

2006-10-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Danny Sanchez needs your help. The author of the Journalistopia blog will be addressing freshmen journalism students at the University of Florida this Friday and asks the question:

What are the top three things a freshman journalism student should do or know to be a competitive job candidate three years from now?

I haven't commented on his blog yet because I am having a problem narrowing it down to just three. I'm like the guy who frees the genie from the lamp and is granted three wishes. At least one of them is going to be to ask for three additional wishes.

Help him out if you can.

I decided to turn the question around and ask my newspaper students what are the three most important things they feel they have learned in my program. Hey, I'm working on department-level learning outcomes and it seemed like a good idea. Some of my students are taking their first-ever journalism class and some have been around for three or four years --yeah, we're a two-year institution, but that's another story. Moses did not come down off the mountain with "Thou shalt finish community college in two years" carved in stone.

To alleviate the fears of the newer students, I broke them into groups of four and asked for consensus on the most important three, but encouraged them to write extra ideas in the margins if they wanted. I also asked them to list some things they don't feel they've learned well enough that they wish we could focus on more. Here are some of their answers:

Most important things they have learned

How to present that which you are writing in an effective way.
How to interview and question people and know what kinds of questions to ask.
How to think objectively about the subject matter.
Know hat you can and cannot do. What are your rights?
Being true to your story (your job is to inform the people, to tell them the news!)
Be well-rounded (complete a variety of tasks around the newsroom)
You have to be informed, passionate and cynical. (they all misspelled cynical)
Presentation matters; it is important to be well-rounded in all types of formats.
You can't be afraid to ask another question.
Ask the right question; get beneath the cliched answers. (obviously one of my sports writers)
AP style, writing and copyediting
Communication is key
Media law
How to use a Mac computer and how to meet deadlines.
AP style and pyramid writing
Media ethics
To check facts for accuracy.
Hands-on experience is the best way to learn, one learns from mistakes.

Things we need to focus on
Perhaps just as interesting was what the students want more training with. Note that some overlap with what some say they've learned.

Copyediting
Headline writing (repeated a number of times)
Bylines
Offer friendly advice (am I too harsh?)
Multi-media skills
More power over my own story.
How to use the computer for the online edition; how to use it to fullest extent.
HTML
What are the right questions?
How to write a sprorts story (especially terminology and jargon)
How to edit videos and create podcasts
Politics of the business
AP Style
Getting jobs after Cerritos
Learn more computer applications
InDesign concepts

The death of the editorial

2006-10-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

Is the common editorial worth keeping alive today? Jeff Jarvis at Media Buzz says no.

When the JACC Board of Directors last met and reviewed contests that might be eliminated from the long list of mail-in and on-the-spot/bring-in contests, one of the contests thrown on the table for discussion was editorial writing. We already have opinion writing and column writing (a collection of opinion stories by the same writer). The argument was made that most students today, indeed most commercial publications, do a weak job with editorials. I haven't seen a real dinger from my students for a very long time. They don't know how to come up with interesting topics and when they do, they repeat their point three to five times without hitting a homer.

Jarvis says:

In this age of open media, when every voice and viewpoint can be heard, when news is analyzed and overanalyzed, and when we certainly are not suffering a shortage of opinion, do we need editorialists? No.

There are some good followup comments on the blog site, too.

He accuses editorialists of leaching off others' work rather than doing real work themselves (sort of like I'm doing with this blog entry).

What do you think?

Related Note: The students at the University of Illinois Daily Illini, who suspended editorials a couple of weeks ago because of repetitive errors, has resumed them with a new policy.

The nation's first online only college student publication

2006-10-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

The bloggers at Reinventing College Media have moved to a new blog called Innovation in College Media and one of the first posts is a lengthy interview with James Patrick Gibson, editor of the Eastern Connecticut State University Campus Lantern. The Campus Lantern is thought to be the first college publication to stop its print edition in favor of online only.

That's a bold move. And one I think we in California community colleges are a l-o-n-g-g-g-g-g way away from. Well, maybe one of us (Cypress) is close to making that move.

The interview covers the thought process and impact of the decision to scuttle the print editIon. The paper went from no online presence to completely online. Holy cow, Batman!

"We realized that as future journalists, we could not ignore the facts and trends that the industry is showing. It's hard work out there for newsprint...," Gibson says.

The interview also includes the strategy the publication used to introduce the change to the campus. Clever idea. But the changeover has not be received well universally.

While Gibson says that students are reading the online publication, I doubt it. It seems to me that the hardest part of going online is getting the readers to follow you. A panel from the recently completed Online News Association conference suggested that it is hard to catch the attention of the younger audience even with web pages and blogs. When I look at the site stats for our Cerritos College Talon Marks I see a whole different audience. While it is easy to go online (and hard to do right), it's a big Internet out there and our brands might not draw readers away from the MySpaces/Facebooks and YouTubes out there. Our print editions are handy to pick up when students are wandering campus and are away from their computers.

I still believe we have to marry the print and online editions. Use the print edition to drive an audience to the online edition. And to do that you are going to have to tell stories in compelling new ways, not simply shovel content from the print edition over to the online. That's going to be tough for us all to swallow. We've got to learn those new ways and they are still being invented. But we have the means to be on the cutting edge of the industry. Because of the subsidies many of us get from our campuses, we don't have the same financial contraints as the industry, which is is a do or die position. We can lead the way in training tomorrow's journalists.

Yes, we have to hold true to the basic tenets of good journalism, but we have to start embracing the potential of the new technology and start experimenting with the new story forms.

Web Watch 6: Photos and other add ons

2006-10-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Front and center of virtually all print editions of student newspapers is a great big photo. Photos break up type, but they also attract readers. But take a look at your online edition. Any photos there?

Will Sullivan's Journerdism (yep, spelled correctly) blog article Ripe, low-hanging fruit — How news sites can make dynamic photo galleries that rock is an interesting read. It also gives tips for optimizing photo presentation in web publications.

Don’t tell the print reporters (although they probably know due to the whole, “if you get a photo with your story it’s more likely to get on the front page” theory) but if you watch Web traffic, you can clearly see that visuals exponentially control traffic.

Unfortunately, most newspapers drag their feet on optimizing their photos for readers to enjoy quickly and easily.

The whole industry is weak with online photos. Sure, their front pages may have photos, but click on a story and you'll see few photos illustrating the story.

A scan of California community college publications shows that most sites could do a lot more with photography online. I often talk about a lot of new media extras that we can do online, such as podcasts, blogs and video. But photos is something most print publications already include: Why aren't more photos online? (I know, but will address it below.)

Most JACC schools include at least one photo on the front page, but most stories go unillustrated. And those who do include photos usually choose the same ones they print in the print edition (and most often the same lead photo). But your photographers probably are taking many more photos for every story than are being included in print. If you can't fit them into the story, think about slide shows or photo galleries. You can even make money by posting quality prints on some sites like Flickr, where readers can purchase prints.

Selecting and preparing online photos takes more care. Because online photos often are displayed much smaller in print, they need tighter cropping. That long shot that looks good in print when run five columns wide really sucks when shrunk to web sizes. Different photos need to be selected. Oh, and the web handles color even when you cannot afford it in print, so simply shrinking your black and white print doesn't look good either.

Three JACC papers that did a good job this week include Orange Coast, Santa Barbara and Cerritos.

Orange Coast uses a special HTML code on the front page that pops the smaller photo into a new window with a larger view. Additional photos appear with stories.
Santa Barbara's lead photo is a copy of the print version's front page, but other photos on the front show good color and cropping. And if you click through to stories you'll be pleasantly surprised with more photos.
Cerritos' front page design demands a variety of photos. But click through to stories and you'll find slide shows and videos retelling the stories in different ways. See the Marine Band and Hotel Workers' Protest stories.

Honorable mentions go to Long Beach Modesto (Measure E and blood pressure stories), LA Valley (rich colors), Bakersfield (smoking photo), Pasadena (yucky looking thumbnails, but good tight cropping), and Ventura County (b/w football photo is exquisite, but displayed two levels in as thumbnail.) College of the Desert hasn't updated since spring, but has an interesting slide show on the front page that shows info about a new building on campus.

Why don't more schools post photos? When I talk with advisers about their web sites they almost universally say that their staffs are too busy to update the web site. That's why the web has to be considered part of the whole process and not an add on. Involve the WHOLE staff in the online AS THEY WORK on the print edition (or before the print edition). Photographers should work prepressing photos for online along with the versions for the print edition. And if you use College Publisher, they should be responsible for uploading photos to the web site just as reporters should post their stories online to await editing. Advisers can lead the way by talking like full involvement is expected. Some I talk to fear giving their students access to upload stories and photos.

