Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility
September 15, 2008

Mit diesem Artikel klingt der Jeff-Jarvis-Monat in diesem Blog aus. Wirklich. Nur noch einmal will ich auf den Blogger und Professor and der City University of New York verweisen. Aber diesmal, um einen eher traditionellen Standpunkt in einer aktuellen Diskussion über neue Medien und Journalismus zu beziehen.

Hintergrund des Gezeters ist ein Artikel, den Alana Taylor, Journalismus-Studentin im Undergraduate-Program der New York University, geschrieben hat. Am 5. September steuerte sie einen embedded report für den Blog "MediaShift" direkt aus ihrem Kurs "Reporting Gen Y" bei. In diesem kritisierte Taylor den Kursplan als veraltet und sagte, ihre Professorin sei nicht auf dem Laufenden hinsichtlich neuer Medien.

Das Recht auf freie Rede und die Anderen

Aber im Kern dreht sich die Diskussion darum, ob Taylor vor dem Bloggen das OK für den Artikel von ihrer Professorin und ihren Kommilitonen hätte einholen sollen. Sie aber schwieg und tat es nicht.

Die Vorteile und Möglichkeiten, die neue Technologien für das journalistische Arbeiten bieten, unterstützen diese Vorgangsweise. Technologie verbindet, ist mobil, live und sozial, wie Jeff Jarvis vor wenigen Wochen auf der ONA ausgeführt hat. Taylor nutzte diese Vorteile, um über ihr Thema zu berichten. Sie schrieb einen Blogeintrag, und bis hier ist alles OK. Sie nutzte einfach ihr Recht auf freie Rede.

Aber dieser Fall ist komplizierter, wie Michael Getler, Ombudsman bei PBS, folgerte:
“This is a complicated issue involving all sorts of free speech and privacy issues, respect for other students' rights, private versus public institutions, and also whether the classroom should be a place where every word can be recorded, personal opinions introduced, and put on the Web without anyone but a blogger knowing about it beforehand.”

Warum aber interessiert die Meinung von PBS, wenn es sich um den Blogeintrag einer Journalistik-Studentin handelt? Sie zählt, weil die Veröffentlichung im Auftrag von "Mediashift" geschah und dieser Blog wiederum zu PBS.org gehört. Es war also eine journalistische Arbeit.

Getler weist Taylors Ansatz zurück, weil er seiner Meinung nach grundsätzliche ethische journalistsche Regeln verletzt: Er verneint, dass Journalisten immer, “except in the most rare circumstances, announce themselves”, schreibt Getler.

Journalisten sind Blogger mit eigenen Regeln

Diese Haltung unterstützt auch der Code of Ethics der Society of Professional Journalists. Dieser besagt: “Avoid undercover … methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.”

I stimme Getler zu. Und auch Jeff Jarvis würde wohl beipflichten, schließlich unterstrich er die Bedeutung von moralischen Standards, um den Journalismus nachhaltig zu machen.

Alana Taylor studiert Journalismus. Das heißt: Zu lernen, wie man neue Technologien vor dem Hintergrund ethischer journalistischer Grundsätze für sich nutzen kann.

In diesem Sinne hat Taylor ihr Klassenziel wohl verfehlt.

In her post, Taylor talked about what she saw as the shortcomings at NYU over its approach to new media. The column provoked a stir at NYU and among journalistic circles online.

It was followed up by a piece by Mediashift editor Mark Glaser on the controversy.

The whole incident was clearly troubling for NYU's journalism school.  The issue was raised with the ombudsman by Adam Penenberg, an assistant professor at NYU and chairman of the journalism department's ethics committee.

One of the complaint is that Taylor did not tell her professor or students that she would be writing for PBS Mediashift.  In his complaint, Penenberg cites PBS's own editorial standards and policies on deception: "The credibility of content is jeopardized whenever the audience or a source is duped or feels duped."

He also takes Mediashift to task for not giving the people criticised in Taylor's post a chance to reply.  In its defense, Mediashift was planning to run a follow-up piece from the student with her professor's point of view and interviews with faculty.