Bonus Tips for College Publisher users:

If your photographers are in the habit of pre-pressing color versions for your print edition, be sure to have them switch back to RGB (instead of CMYK) before saving. CMYK jpegs will display pure black.
If you use more than one photo with a story College Publisher defaults to stacking them along the right side of the story display (see Modesto's Measure E story). You can control placement of photos within the story by inserting the following HTML tag at the proper location in the story: <cp_showmedia position="1" align="right">. Change the position number to correspond to the photo's position and the alignment to "left" if you want it to show on the left side of the page.

Final note

San Mateo has joined the ranks on online publications getting a start this fall and I've missed the Chabot publication (sorry), which has been publishing. That brings to 35 the number of California community colleges publishing. Twenty-six are part of the College Publisher network.

Making the case for student media

2006-10-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

Making the case for why student media matter, as if readers of this blog need to be convinced, is Aaron Sussman of AlterNet in his recent article "Why student media matters" in the site's Youth Wiretap section. Among the reasons the article caught my eye was its mention of the shutdown of Evergreen, Ventura and Oxnard student newspapers, three newspapers in the California community college system.

The lead:

As the mainstream media -- and even alternative media -- become more corporate and consolidated, hundreds of campus publications are reporting the truth about student life and training news leaders of the future.

If you visit the article, take time to check out some of the interesting links within the story.

Disturbing sidenote: The article lists three sources for lists of student publications. The most exhaustive of the three includes NO California community college publications and the other two include only a small handful of them. We gotta do something about that! We can add another 50-60 to the lists.

Web Watch 5: Where are you from?

2006-09-30T14:03:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the flag of your print edition. It probably contains the name of the publication and the name of your college. It may even include where you are located (the city and state). If it doesn't include the latter, that's okay, the vast majority of your readers know where they are when they pick it up.

Now take a look at the flag of your online edition. Where you are located might be more important. Campus publications focus on campus or local news. But visitors to your site are not like the readers of your print edition. They may be located in Zimbabwe or Syndey, New York or Paris. They may need to know what "local" means to you to put your stories into context. They may have come to your site through a search engine.

For instance, here is a SiteMeter representation of the last 500 visits of the Cerritos College talonmarks.com. While the college is located in Southern California, look at the distribution of visits from across the country and even around the world.

How do California community college publications do in providing this information to their readers? Only three regular online editions -- Pasadena College, Sacramento and Shasta College -- provide the location of the college on the front page (Pasadena puts it at the bottom of the page).

Okay, six other colleges -- Merced, Mira Costa, Ohlone, Reedley, Diego City and Taft-- that post pdfs of their print editions as their sole online offerings include the addresses, too. They do so on regular college web pages that serve as portals to the pdf links. It is probably less significant here, though, because readers have to download the pdfs to read the publication. Content in PDF versions may be shielded from search engines and readers are more likely to specifically seek out the college before reading. PDF is an ineffective way to have an online presence.

Most JACC schools at least indicate which college they represent, but six of them don't even do that! Bakersfield, Cerritos, Cypress, Laney, Palomar, Santa Monica and Skyline only include the name of the publication. Palomar includes the line "Focusing on Palomar," Cypress includes "The Cypress Chronicle Online," Laney includes "Laney Tower.com," but unless you know those are college names ....

Now online

Add two more schools to the previous lists of California community colleges going online this semester: American River, which I missed in previous lists, and Rio Hondo, which goes online for the first time.

That brings to 32 the number of California community colleges to get started online this school year. Schools that were still publishing online as of last spring that are still missing in action are Los Medanos, Marin, Palo Verde, Reedley, San Bernardino (MIA since last November), San Francisco and Taft. A few others are MIA a little longer than that and at least seven who were online at one time are dead: Not even a out-of-date page is available any longer.

Also of note this week:

Cerritos has added a photo staff list that uses College Publisher's auto portfolio system (see my other post). Only 10 of 27 College Publisher partners in the California community college system use the portfolio system.
Crime shows up on campus in a number of publications, but Long Beach City's coverage of an on-campus sexual assault shows unusual coverage. Reporters staked out the assault scene 24 hours after the incident to get a sense of the isolation during the attack.
Several schools do good jobs with consumer choice stories, but one wonders how much more effective the stories might be online if presented more visually with infographs or multi-media presentations (see Mindy McAdams' blog for links to examples of multi-media presentations). Not to pick on the students at Cosumnes River --it is early in the school year and few community college teachers are prepared to teach these skills yet-- but take a look at their stories on inexpensive lunch choices and managing time and imagine how much more effective they could be online as multi-media stories. Or Cypress' story on credit cards.
Speaking of Cypress, the staff is short on sports writers, but feels sports coverage is important, so editors have created a section online for releases from the sports information department. Giving readers content despite a shortage of staff skills? What a great concept!

Electronic portfolios for students

2006-09-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

One of College Publisher's under-utilized tools, for the sake of the 27 JACC schools that have signed with CP, is its built-in electronic portfolio of students' work. Few schools seem to take advantage of it.

While the tool is free and automatic, it requires schools to take TWO simple steps to activate it.

To see a sample of how it works, visit the Cerritos Talon Marks site and click on any byline. You are taken to a portfolio of all the photos and stories that student has taken and written. This portfoilio can be issued a specific URL that can be shared with potential employers or Aunt Sally. A student can write his or her own bio statement, attach a photo and attach a resume for download.

Talon Marks has even added a staff roster photo page with links to the individual portfolio pages.

To create the portfolio pages College Publisher users must do two things: Set up an individual account for each student. (Don't want all students to have access? Just don't tell them what password you assign them. But why wouldn't you want to give them access to upload stories? They don't go online until an editor approves them. Let's talk.)

The second step is then to assign a byline from the drop-down menu that will then appear on any "Add story" page or on the photo upload page. That's it.

Pages will exist forever as long you stick with College Pubilsher and you don't delete the student from the staff list. You can deactivate "Reporter" status without deleting the student.

Put the online editor in charge?

2006-09-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

Steve Outing is a great out-of-the-box thinker and his latest online journalism column for Editor & Publisher is bound to get the hair on the back of your necks to stand up.

In his column he shares responses from readers on what's wrong with journalism these days and how to fix it. Among the boldest of suggestions is to change the role of the editor-in-chief. As most of us realize (and love) our teaching of journalism is print based. Learn it here and you can apply it elsewhere. Being the dinosaur I am, I still believe that, though I clearly show the effects of that new media Kool-Aid I've been sipping.

A theme from his readers was:

A huge part of the problem is that newspaper companies are still being run, mostly, by people from the print side -- and who, though they may attempt to understand interactive media and the needs and media habits of young people, aren't effective at moving their organizations in a radically different, and necessary, direction.

which led to the outrageous suggestion:

It argues for putting online at the top of an organization, with the print edition being but one delivery channel for the company's editorial and advertising content, and thus underneath a central news operation that is responsible for "the news" and distributing it out to various channels.

Whoa! Put the online editor in charge of the print edition. That takes some digesting.

But when you think about it, it does make some sense. And Outing's column continues to explain why. Meanwhile, Bryan Murley over at Reinventing College Media has suggested that we consider bringing the concept to our campuses. He ponders whether our online editors should become the managing editors of our entire operation and put the print edition editor UNDER the online editor. I'm thirsty, anyone got any extra Kool-Aid?

As wild as the idea sounds at first blush, there is clearly a logic to the idea and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of us moving that direction before too long.

We've broken the barrier of getting online --at least four out of five JACC community colleges have, the other 20 percent need to catch up.
Most of us still continue to see the online edition as a mirror of our print editions --my students still see the lead front page news feature on the print edition as the lead story for the online edition, as though the readers of the online edition are the same as the print edition.
But a few of JACC member schools are breaking out by posting breaking stories mid-issue, putting full stories online and shorter summaries in print and looking for original online exclusive content (sometimes in new story forms, such as blogs, podcasts, photo galleries, video, etc.)

Of course, the implications of such a move are staggering. First, start with training of editors. While College Publisher allows our online operation to run without a techie, some HTML training eventually takes place for the online editor for any publication wanting to move beyond shovelware. Perhaps more is needed for the entire staff ... and the adviser. Start thinking about it now, folks. Three years from now will be too late.

Related thoughts:

Chabot's Bill Johnson reacted strongly on the JACC-FAC listserve recently to the elimination of the on-the-spot headline writing competition for JACC. (See JACC Broadens Contest Scope). He makes a good point that headlines are really important to newspapers. I'd agree and add that they are perhaps even more important to online publications that want to be taken seriously. Oftentimes, your front page of an online edition is mostly headlines. I know as an instructor I'm guilty of not teaching headline writing as effectively as I should. And who teaches counting of headlines any more? I don't, and I'm not sure I should. But I know I write better headlines because I understand the principles of counting units behind them. I sat through the JACC board's discussion of why to eliminate the contest at this time and agreed with the thinking. Board president Paul DeBolt summarized that reasoning well in a followup post to the listserve. It is not that headlines are not important, but that we need to evaluate what we're testing with contests and see if there is another way to do it. Keep the faith, Bill. Think tomorrow instead of yesterday.
Steve Outing would be a great speaker for a JACC conference, Tim Harrower great.

Bold move or cutting off your right arm?

2006-09-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

Scenario: Your students' editorials are riddled with errors day after day (or week after week). What action should be taken?

Students of the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign decided that they would just stop running editorials.

Bold move or cutting off their right arm?

The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., feels this was a wrong move, saying among other things:

That’s what we call giving it the old college no-try. […]

You made errors in your reporting (sorry, but there’s no such thing as a “faulty fact”), and you’re so upset about these errors that you quit? And you want to work in journalism?

Here is some advice from a place with considerable Daily Illini experience on its resume: Quitting solves nothing. Better reporting, thorough checking of facts, constant striving for accuracy will lead to well-founded opinions. Opinions not backed by facts, or based on untruths, are worthless. […]

Who's right on this? How would your staffs react? It's great to see that even the larger universities struggle with issues that could affect the community colleges. The difference, of course, is that the Illini is a daily and does not have days off between publications to deal with the issue.

Web Watch 4

2006-09-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

Fourteen more JACC community colleges have started up their online editions for the school year bringing the total active up to 29 with a couple of new publications join the ranks for the first time. Still leaves almost 20 schools who have had online publications in the past who have not gone online yet this year. Some of those clearly are inactive and need rebirth.

New since the last web watch are Bakersfield,Cabrillo, Cosumnes River, De Anza, LA Valley, Mira Costa (pdf), Modesto, Sacramento, San Diego City (pdf), San Diego Mesa, Santa Barbara, Shasta, Ventura County, and Yuba.

Some highlights from publications this week:

Cabrillo has posted some video podcasts and and some more.
Chaffey is running clues in its paper that will help one reader win $200 by solving a riddle
Cosumnes River has decided to show all of its issue photos in one slide show (scroll down to bottom of page for the link).
Cypress has a story about the world's largest photo.
Business must be good at De Anza. The most popular story of the week (as of Monday anyway) is La Voz advertising info.
Laney has a story many of us will be writing: one about new math and English requirements statewide for AA degrees.
Ventura County has an interesting article by instructor John Gray about the First Amendment and how it is time to bring back publications at sister campuses at Oxnard and Ventura.

And speaking of first amendment issues, here are some links to papers who are doing stories about the new bills that affect college journalism:

and Citrus has an editorial advocating a national shield law.

Why blogs count

2006-09-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

San Jose State University New Media in Journalism students are getting a first-hand view of why blogs are important in journalism today. IT officials at SJSU announced a little over a week ago that they were thinking of blocking Skype communication technology from the campus network. At the time it was a little known story with an interesting angle of a Silicon Valley school looking to ban a Voice over Internet Protocol program.

But blog reports, some from the members of the journalism new media class who are just learning about blogging, have created a firestorm that has bloggers all over the world writing about the story.

SJSU's Steve Sloan has put together a list of just some of the blogs reporting on the plan.

Last year a number of JACC community colleges reported independently on campus IT staffs blocking MySpace on campus computers. Each story was told in a vacuum of the campus. Imagine what might have happened had newspaper-based blogs been more prevalent and bloggers were paying attention to what was going on statewide.

Adding online skills to our classes

2006-09-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

Blogger Mindy McAdams has put together an interesting entry on how to include online media skills in our existing journalism courses and invites readers to supply their own suggestions.

She put together a similar list several years ago that is interesting reading, too. Her current entry links to the older list for those interested.

More on adviser's role

2006-09-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

I spent the day meeting with the California Journalism Education Coalition, the group that brings together representatives from the state's high school, community college, four-year college and university, California Newspaper Publishers Association and other related journalism education organizations.

During a portion of our meeting we met with Jim Ewert, the CNPA staff attorney who was instrumental in writing the newly passed AB 2581 college newspaper censorship bill. Part of the discussion centered about the adviser's role in light of the new bill. Should the adviser regularly read copy before the paper is printed or not, even if it just to copyedit spellings, etc.?

No, he said. He feels that the bill suggests that no prior review of the paper should take place by any college official, including the newspaper adviser. "Anyone doing that is leading with his chin and making the college liable should any lawsuits (libel or otherwise)." That would not prevent a faculty adviser from assisting students --preferably editors-- from helping students who ask for help, but to routinely read all copy before the paper is printed is a slippery slope that makes the college vulnerable.

We didn't get much of this from the wonderful announcements that the bill had been passed and signed by the governor, but apparently representatives from the California State University system tried to mount opposition to the bill on the grounds that they felt that the adviser NOT reading the newspaper content would make the schools more liable as a matter of negligence. The counter presented in committee hearings by Cal-JEC chair Sylia Fox and by Ewert was that a bill that PREVENTS prior review by college officials, including advisers, actually protects the deep pockets of the school. All research on suits against student newspapers showed that the school became liable when it had a finger in controlling content, such as prior review by the adviser or campus policies that limited content.

Wayne Overbeck essentially has been telling us this for years at our Morro Bay conference legal updates. With an actual law in place, perhaps it is time to listen.

Since the bill was signed --it doesn't officially take effect until Jan. 1-- one California community college adviser has been told to review all copy prior to publication and has indicated a willingness to put that order in writing. The president ordered this even after being made aware of the new law. Another adviser has been expecting to receive a similar order, but nothing has happened so far; perhaps the president has re-thought the position after talking with lawyers.

And, of course, JACC faculty have shared thoughts on its faculty listserve recently that they think it is their obligation to read all copy. Ewert would tell them that this is wrong, that instead they need to improve their training of students and have them take more seriously the pre-publication review of their own publications. The law puts the responsibility on the students.

The key to remember (in regards to the Jan. 1 start date), Ewert says, is that this law does not change the status quo. It is already the policy that censorship and prior restraint is unacceptable. This law simply reinforces that policy in light of the Hosty v. Carter decision.

The bill that actually changes things for college papers is AB 2612, the bill that prevents theft of freely distributed papers with the intent to 1) prevent others from reading the paper, 2) sell or barter the paper, 3) recycle the newsprint or 4) harm a business competitor. The law says removal of free newspapers from stands with this intent is a crime. While this bill was not written specifically for college papers, they are included. In my years as a student publication adviser I've seen student newspapers removed for three of these reasons. Most often it is intent No. 1. Someone does not like the content, so the papers disappear. My lab aide last year caught a student removing stacks of papers just minutes after they were placed on stands because he wanted to recyle the newsprint for cash. And I've even seen papers removed because the issue includes an ad for a private textbook store across the street from the campus that competes head-to-head with the campus bookstore.

The trick will be in educating our campus police departments that they should pursue these crimes, even when college officials are involved in the action.

JACC broadens contest scope

2006-09-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

The JACC Board of Directors this weekend adopted three new broadcast/new media mail-in contests for its annual competitions and eliminated or consolidated a number of other competitions. It also adopted a new policy to guide when new contests may be added or should be consolidated or eliminated; the policy sets up a regular review of contests to test their viability.

The changes will go into effect with the next state convention. Material currently being developed by student media staffs, or which have been produced in calendar 2006, will be eligible.

The three new broadcast/new media contests were designed to open JACC to campus radio and television programs, as well as capture the new media work of podcasts and videos that journalism staffs may be producing.

Added were On-Air Performance, Broadcast News Portfolio and PSA/Commercial. Three other proposals recommended earlier this year by a committing looking to expand broadcast offerings were not adopted at this time.

In addition to the three new contests, the board

Eliminated the Headline Writing on-the-spot competition from the convention
Renamed the on-the-spot Front Page Layout contest to News Judgment/Layout and reduced the number of possible contestants from four to two
Consolidated the mail-in Profile Feature and Sports Profile contests
Eliminated the Best Use of Photos and Graphics mail-in competition
Consolidated the mail-in Depth/News Series and Investigative News contests into one Enterprise News Story/Series contest
Renamed the Broadcast/Video Journalism to Broadcast News Story,
Renamed the mail-in Line Illustration contest to Illustration, and
Clarified wording in several other mail-in contests, including three magazine contests.

Minor tweaks in contest definitions were made in a number of categories.

Rules affecting the Pacesetter sweepstakes competition were changed to include Online Photo and Online General Excellence winners in calculating the award and opened the qualification for the award to those schools which win an Online General Excellence as well as those who win print publication General Excellence awards.

A new class of competitions that will affect how long students may continue to compete was added to accommodate the new broadcast/new media awards. Broadcast/New Media will be recognized with Publication, Writing, Photography, and Editing/Design. Students will be able to compete indefinitely until they win a first-through-fourth place award. After that they will have only two more years eligibility in that class of mail-in, on-the-spot and bring-in competitions. The existing Broadcast/Video News mail-in competition and the on-the-spot Broadcast News Writing competition will join the new contests in that class.