The problem here is that Taylor's piece was published under the PBS banner, even though it was not written by a PBS employee. Since it was published on Mediashift, it drew far more attention than they would have if they had appeared on her own blog.

The ombudsman concludes:

But the PBS imprimatur on this online feature takes it out of the realm of what one ordinarily considers individual blogging. This was an assignment for a very large public service, and I do think that in this instance this posting did not meet PBS standards. There is no way that Taylor's posting would have appeared as a PBS television segment or NPR broadcast without additional comment and reporting, and so PBS needs to look into this and perhaps come up with a more refined set of guidelines that cover these new situations if they are going to lend their logo and PBS.org link to them. NYU probably needs to do the same thing.

I suspect this whole episode be discussed at length in ethics classes at journalism schools. There is no easy answer here.

Taylor has a right to be heard and write about her experience at NYU. And professors should be accountable for what they say in class.

In hindsight, Taylor should have told her professors and fellow students that she was writing for Mediashift. But I agree with Mark Glaser that:

Alana has the right to voice her opinion about what went on in her journalism class and that just the exercise of bringing it up for discussion and conversation is worth it.

(Full disclosure: I am also an 'embed' for Mediashift and discussed this with my colleagues at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism before taking it on).

In an article for PBS Mediashift, I looked at the challenges facing journalism schools in teaching technical skills without losing sight of the journalism.

This is a difficult area for j-schools as journalism becomes ever more interwoven with technology:

The challenges for journalism schools are two-fold. First, students need to be taught how to use a wide range of technical tools. Second, and more importantly, they have to learn how to produce real journalism using the technology. This is perhaps the hardest part.

Our students are digital natives, living in an always-on, always-connected world. The challenge in the classroom is less about teaching the technology and more about providing an understanding of how new media tools can be harnessed to create quality journalism.

I argue that journalism educators need to be part of the digital world if they are to teach digital skills.  Too often academics are observers looking in from the outside, rather than being part of the new media world inhabited by our students.

The full piece is at Mediashift.

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I am one of them, reporting back from the front line of journalism education. My first missive has just been published, looking at our integrated journalism approach at the UBC j-school.

This extract sums up what we are doing:

This past academic year, we decided to combine these three disciplines (news-writing, multimedia and research) into an ambitious team-taught integrated journalism program. Over two days every week for the two semesters, students receive training in core journalism competences. They get to apply these skills through assignments that take them from covering social issues in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to tackling questions of diversity, with the work published in TheThunderbird.ca, an online magazine.
Questioning What Is News

The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.

But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred

There is no doubt that journalism education has to change, just as journalism itself is changing. It is time to start a conversation on what we should be teaching the next generation of reporters.

***

MediaShift, PBS' media blog, talks about adding friends (on social networking sites) and who to follow on Twitter.

Perhaps the lower the satire, the higher the art. Fishbowl NY on The Onion's latest -- taking out big-box retail, hyper-branding, corporate news, and the Iraq war all in one clip. I only hope my loved ones build me a memorial deck.

Oh, CNN. Where to start? Gawker gives us the latest and greatest on disgraced CNN presenter-turned meth-head Richard Quest. Really, Richard -- everyone knows you keep your dildo in your pocket. No one wants their junk to smell like gym socks.

I love The Smoking Gun. Almost as much as I love the Freedom of Information Act. MediaShift discusses the always entertaining and increasingly credible web phenom.

Syria and North Korea, cohorts in a nuclear scheme? Israel completely justified in bombing ... well, whatever it wants to? Sounds like the US government, alright! Salon explores the skepticism toward claims and blames from the White House.

And now this, from the office of Yeah But You'll Still Bend Over & Take It: Diebold (now Premier -- DO NOT let name changes throw you off the trail!) admits its ATMs are more robust than its voting machines. Slashdot has an interesting post (with links to the full story) about this admission and the insane reasoning behind it.

And so I can keep my finger on the pulse of my people, Stuff White People Like talks about how I like my pre-schools: private, organic, French, and f*cking crazy.