The new policy guiding adoption of new contests and consolidation or elimination of existing contests sets up a regular review process for all contests and criteria for flagging contests that may be under-utilized and establishes a process for determining when place-plus-honorable mention determinations should changed to unranked or “Meritorious” status and how such contests should affect the Pacesetter competition. It also establishes a regular procedure for members of the organization to propose new contests for consideration. New contests will automatically be assigned “Meritorious” status for their first two years of competitions.

Three proposed broadcast/new media contests were not adopted at this time. They include Entertainment Drama/Sitcom, Music Video and Political Commentary Animation. Definitions and criteria for the three new competitions will be available soon on the JACC web site.

Page One News

2006-09-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

I've got a theory that visiting a web news publication is a bit like perusing which newspaper to buy in a newspaper rack -- you don't get/or want to look inside the publication to make a decision.

As I surf through the various online publications I relish in the modicum of diversity of design, even among the schools in JACC. I've already discussed in previous posts my concern about those schools who present their publications only as pdf downloads of the actual print edition. Nice for archiving, but not so reader friendly.

But what about those publications that incorporate a design where only SOME stories appear on the front page or have any display (such as headlines) on the front page. Most of those sites have navigational links to various news, opinion, sports, feature, entertainment, etc. sections, where you can find more stories or headlines. I wonder how many readers take the time to look on those section pages to see if there are any additional stories they might want to read.

I appreciate organization, but I suspect that the front page is where it's at. Publications that use a design that gets lots of stories or headline links on the front page work best. Top stories need to have some drawing power with summaries and photos, but give readers a good headline for each of the rest of the content.

Web Watch 3

2006-09-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

Mid-week in the middle of September and there appear to still be a lot of schools that have not started with their online editions. Starting a new school year is tough and first priority goes to getting out the first print edition. In the meantime news that could be covered in a timely fashion online goes uncovered. Such a shame.

Looks like newcomers who have started their online publications include Chaffey, Glendale, Long Beach, Palomar and San Joaquin Delta. Mt. San Antonio College, which under new adviser Toni Albertson will not publish its first edition until October, already is updating its site. The six new schools brings the total of JACC colleges that have started their online editions to just 15.

The online publication has to be an integral part of process, not an add-on. Involve the whole staff, not just one or two specialists.

In viewing the various sites an interesting question has come up. You've heard Robert Mercer argue that stories should be posted online first and in print last (rather than the other way around most of us do). Certainly for those publishing less than weekly (daily?) this is even more important. But how does your site date its content? Most of us think in weekly (or less often) issues. But it is interesting to decipher when sites have been updated. Most of us use "Issue Date" to date our sites. The Cypress folks do not like that and put "Today's Date" on the front page. You have no clues how long the stories on the front page have been there.

Then there is LA Trade Tech, which uses "Today's Date", but hasn't been updated for three years. And there is the Lassen and City College of San Franciso and Shasta, which have no date on the front page, so you have to deduce from the story content that they have not been updated since spring. Which works best? An issue date, today's date or no date?

This week's notables:

Glendale, which is probably one of the last publications that signed with Digital Partners and hasn't been migrated to a new format by College Publisher, includes a El Vaquero blog that contains info on the newspaper-pulling saga of last spring.
There are a number of 9/11 memorial stories in papers this week. Cerritos includes a slide show.
Palomar has an interesting story many of us can all do. Does the Nov. 4 statewide education bond measure contain money earmarked for a project on your campus?
Sacramento has pulled all of its content off the front page while it builds a new issue. A blank front page?
Hopefully, it will be fixed by the time you check, but SJ Delta's lead photo is pitch black. This was caused because the jpg image is in CMYK instead of RGB format. Some web sites can handle that, but College Publisher sites need to make sure that their online images are RGB before the compress them.

A boost for student press

2006-09-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

California colleges really benefit from two new laws recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The first, AB 2581, dubbed by some as the Hosty bill, specifically addresses colleges and universities and makes it illegal for college officials --presumably even newspaper advisers-- to adopt rules that restrict student press freedom or seek to punish students for content in student publications.

The second, AB 2618, or the newspaper theft bill, would make it illegal to take more than twenty five copies of a freely distributed newspaper if done with the intent to recycle for cash or other payment; sell or barter the newspapers; deprive others of the ability to read or enjoy the newspaper; or harm a business competitor.

The first became necessary after the disastrous Hosty v. Carter decision that ruled that the 1989 Hazelwood v. Kulmeier rule applied to college press as well as high school press. Not in California it doesn't! Actually, high schools here were protected even before Hazelwood. That's not to say that high school papers don't get censored or subjected to prior review all the time here. An ignorance of the law or an unwillingness to rock the boat and have newspapers disappear allows for both to happen.

And that could happen at the college level, as well. Already, just since the law was signed, at least two community college newspaper advisers have been pressured to subject their students' publications to prior review. And some advisers perform ad hoc prior review on their papers anyway. Ummm, newspaper advisers are school officials, too. (See my views on this at my blog).

If college administrations try to test this by requiring advisers to proofread papers it'll take a gutsy student to challenge it in court.

The newspaper theft bill was aimed at a wider press and just happens to include student newspapers, most of which are distributed without cost on college campuses. In many ways this is a bigger problem for the college press than administrative censorship. (College administrators, for the most lot, are not dumb; they know censorship is wrong.) Disgruntled readers often perform their own brand of censorship by removing newspapers from stands. And shoot, we even caught one person on our campus who saw nothing wrong with lifting entire bundles of the school paper and recycling them for cash.

The problem with this bill will be in getting campus police to pursue the crime. El Vaquero at Glendale College found that to be a problem last school year when campus police said that the college would end up prosecuting itself in a newspaper theft there and that just wasn't going to happen.

Tags: Student media

Thinking small, but not small thinking

2006-09-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Steve Outing's latest Editor & Publisher column tells newspapers that the new "big" for newspapers should be to think small.

Most community college newspapers already think of themselves as small, but we probably aren't. Maybe we're medium. I mean, a weekly newspaper with 20 or so reporters? Come on, most weekly papers across the country are smaller than that. But that is not what Outing is really talking about in his column. He's talking about being accessible to our audiences.

Many of us would qualify, but when you think bigger about what he's saying, we're not all that small. How many of us open our columns or web sites to content produced by our readers, where we become merely the hub for news? We still want to control the news and let only material produced by OUR students into the paper.

Time out: Okay, we HAVE to accept that we are more than just campus newspapers. We are classes and a major role of the campus newspaper is to be a lab for our students. We are in the education business as much as we are in the news business. Yet, we may need to rethink what we need to teach based on what is happening in the industry. I will go to my grave teaching inverted pyramid (and other forms), AP style, etc., but I'll also look at how other technologies must be introduced. Simply teaching students how to publish a printed edition may be irresponsible, if not self-defeating. And we DO have a dual role. We DO publish our campus newspapers and have some obligation to inform our readers and to turn them into consumers of news media. Time back in.

Among the suggestions Outing gives:

Changing the corporate brand from being a monologue with readers and allowing limited feedback looks, to a dialog.

I am still thinking about what that one means for the print edition, but the inclusion of forums, blogs, and more can be a part of the online situation. What excuse do we have --aside from fear, which I still harbor, too-- in not opening our electornic editions to members of the campus community NOT enrolled in our classes.

Blogging from the top

Here we go again with the blogs. He's suggesting that editors need to blog. I suggest that advisers need to blog. Maybe not as part of their publications, but as part of their educational efforts. They need to blog so that they can understand blogging. There are subtleties to be learned by doing rather than by reading about it. We've had that conversation on this site in the past, or was it in our faculty listserve. But who among us blogs. I stumbled across a blog by Alan Lovelace, but it appears he stopped at the end of last school year. (Mine are Rich's Musings and Talon Marks blog.) Blogging requires a continual effort. Or join me here. I started this blog, but I'm glad to open it to others. Got a blogger account? Let me know and I'll add you as a poster.

Newspapers should enter seemingly small, unusual new businesses

Again, we've got another mission, education. But, oh, could we get creative by linking our publications together. And we're going to HAVE to look for ways to draw our campuses to our online editions. Our online editions have to become portals rather than mirrors of the print edition.

Stop being afraid to innovate.

Robert Mercer both intrigues and scares us with his full convergence attitude at Cypress College. But he's probably the only one among us trying to innovate, except maybe those few schools that are looking at distance education. We risk making ourselves irrelevant. What if our schools no longer need a newspaper because other methods of sharing campus news develop around us? All that core teaching of journalistic values might not survive. Will your college replace you in x years when you retire?

Don't hire people just to complete tasks; hire innovators

Yuck, innovative students can sometimes be described as high maintenance students because they push the boundaries and don't want to fit into your program of what YOU learned in journalism school. Reminds me of a line from a children's show called "Reading Rainbow" that my daughter used to watch. Host LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge of "StarTrek: Next Generation" fame) often warned his young viewers, "Be careful, you just might learn something."

Tag: Steve Outing

Web Watch 2

2006-09-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

Looks like a few more JACC schools have started the semester with their online editions. Joining Cerritos, Citrus and Cypress are Fullerton, Laney, Ohlone, Palomar, Pasadena, Riverside, and Skyline.

It will be interesting to watch sites for stories about the new AB 2581 and what students have to say. So far, none of the papers above have online stories, though I saw one in a print editon of the Contra Costa Advocate that was printed and I've been interviewed by a couple of students from other schools about it.

Interesting stories to watch this week are Fullerton's 23-year-old's guide to growing up and getting out of Fullerton, Palomar College's delay of a nursing program expansion because it can't find teachers, and Pasadena's suspcious hiring of a new football coach and a story we might all look at: a drop in enrollments of international students post 9-11.

Cerritos has added video to its list of podcasts and blogs and I hear that Santa Barbara and Laney are working on podcasts.

Not reading blogs yet?

2006-09-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

So, you still haven't figured out what this blog thing is all about. You wouldn't be reading this blog if it weren't for the subject matter. You don't read blogs.

Well, you are not alone, according to a survey completed by the Scripps Survey Research Center of Ohio University this summer. The survey showed that only one in eight residents in the United States currently uses Internet blogs to get news and information. That's it! You are justified! Forget all this hype about blogs!

There is more to think about, though. First of all, when you consider that the numbers of people who actually read newspapers is not all that much better, the one in eight doesn't look so bad. Also, the survey showed that almost a quarter of young adults read blogs at least once a week. It's the older folks, 65 and older, who are at the 3 percent level.

Other important findings:

Blogs are more popular with whites than minorities.
Those who are single (lots of time on their hands?) and who live in urban areas are most likely to read blogs.
And while blogs are most popular among well-educated people, they are also popular among people who are most likely to believe in conspiracy theories

But one thing not in the survey that I think is important. So what if only one in eight people read blogs for news and information? It wasn't all that long ago that only one in about eight adults even used the World Wide Web. I can remember when only one in 10 JACC advisers even had an e-mail address.

Technorati, the company that tracks the blogosphere, reports that there are more than 52 million blogs worldwide and that the number doubles about every 200 days. The numbers and usuage is going to grow the way e-mail and Web usage did. People who know me have probably heard my analogy of the guy who builds a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert. He's not selling much lemonade today, but when the road comes through he's going to be the one who gets to hang the sign that says, "Been in business since ...."

Multimedia: I'm afraid it's time

2006-09-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

I know that I've been beating the multimedia drum all summer and I suspect some of my colleagues across the state are nodding their heads and saying something like, "Looks like Rich has gone over to THAT side." Yeah, I have, but not necessarily because I want to.

We've had prophets in the organization telling us for some time that convergence and multimedia is the new thing and that we need to get on board. And while I clearly am closer to an earlier adopter than a middle-of-the-roader, I am somewhat of a dinosaur, too. I'm an old dog who has to be persuaded that learning new tricks is worth the effort.

And I just think the time has come for us to learn about multimedia and incorporate it in our exisiting courses --and when necessary to create new courses. I feel this way because I keep reading more and more about the industry moving this way. Journalism instructors who never learned this stuff in school have to learn it now so that they can add it to their repertoire of what students need to learn from us.

If we don't do it now, we risk becoming irrelevant. And, yes, I understand that we STILL have the primary responsibility of teaching students to gather news from a variety of sources, synthesize that information and prepare it for dissemination. And we must teach objectivity, fairness, completeness and responsibility along with the technology of the day.

Editor and Publisher published another story along those lines today that is worth reading.

As demand for online content grows, acquiring online media skills have become more than a personal hobby for me -- this stuff is coming in handy at work. Reporters who can produce an edited MP3 clip or a video clip can become a valuable asset to any newsroom. Here are seven tips to get started.

I struggle to understand the hows and whys of multimedia intruding into what we do, but it just is time we learned.

Common platform for online

2006-09-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

Interesting story on the Editor and Publisher web site about the need in the newspaper industry for a Marshall Plan like manifesto for the industry.

When I read stories like this it is hard to keep the eyes from glazing over because so much of it is based in the finances of journalism and the more alturistic quality of journalism I am more interested in. I know the finances are important, but in my academic encased cocoon finances are a really small part of what I'm concerned with. We get a pretty good subsidy from the school's student government. Still, the extra income we generate through advertising makes like a lot easier than if it weren't there.

But I digress. Several statements in the article did hit home. Things like:

Not only is the shift towards online; it is, in tandem, a shift away from print. Not dramatic yet, perhaps—but clear. And the impacts continue to ripple.

and

Newspapers gain by moving onto common platforms

While that last one is largely based in finances again, it also talks about the value of networks in getting more readers. True, at community colleges we are more interested in training our students to report and write than we are in building large audiences, it is imperative that we let our students know that audiences DO count. And we are so far behind with online.

I like the idea of a common online format so that we can build on what we already do. And while Robert Mercer has problems with a common platform like College Publisher that still thinks in terms of issue-to-issue rather than minute-to-minute (he's not wrong!), most of us still think in those terms, and so do our students.

Whether College Publisher is the right common platform or not, if we are to look at some kind of common platform, it really is the only one out there for us. (Sorry if I sound like a shill for CP, but I really am thinking about what's best for JACC schools.) About 50 JACC schools are online and half of those through College Publisher. If the other half were to join today we'd account for 10 percent of all of the schools using the platform. While that would not translate into 10 percent of the online traffic because bigger universities draw far more online traffic than we do (and thus generate more $$$ from ad views), we'd be a significant 10 percent. We could go to College Publisher and have a basis for asking for network-within-a-network tools. So our reporter fails to get that baseball story, maybe the other college did and we at least link to it. Our readers win.

Now, I believe in diversity, too. Really great ideas come from it. But at some point diversity narrows to standardization, which allows for a new form of diversity to grow. Some days when I'm playing golf I like to play scatter golf. That's where everyone hits and then moves the ball to whereever the best shot landed. That way the lagging shot does not put you perpetually behind. You get to catch up and try from an even platform again. I'm thinking that's what we need to do with online platforms. We still have room for diversity from the new vantage point.

Infrastructure: The adviser's most important job

2006-09-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

When I was a young adviser I felt my obligation was to put out a error-free student newspaper. It was my job to tell students what they should write about. It was my job ...well, to be editor. I didn't understand that an adviser's job was to build an infrastructure that allowed students to learn by doing.

It took a while before the words of the venerable Warren Mack (DeAnza) to "train 'em and trust 'em" to sink in. I listened to a lot of advice from such outstanding instructors such as Tom Kramer (Pierce) and I was so convinced that my situation was so different that they just didn't understand. Every school IS different, but the situations are not so unique after all.

The student publication adviser's most important role is to establish and help maintain an infrastructure that allows students to grow and learn. Fortunately for California community colleges, we have a lot of tools. It is recognized that the best structure for a student newspaper/magazine/online publication, etc. is through a course where students receive academic credit while they learn. Further, state education code allows for courses like the newspaper to be repeated for a maximum of four times so students can hone their skills to greater levels. We still have issues with the units students earn doing this being transferable to the California State University system, but at least students can get practice. And, of course we have JACC and all it brings to the table.

But if the adviser serves as editor, the students don't learn, or rather they learn the wrong lesson that there will always be an authoritative safety net and they don't need to learn responsibility.

A successful infrastructure is one that puts experienced students in the role of helping train newer students and one that helps talented students explore and hone their skills. That is not to say that the adviser is not also responsible as a educator, but advanced students learn by having to explain the craft to newer students. The adviser can concentrate on stablity --academically and financially-- for the publication and let the students concentrate on content and production. And the adviser can concentrate on leadership training. An infrastructure that does not develop future staff leaders is failing. Identify potential leaders early and move them to editor positions so they can learn. Give lots of opportunities.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing: The chemistry of the newspaper staff changes every semester, even with the same student editor in place. The adviser needs to see that there is some basis for consistency. I recommend starting with the proposed policy manual on the JACC site. Have STUDENTS alter it to your school's needs. Let it be fluid, one that students can change, but one that is solid enough that you can follow and one that doesn't change from week to week.

The whole concept of infrastrucutre is something I know mostly from gut, but I sense that JACC advisers need to develop a public discussion on it so we can all get better at it. I invite my colleagues to share an aspect of infrastucture that they think is important. Simply click on the "Comment" link.

JACC Web Watch 1

2006-08-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

Thought that to get JACC schools to pay attention to other schools' online publications I'd include a Web Watch feature here. The goal is to watch what schools are doing online and to point out unusual efforts.

Most schools still sport the last issue of the school year from last spring. Looks like Cerritos, Citrus and Cypress were the first schools out of the chutes with publications, at least online.