I love how two disparate things can converge so nicely. Thing #1: Great post over at MediaShift calling out Newsrooms to "Walk the Talk of Change". Check out some great examples of Talk and Action over there.

Thing #2: My favorite band, Tapes 'n Tapes, released their 2nd Album today entitled "Walk It Off". Take a listen over at MTVU. It's piping hot if you're into the independent rock.

I hope you agree that these are disparate things. Now comes the convergence.

Instead of Walk the Talk, I like the concept of Walk It Off for LoMediaCo's. Walk the Talk connotes some blustery guy saying all the right words and pretending to know precisely where he's going. Walk It Off is saying, "I think that 'it' is over there, and instead of measuring exactly where it is, I'm just gonna approximately walk towards it. If I'm close, great. If not, I'll have a better viewpoint to walk it off again."

Wedia Up is an exercise in Walking It Off. Tom and I thought it'd be great to do something in the Wedia community, so we got on WordPress in an hour. We're walking towards where we think Wedia should be.  It may be an imprecise innovation method, but we think it will get us where we want to be more quickly.

Walking It Off is great for the innovation muscles.

 I struggle nearly every week with an identity problem: Am I a blogger or a journalist? Most times, I can take the easy way out and think of myself as the nouveau blogger/journalist or journalist/blogger — but which one comes first? nags my inner pigeon-holer.

 Last week’s blog post (or was it a long-form piece of journalism?) on MediaShift about the blurring of the line between journalists and bloggers left out one big example: me. I often struggle with how much personal information I want to put on this blog, how much I want to make it about me and how much it is about the world outside my bubble. In this case, I probably failed on both counts, ignoring myself as an example, but then injecting myself in the sources I chose for the story.  I was criticized in the comments for using the same old tired examples of journalist-bloggers and not including enough non-journalist bloggers, not to mention interviewing only men. Fair enough, and it’s the one sin of journalists that I’d most like to change in what I do: only talking to the same group of “experts” for each story. I would like to broaden my range of interviewees and sites that I cover, and am hoping that Jennifer Woodard Maderazo as associate editor is helping to do that each week. But back to my identity problem. My career as a journalist has jumped around from print to online publications, and my work has appeared in trade magazines, daily newspapers, email newsletters, text books, glossy magazines, glossy books, blogs, academic websites, and more. So I shouldn’t necessarily be defined by where my work appears. I don’t remember calling myself an “email writer” even though at one point it seemed like most of my work was designed for the email format. At the moment, I am living on the border between blogger and journalist. I am a blogger who is published at a traditional media website, PBS, with most of my posts being published without an editor (such as this one). And once per week, my Digging Deeper posts are edited first by a PBS producer, and I very much appreciate that editorial filter when I am doing more in-depth work. I prefer to post longer pieces to MediaShift, and perhaps they read more like columns than blog posts. Many people have described what I do as an online column for PBS and I rarely would correct them on that. But I also do want people to comment on my posts, and tell me when they think I’m wrong. Plus, I do update posts with more information as I get it from readers. That seems more blog-like. And I follow the discussion on various blogs to see where my posts lead. Playing the Perception GamePersonally, I’d rather not spend my time worrying whether people think I’m a journalist or blogger or journablogger or whatever cross-breed I am. But there are times when the question does matter, and I have to consider which one I am to get what I need. If I am going to a conference and planning to do live-blogging, then I tell them I am a blogger. But in some cases, saying I’m a blogger can have an adverse effect, similar to the problems of getting press credentials for some bloggers. A couple years ago, I tried to get a press pass to cover the music portion of the South by Southwest conference for MediaShift. I told them I was a blogger for PBS, and their response was, “We don’t give out press passes to bloggers.” What if I had told them I was a columnist for PBS?  When I first contacted Google News about getting MediaShift into the sources included on the news aggregator, their automated response noted that “Google News does not include one-person websites in its sources.” I took that as code for “bloggers” or at least one-person blog sites. I later petitioned them to include me by pointing out that I did have an editor and was distributed via PBS. In the end, they agreed to include MediaShift. So while the distinction between blogger and journalist (if it ever really existed) has slowly dissolved, all the infrastructure around recognizing who a journalist is — from press credentials to legal protections has changed very little. So whether I really am a blogger, a journalist or a blogger/journalist might not matter to me, but it will matter when I’m trying to get a press pass or if a judge wants to ferret out my anonymous sources. What do you think? Does it matter what my identity is, or how people view me? If you’re a blogger/journalist, how do you deal with these issues?   