Cerritos talonmarks.com is still introducing a new visually-oriented layout that shows the flexibility of College Publisher. Aside from the new look, the site already sports blogs and podcasts and will include videos. Talonmarks.com has partnered with its radio and film programs to get additional student content for the publication, but it is early in the school year. The new visual design was student generated and required a custom template from College Publisher. It requires newspaper students to think about the online presentation as they gather content for the print publication.

Citrus Clarion Online had some interesting program promotion on its site for most of the summer, but has rolled out the first issue complete with a podcast of the president's opening remarks. Citrus experimented with podcasts at the end of last school year, too. And MySpace figures prominently in the news as the school year opens.

Cypress College's Cychron is one of those publications that tries to rotate content in and out and not think "publication date," so it is sometime hard to tell if there is up-to-date content until you actually open the story. What can you say? Anytime you've got someone with flaming pink hair to include in a photo its going to stand out.

Speaking of photos standing out, even though they're from last semester, LA Valley Star Online has an outstanding photo on its front page. Trouble is, it is not formatted properly to fit the template of the online site. I also like the photographer on Sacramento's e.press. While there take a look at the photo essay for some more nice images.

Some schools --Merced, Reedley, Mira Costa, San Diego and Taft-- still use the pdf-of-the-issue format that are okay for archival purposes, but not are very online-reading-friendly. And I won't even list the half dozen or so publications that either have disappeared or haven't been updated for a year or two.

The Pasadena Courier Online has an interesting followup story to campus newspaper thefts from last spring. Turns out nothing is going to be done because the school would end up sueing itself. Interesting twist concerning that the governor has on his desk an anti-newspaper-theft bill we hope he will sign. If he does, it theoretically applies to college papers, too.

Interesting perspective on the future of news

2006-08-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

Ryan Sholin's blog entry today, "Enough handwringing, let's get down to business" is an interesting read.

What’s the future of news? What does the audience want? What will the dead-trees edition be able to do about either?

Lately, it seems like these questions are brought up by newspaper editors and journalism educators fraught with worry over what will become of their medium and of their readership. (And the children! Won’t somebody please think of the children?!)
They write editorials and cluck over how journalism students don’t read the newspaper anymore.

No, we don’t. We read more than that, we do it faster, and we do it at a level of depth that correlates to the amount of time or interest we have for the topic.

Actually, his conclusion might be scarier for some of us than the proposition that newspapers will die. But you see good examples of it cropping up in places like Bakersfield and Riverside.

New Year resolutions

2006-08-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

One of the really cool things about teaching at the college level is that you get to start over at least twice a year at the beginning of each semester. The start of the semester is a good time to reassess and set new goals. That's how we grow. Here are a few resolution suggestions for JACC members:

I will finally start a weekly (or every other week depending on publication) mailing list and send copies of the newspaper to other community colleges in hopes they'll do the same and my students can learn by taking their blinders off.
I will create a folder of bookmarks in my web browser for other community college online publications so that it is easier to check out what others are doing online.
I'll talk up blogging, podcasting, videos, etc. with the newspaper staff members so that they will at least start thinking about multimedia storytelling and creating original content for online. Shoot, I may even start my own blog so I know what I'm talking about.
If we don't already have an online publication I will see that we actually start one EARLY this semester so that my program isn't another four months behind the curve at the end of this semester. We've already got some catching up to do since 80 percent of JACC schools are already online.
If we've got a dead online publication I (the instructor) will admit I was wrong in not trying to set up an easy-to-use College Publisher site. And I will follow Rich's advice to treat it as an advertising contract and keep my risk-averse administration out of it. That way the contract will be signed by me 8-10 months earlier than if the school's lawyer tries to tear it apart. If I'm already on the risk-averse track, I'll ask Rich to help by writing a letter to my administrators explaining how they are hurting my program by not working out their concerns in a timely fashion.
I'll start using Rich's free City Council simulation in my newswriting class. But he needs to update the numbers a bit.
I (an instructor) will be more tolerant of Rich's long messages on the JACC-FAC listserve and I pledge to actually contribute some thoughts to the listserve this semester.
I will get off my campus this semester and visit one other community college journalism program that I haven't seen before in hopes of learning at least one new thing we can do with our program.

Feel free to add more ideas.

Getting started with online

2006-08-25T08:49:00.001-07:00

Bryan Murley, who writes the Reinventing College Media blog, started a series today that might be of valuable to many of us. He has been hired to take over the online publication at the small Emory and Henry College, a private liberal arts college in Virgina.

The online publication there has already evolved into something separate from the print edition. His series is a chronicle of what he's learning along the way as he takes over. I think it is going to provide some interesting insights for us as we define the role of an online publication --or lack of one-- in our programs.

His goal is to speak to those who are still without an online publication or who still are on the beginning end of that curve. Part one talks about how the online publication there is created. Those who are running independent sites that require them to use HTML code will relate to where he started and why he is switching. He develops a line of thought on how to make things easier and lists alternatives, including building a standalone content management system.

For those already with a content management system --such as all of us using College Publisher-- he talks about some extra things he wants to add to his system, including a software program that Amara Aguilar turned me on a few weeks ago: Soundslides. This program makes making photo slide shows for your online site extremely easy. (And a single license is just about $50. You probably only need one.) College Publisher has a built-in slide show function, but the feature sucks.

Tags: JACC, Reinventing College Media, Journalism Education

Podcasting course at San Jose State

2006-08-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

Lots in the blogosphere today --at least the blogs I check in on on a regular basis-- about a new podcasting class at San Jose State starting up this semester (next week). I think this class is a direct descendent of the Rethinking Journalism Education workshop at Morro Bay last winter. Okay, it probably was in the works before that knowing Steve Greene and knowing about Steve Sloan.

Anyway, the new class has its own blog and there is even an mp3 download to learn more about the class. Check it out. Good example of how to give a little more personal feel to promotion.

Of course I'm thrilled to see one of the CSU programs in the state get srious about new media courses, but as the blogosphere talk says, too bad it is focusing on podcasting and not approaching a wider look at multimedia story telling. (From the podcast, sounds like it really IS a multimedia storytelling class.) I'm extra excited that they made it a lower division course.

Speaking of which, we've been trying to start a multimedia storytelling class at Cerritos College this semester. Though we got a lot of interest from people both on our campus and at newarby campuses, it looks like it might fall just short of the 20 students we need to make it go this semester.

BUT, we WILL offer it in the spring, and with it actually in our college's printed class schedule we should be able to make it go. We'll cover podcasting, but also photo slideshows, Flash presentations, blogging and more. I still think it would be a great class this semester for community college journalism instructors to learn what this is all about and gain some skills to go back and introduce it in their programs.

What American newspapers are doing online

2006-08-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

PBS's Mark Glaser presents an interesting summary of a study of what the largest newspapers are doing online on his MediaShift blog. (see the full report)
He gives a fuller discussion of these key items:

Blogging is all the rage.
Podcasting is still a province of larger papers.
Video offerings are widespread.
Newspaper sites offer RSS — but not with full text or ads.
Forced registration is losing steam.
Editors are not hip to reader comments on stories or bookmarking.

MediaShift

What is a student newspaper?

2006-08-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

You know that you and Toto are in the land of Oz when even Kansas isn't in Kansas anymore. And certainly the lawyer and administration at Barton County Community College in Kansas must be in some mystical land like Oz. They tried to fire the adviser of the student newspaper a couple of years ago for not controlling the content of the paper. And their argument was that it wasn't a student newspaper so they had no First Amendment rights

The adviser has just taken a cash settlement in the case, but the school is still getting its way unless someone challenges the next issue of the Interrobang, if there is one. From the article:

They wrote in AP style. They tried to present both sides in every article. They secured their own advertising.

But, apparently, they didn’t write for a student newspaper.

and the reason, according to the college's lawyer:

Because the publication was written and produced as part of classes taught by the instructor, he said, it amounted to no more than a “class project” — a project that Schartz (the adviser) could have censored without violating the First Amendment. The publication has long been written as part of journalism courses at the institution, in order to help students learn the craft first-hand.

Using this reasoning all community college papers in California and a huge percentage of college papers around the country would not be student newspapers. Granted, at some universities the paper is independent of any classes. That's also true for some club-driven community college papers in the country. But surely this definition would not hold up had the case gone to court. Can't blame the adviser for wanting to go on with her life, but someone needs to challenge this before some other addled administrator upset with content of the paper pulls the same stunt because it worked once.

More on Florida paper being bought

2006-08-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

Note: Updated to include part 2 of interview.

While the sale of the Florida student-run paper being bought out by a Gannett paper does not affect many JACC schools directly, and may never because none of our papers are truely independent of our schools, there are interesting issues about the role of student newspapers that makes following the story valuable.

To that end, some may want to visit some other blogs that are talking about the sale.

Start with Kiyoshi Martinez' TPS report on "Should College Papers Sell Out? Yes!" and the followup with the Reinventing College Media interview of Martinez Part One and Part Two. Martinez is associated more with the Illinois Daily Illini, not the Florida FS View & Flambeau. The interview touches on some issues some of might think about, such as the give-and-take of a big pockets owner in the case of a law suit.

I, for one, enjoy the attention being paid to student newspapers in the media the last week. While we're talking university papers here, some of the same issues of relevant branding of the student newspaper applies to community college papers as well, and is a strong argument for a strong student press.

See an earlier JACC blog entry on this topic.

Casting a broader net over broadcasting

2006-08-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

JACC could cast a broader net over broadcasting if suggestions developed by a select committee in San Francisco today are adopted. The committee, heavily represented by JACC faculty, discussed whether to help start a new broadcast association parallel to JACC or expand JACC more into the broadcast realm.

A big issue was how to reach out to community college broadcast programs around the state, some of which have journalism ties and many who do not.

The committee decided to put aside for the time being the idea of a new broadcast association and recommend that the JACC board consider a "broadcast division," sort of like our geographical NorCal and SoCal divisions. More specifically, the group is recommending that more broadcast-oriented workshops be added to the existing regional conferences and that broadcast programs be invited and courted to participate. Then for the state convention also add mail-in competitions in six areas, in addition to beefing up broadcast workshops and activities.

Details for the contests have to be fleshed out and presented at JACC's September Board of Directors meeting, but contest areas proposed would include:

On-Air Performance
News Package
Entertainment Drama/Sitcom
Music Video
PSA/Commercial
Jib-Jab Political Commentary (basically an animated political commentary -- see www.jibjab.com for an example)

Also suggested was looking for a way to expand individual college delegation limits for those schools that choose to bring broadcast delegations. Once broadcast instructors and students start attending JACC confernences in sufficient numbers, the topic of whether to start a separate organization or further develop the broadcast division of JACC would be revisited.

Tags: JACC, journalism education, community college broadcasting

Florida daily buys student-run paper

2006-08-02T22:30:00.000-07:00

Is the epitome of student newspaper success or what? First the news from earlier today that mtvU (a division of MTV, which is a division of Viacom) purchases the 450-newspaper network run by College Publisher* and then later in the day the Associated Press reports that a Florida daily newspaper has purchased the student-run newspaper at Florida State University.

* See my related link at Rich's Musings on why the College Publisher purchase is a good thing.

Breaking stories online: Yes or no?

2006-08-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

Here's the scenario for a college newspaper with a web site to ponder. Your paper publishes weekly and mid-cycle --let's say two days before publication-- a big story breaks and you've got the facts. Do you publish the story online immediately, or do you wait two days and let the print edition have the scoop? What if you publish every other week and the story breaks on the off week?

I say, go for it online as soon as you can. But my student editors do not always agree. In fact, while they could publish an updated version of the each week's talonmarks.com the night before the paper is distributed on campus, most of my editors choose to hold back the online edition until at least distribution day. Occassionally they'll break a story online, but the newspaper reporters let the print edition deadlines steer when they write their stories.

Ran across two opposing stories on this today. Independent editor Simon Kelner has spoken out against the practice, thinks you should never break stories online.

Kelner said: "If you have an exclusive story at five o'clock to go in the following day's newspaper, the idea that you would put it on the website for nothing strikes me as complete madness.

"Our relationship with our own website is one where the paper is first and foremost, and the website comes second.

Greg Bowers, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, disagrees. He says break news online and tell stories in print.

Telling people news they already know is not a good business model, so, if newspapers are to remain relevant, interpretation is the only way to go in print -- especially in the sports department.

How do you feel about this question and why?

Tags: JACC, student newspaper

Where does news come from?

2006-07-31T18:20:00.000-07:00

Where does news come from? For many JACC college newspapers it comes from our journalism students .. and no where else!

This kind of makes sense because one of the missions of the student newspaper at our campuses is to serve as a lab for journalism students to learn their schools. But we really face a triple mission: train our students, cover the campus community and help develop readers.

Our insistence that we only include stuff our students produce gets in the way of those other two missions. If you come up short on photographers and writers, the end result may be that parts of our community don't get covered.

Yet, we continue our closed systems because we are territorial and because we want to save our jobs. If students don't have to sign up for our classes to produce content for the student newspaper, how are we going to answer those administrators who seem to think that quality education begins with 20 students?

The industry is changing. This week Reuters reports that CNN is getting ready to accept news from its readers/viewers:

The cable news network on Tuesday plans to announce it has created a new program to let users send in digital audio and video from breaking news events in their region. Users can e-mail or upload these so-called "I-Reports" directly from CNN's site.

And online guru Steve Outing has prepared a treatise on "citizen journalism" for the Poynter web site that is worth reading.

Our online publications give us a unique opportunity to expand beyond the content our students provide. We HAVE to move beyond shovelware and find new sources of content. At Cerritos College this year we plan to team with our radio and film programs, who also are in the content-producing business, and add to our online content.

But student newpapers can go further. JACC has talked for a long time about starting a news sharing cooperative. Most talk centers around covering the state legislature (which provides an undue burden on Sacramento area schools, though Contra Costa College perhaps does best in the state) or sharing sports news/photos (still a good idea!). Those of us who use College Publisher could also take a deeper look at its built-in syndication service, forums and calendar functions. But even non-CP web sites can look for other online content provides (such as blogging services), though it may cost and definitely will challenge our notions of what belongs in a student newspaper. But focus on what your readers cannot find elsewhere easily. Local content is still best.

Got any other ideas? Here is a good place to brainstorm them. Maybe we can get past dreaming and improve ALL our publications.

Tags: JACC, journalism education, student newspaper, citizen journalism

Late add: Just saw this article about how some big papers are using a service that automatically produces links to similar stories from rival paper. Interesting.

Thinking of shooting video? See this guide.

2006-07-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

Thinking of shooting video for your web site? Here is an excellent story-telling guide to help make your videos better. Leans to the high end, so don't be scared off. The concepts are scalable. (Requires Flash player.)

SF paper wants student podcasts

2006-07-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

Mark Larson of Humboldt State University shared the following report today on the JACC-FAC listserve:

The (SF) Chronicle is interested in meeting with college and high school teachers throughout the Bay Area to explore ways of getting their students' writing, videos and podcasts into the paper and onto our Web site, www.sfgate.com.

We welcome input from any college or high school teacher, principal or administrator in the Bay Area, but we are particularly interested in having journalism teachers and advisors attend the brainstorming session.

Interesting notion, looking for other sources of content. Community college programs should consider participating in such a project --indeed, should be copying it on their own campuses-- but do so with caution.

At Cerritos College we've already investigated a similar project by contacting our radio program and our film program to see if we can repurpose some of their content on the Talon Marks site starting this fall. Both seem interested. In fact, the film program instructor countered by suggesting that he make one his class projects for his students to partner with a Talon Marks reporter to create a related-story video (see a sample). Bingo, we just got help for producing up to 20 video stories for our web site each semester! With minimal extra effort on our part! The radio station's music programming creates some copyright issues, but not its sports broadcasts and talk/interview shows.

Now, as for the San Francisco Chronicle project, though, colleges should realize that the Chronicle is hoping to drive traffic to its web site. Colleges should want that traffic, too. And since I'm pretty sure the Chronicle does not want to pay for this content, schools should seek an appropriate quid quo pro out of the deal. Their publication web sites should get free ad space and linkbacks out of the deal.

For those schools who are still struggling with the concept of podcasting, the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just posted a pretty good primer on the subject.

And Washingtonpost.com has an interesting article about the growth in popularity of poddcasts:

A report released by Nielsen Analytics last week found that podcasts -- online broadcasts downloaded from the Internet for playback on portable devices -- are attracting a growing number of listeners, a shift that media companies and advertisers have noted.

Why should I learn to blog?

2006-07-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

Good question. Never had to learn it in school or when I last worked for a newspaper, so it can't be important.

Last week's PEW report that says that only a little over a third of bloggers consider what they do to be journalism. And forget that most media organizations are looking at blogging to supplement their current content.

I don't fully understand it and even getting my veteran students to blog is like pulling hen's teeth. But I'm doing it and I'm starting to understand it, even though what I do I'd call journalism education. I wish that more journalism faculty would try it. We didn't learn it in school, so we have to teach ourselves. But I can't even get much participation here ... at least not in the first few weeks.

Site stats show that this blog only gets about nine visits a day and some of those are from such far away places as Alaska, Montana, the east coast, England, Portugal, Chile and Australia. The vast majority are from within California, though. Presumably JACC folks. But only one has bothered to click on a "comment' button and none have asked to become contributors.

Still, it's summer. Maybe that's it.

Kind of reminds me of other reluctant moments in JACC. Twenty years ago there was a reluctance to infuse journalism programs with computers --we had a lot of name calling involved in just thinking about using them for our conference contests. Ten years ago there was a reluctance to learn how to paginate. Now the question is "Pagemaker, Quark or InDesign?" Five years ago only about a quarter of JACC schools had online papers and now by the time school starts in a few weeks there will be, by my count, 52 -- JACC's membership hovers in the 60 range. Hope it doesn't take five or more years for schools to adopt this new technology. Just dive in!