I've been up for about an hour, and I've already added three new additions to my Google Reader feeds, namely SquirrelNet, MediaShift (thanks to a Feedhead post by Prof. Netzley who shared a great post on How Google & Wiki have changed our lives) and Louisgray.com, referred to by Mike. No wonder it's taking me longer and longer to check my feeds every day!

Anyway, on Louisgray, there's an interesting article about AssetBar, which looks like a competitor to Google Reader, with a social element built in. Basically while you can share feeds in Google Reader, you don't know what someone else might be thinking about it, other than the person liked it enough to share it. AssetBar changes that by allowing users to rate articles and comment on them as well. I haven't had the time to try it yet, but hopefully I will soon and see if the whole commenting thing turns up anything interesting.

The site looks like it will be a great place for examining how to support and find quality, objective journalism online. Its focus is on the process and the questions -- other newly announced sites like ProPublica and The Center for Independent Media say they'll provide the journalism. Almost all of the new ventures have some form of foundation money, except for a new private effort, MinnPost, in Minneapolis.

It feels as if we're entering a new stage. Hold on tight.

Update: MinnPost had a jump start with Knight Foundation money, as Howard Weaver pointed out in comments. Details from Ken Doctor at Content Bridges: Founder Joel Kramer says, "We have 186 annual donors totaling more than $63,000 right now, on top of the 4 founders who gave $850,000 and the Knight grant of $250,000."

Kramer told Doctor that MinnPost did not set a specific membership target for 2007, but did make a projection in its Knight Foundation application, a prediction of 250 annual members contributing $75,000.

In the article, Mark Glaser, the blog's author, discusses what he "took away" from the Media: Overseas Conversations IV conference he recently attended, and surprisingly, most of the topics Mr. Glaser discusses have to do with education's role in media.

"But with the rise of new media, perhaps the focus of media literacy education should shift to educating the educators — and other adults — about blogs, podcasts, social networking, mobile content and virtual worlds. That way, adults could relate better to students and help them understand the world in which they are digital natives."

I definitely agree with Mr. Glaser's thoughts.  Educators need to be trained about what these new technologies and media outlets are and how they impact the lives of their students.  Media is no longer just the nightly news on the television or the Sunday newspaper as it was when many educators were young.  Students today access media in an ever increasing variety of ways. 

If you are an educator or student I suggest giving his blog post a look and then taking a few minutes to reflect upon the questions he asks in the article.

Below are my thoughts on some of the questions Mr. Glaser poses.

Should media literacy classes be required in schools? Ideally media literacy  should be "taught" in all classes as students research topics, keep up-to-date with the news, create digital stories, etc.  The problem lies in educating the adults in the classroom about the "new" media and technology.  Educators need to understand the relevance and importance of teaching students how to navigate and validate these new sources, and then they must be given TIME to teach students what they have learned; the "curriculum" is already stuffed full of information being "tested" and unfortunately many teachers feel unable to allocate any time to teaching anything not on "the test." 

Oh, and teachers also need to be okay with giving up a little bit of control and allowing students to teach them every once and awhile. 

What’s the best way for teachers and students to learn about new media in a collaborative way?  I think the best way for teachers and students to learn about new media (and new technologies) is to explore them together and discuss.  At the onset, students may seem to be more knowledgeable about the "new" media than the teachers, and that is okay.  I would venture to guess that most students feel more comfortable in the digital realm than many of their teachers.  And although students may know how to access the media, they do not always know what to do with it. The teacher's role should be to guide students in questioning, reflecting, synthesizing and validating what they find.

I have shared my thoughts.  What do YOU think?