Wake me up when the war is over

2006-07-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

I find movies and TV shows about journalism and journalists fascinating, but wake me up when Tabloid Wars, Bravo's new reality TV show following reporters of The New York Daily News, is over. Did anyone else find the priemere of this show to be a snoozer? My family was begging me to change the channel. But where do I get one of those cool backpacks Kerry Burke schleps while running down the street? It is interesting, though, to see the reporters hanging out on the street fishing for quotes; I haven't had much experience with pack journalism beyond JACC conferences. Guess "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

Tabloid Wars

College papers still have place

2006-07-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

For marketers looking to reach college kids, it's always been a challenge, and it certainly isn't getting any easier with the rise of MySpace, iPods and online gaming.

Yet, as contrary as it may seem, the campus newspaper may still be the most efficient medium. And in fact it may be more so with the increasing fragmentation of media.

Thank you to Meg O'Neil of Citrus College for sharing this Media Life Magazine article "Campus Newspapers for the Old College Try" about the valuable role of college newspapers. Consider sharing it with your students as well as your advertisers.

College newspapers

JourCon anyone?

2006-07-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

I was in San Diego this morning for a SoCal mail-in judging session and one of the big things happening in town was the Comic Book Convention: ComicCon.

Maybe we should give the JACC annual convention a more upscale name. How does JourCon sound?

Solving the math problem

2006-07-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

We joke about about it all the time, but the fact that we have very bright students who don't transfer to four-year programs because of the math requirement is serious business.

If you are one who thinks that the problem is the students', not yours, consider this: Increasingly we will be judged by the number of students who complete our AAs and certificates. At lunch with other area journalism teachers today we came up with a possible solution.
What if we could find one math instructor at one of our schools who would be willing to put together an online version of the Intermediate Algebra course replete with journalism story examples and market it to all of our journalism students? We could serve as campus proctors for tests and local liaisons to help our students follow through. The host campus would probably have to set up some kind of learning community arrangement to hold all those spots for students from other other schools.

Let's kick around some comments and refine this idea. I'll bet there is grant money out there for some kind of collaborative project. Let's hear your comments.

General Excellence and web sites

2006-07-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was perusing the CNPA Better Newspaper Contest winners tab (how awkward to view it as a pdf document online!) and was pleased to see that CNPA honors newspaper web sites as one of its contests for its non-education members.

It got me to thinking, though, that since college newspapers have just one category in CNPA competitions --general excellence-- how about allowing our entries to include our web sites? Or one might argue that if we're ONLY looking at general excellence, shouldn't general excellence include both print and online?

Anyone want to jump on either of those bandwagons? Allow web sites in the competitions or require a combo entry.

CNPA honors best when shared

2006-07-20T16:39:00.000-07:00

JACC President Paul DeBolt posted the following on the faculty listserve last week:

Congratulations are in order for editors and staffers of two JACC-member publications — el Don (Santa Ana College) and Southwestern Sun (Southwestern College) — as they won first and second place honors respectively in the California Newspaper Publishers Association 2005 Better Newspapers Contest. Winners were announced yesterday at the annual CNPA convention.

Kudos and congratulations, indeed! But for a long time I've promoted getting more schools to mail out more copies of their papers to more schools. It only take a few minutes a week to mail 50-60 papers; and most schools absorb mailing costs.

We all benefit when we see others' papers. We see the Southwestern Sun at conferences twice a year, but never get a chance to see the Santa Ana el Don because Santa Ana doesn't attend JACC conferences. And neither of these schools has an online edition, so we can't even view their writing. (Southwestern has tried to launch a web site, but has had problems keeping it alive.)

Would that the CNPA award carried a cash prize for their schools to offset regularly mailing copies of their papers to other schools. Contests are great, but we're all in it for the education. And learning from "best practice" is a common practice.

What does everyone else think about mailing papers to other schools? Don't do it? Why?

Sunshine in Glendale

2006-07-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

One of the best ways to fight attempted censorship is to let the sun shine in. And that's what's happening this hot summer at Glendale College.

Students for the el Vaquero newspaper wrote an article in the last issue of the school year about a couple of nursing students who committed suicide during the just-ending school year. Beyond just reporting about the suicides and mentioning the name of one of the students, and including interesting quotes from students and teachers in the program, the article also talked about suicide prevention. The school's health services director subsequently praised that portion of the article.

But the nursing department did not like the article and complained to the retiring college president, who immediately started talking about squelching the story and suggested removing papers from news stands because the story "reflected badly on the campus." In fact, newspapers started disappearing from stands rather rapidly, suggesting that someone was removing them to prevent anyone else from seeing the story. The president denies he is behind it. (Nursing department?)

The squelching efforts have backfired as the school is getting all kinds of local and national exposure for the attempts at censorship. The attempts are being covered in mainstream media, national media and even area blogs. This type of public exposure should be pointed out to campus administrators every time they try to interfer with campus media. What happened on campus was tragic, but what is happening subsequently to the attempt to control the news is a disaster. What is happening now is far worse than any damage to the nursing department had it just let the story alone.

Another lesson: Instructor Mike Moraeu has been teaching at Glendale for six years without a major problem and when it hit he felt unprepared. Just like an earthquake. But he had the support of JACC and was willing to tap into it early. We all need to be better prepared for the inevitable earthquake. As one who has felt the earthquake a number of times in his career, I say "Thank you, JACC, for being there."

Editor's Camp

2006-07-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

Just did an Editor's Camp signup report for Timi Poeppelman. The "final count" (I think she'll still accept latecomers if you contact her) rests at 23, five for the design camp and 18 for the leadership camp. The camp is in Pismo Beach next week.

Twenty-three. That's an okay figure, but no where near as good as it should be for the fine training our students will receive. Think of all the leadership issues our editors will face in just a few weeks when we start new school years! Wouldn't we be wise to have our students get some excellent outside training to supplement what we'll provide? Timi is outstanding in putting together good conferences and I know she taps into some good talent from within the organization.

Of course, I can't talk too much about this without throwing some stones my way. No Cerritos College students are going. I offered it to them, but there are two big issues: Timing and cost.

Most of the students are working during the summer and it is tough to get together with them for lunch --one of my favorite mid-summer training tools-- much less get them to leave town for a few days. We've struggled on when to hold Editor's Camp and dead summer is just poor for my students. Early August MIGHT be better, but probably not.

While the cost is not too unreasonable (lodging, meals, transportation probably adds up to about $200 per person), cost becomes an issue to. Now, I'm in a position I could afford to pick up the costs for the students, but my school won't let me if I am not attending. We can circumvent the rules, but what kind of example is that for them. They'd nail any other program, especially student government, for trying that. I've just finished teaching summer school and just really do not want to go out of town next week. It is rare for me to not want to participate in a JACC activity, but I think it boils down to the timing issue again.

JACC, Inc.

2006-07-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

Summer 2006. A new era for JACC begins. Oh, sure, we'll continue to do the types of things we've always done, but now JACC is not your old teacher's JACC. We've finally incorporated. We exist in the realm of the big kids now.

There are good reasons and bad reasons for incorporating. There is the improved status and imporved ability to apply for grants that might be applicable only to non-profit corporations. (We don't really know how to do that yet, but now we can learn.) Bad reasons include the necessity to protect the liability of association officers in law suits; too bad we live in such a litigious society. And then there are the good/bad reasons, such as we need to work harder at following our own rules.

JACC owes considerable thanks to Melissa Korber of Las Positas College for following through with the paperwork needed to incorporate. She's also taken over as JACC's treasurer at a time when JACC is bleeding money. She's already taken so many steps to help JACC's board of directors get a better handle on what money we have and where it goes. Anyone who has studied financial stability knows that knowing where you stand at any given time is a real key. JACC's board of directors and conference planners have a Herculean job in front of them to improve the organization's finances. We're not broke yet, but we haven't completely plugged the leaky budget pipe.

Intro

2006-07-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging several months at Rich's Musings about how I teach journalism at Cerritos College and feel that it is time for me to stretch into an additional topic area. And I do a lot of thinking about JACC, so I thought I'd start this blog about JACC, journalism education in general and related activities.

But I'm hoping that I will not be the only contributor. It seems to me that the value of blogs comes with shared ideas. Anyone is invited to comment on blog posts, but I will be watching to keep out junk I've seen in other blogs, stuff that is clearly commericial. If anyone wants to become a regular contributor I'd love to have you join me. Just contact me and we'll work out the privileges for posting.

Anyone interested in community college journalism education is encouraged to join the discussion. JACC students have a separate MySpace blog and may want to direct some discussions there, but are welcome to participate here, too. And, of course, JACC faculty have a listserve that will continue to be a great discussion spot, too.

Rich Cameron