Hope for Would-Be Journalists

Why study journalism anymore? A lot of my students have to be asking themselves that. The pay's terrible. The hours are long. And the ideals of the profession seem to be getting flushed (if they ever were there in the first place) by the suits who increasingly are calling the shots in the newsroom.

So it's worth noting that Robert Giles, in a new Online Journalism Review piece, has a bit of a silver lining for the Woodwards and Bernsteins of tomorrow. If you're studying journalism and want something to look up to, then give this a read.

Europe Slideshow

Working on more skills picked up at the Center for Innovation in College Media workshop. I've tried to turn an iPhoto slideshow into a YouTube slideshow. Check it out below:

The Finished Product

I've been at the Digital Media Workshop sponsored by the Center for Innovation in College Media for the past several days. We tried quite a bit of new things — live blogging, audio slide shows, and more. The climax was a video we produced (and I sadly voiced) on mosquito research at Vanderbilt. Students should check this out, this is the kind of stuff we're going to be doing starting next year at Simpson.

Live Blogging

Hope you can join me today for a live blog:

Racial IDs in the News

Gil Cranberg, a retired editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register who later taught journalism at the University of Iowa, keeps plugging away at writing — nowadays for SPJ's Watchdog Blog. And his latest post takes on the question of whether racial identifiers in crime coverage are ever defensible in responsible journalism.

Cranberg's hopping-off point is the mass murder and suicide by an African American male last weekend at a suburban Chicago strip mall. He comes to a conclusion on when racial or ethnic identifiers ought to be used and when they ought not.

What Tech Skills Do You Need?

Studying (and teaching) journalism today is a bit like trying to get on a bus that's picking up speed while you're trying to hop on. A bit daunting — or is it? Eric Ulken at USC has offered this tagcloud on the technical skills that journalism graduates are expected to have when they enter the job market. How are you going to get these skills?

Mixing with the Pros

The 2008 Iowa caucuses are history, but the photos of our Simpson students working alongside some of the biggest names in the news business are rolling in. The Jan. 3 caucuses were the climax of a year in which Simpson journalism students worked for the Associated Press, freelanced video for C-SPAN and worked for Roll Call and Dow Jones Newswires. Not bad for a small college in Iowa, eh?

In the photo above, sophomore journalism major Emily Schettler gets a pic with NBC News' Tim Russert. She was working the media headquarters at the Polk County Convention Center for the AP. The photos at right are of Andrea Kemp with Russert, Andrea again with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, and Nicole Cleveringa in the middle of the storm in the convention center.

From the Caucus

The Iowa caucus is now history, and we did our part for Barack Obama in the Ankeny 6 Democratic caucus on Thursday night.

Most notable is that we had 210 participants and a handful of observers at the event, and when the fur finished flying, Obama had 81 supporters — enough to earn 3 of the 7 precinct's delegates to the county convention in March. For the record, John Edwards won 2 delegates, Hillary Clinton got 1 and Joe Biden earned 1. 

Here's a photo from the caucus, with Sam Graham as our chairman for the caucus.

It was an exhilarating night. My wife, Sharon, switched from an Edwards supporter to an Obama backer and quite a few other people came over to our side as well. As precinct captain for Obama, I spent a lot of my time running around the Crocker Elementary cafeteria trying to pick up supporters here and there as the Biden campaign teetered on unviability and the Bill Richardson camp fell apart. Rather than go to the Obama victory party at HyVee Hall later in the evening, all I wanted was a shower.

So it was a big victory, an organizational victory, for Obama. Democrats are energized. Of course, Clinton may be the victor in the New Hampsire primary election this coming week, so we can't read too much into the Obama victory. But I have a better feeling than I have in a long time that the American public is about to repudiate the lawlessness and corruption of the illegitimately elected George W. Bush, the man I've never gotten used to calling "president".

It's Caucus Day

For those of us in Iowa, it's a bittersweet day — the Iowa party caucuses are tonight, which means that the crush of media attention has reached its crescendo and that we finally get to stand up for our candidates tonight. But it also means that Iowa will revert to its Is-it-Idaho-or-Iowa-or-Ohio status after tonight. A quarter million Iowans will show up tonight, after which we'll revert to a state of pigs and corn to be largely ignored until around 2010.

I went out this morning downtown and found the place crawling with network uplink trucks. The Polk County Convention center looks more like St. Elsewhere this morning, and the East Village has several streets shut down so that the nightly newscasts can get a nice backdrop of the Iowa state capitol.

I'll be doing my bit as Ankeny 6 precinct captain for Obama tonight, then be pretty happy when it's all over. 

Caucus Frenzy

We're in the final push for the 2008 Iowa presidential party caucuses, and I've been spending much of the Christmas break campaigning for Barack Obama. Here's a photo from a recent Obama campaign event I attended in Des Moines.

With less than two days to go before the caucuses, it appears that Obama could capture more convention delegates than any other candidate in the race. That's based on today's Des Moines Register story showing Obama with 32 percent support in the state, opening a clear lead over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

I'd love to say it's been because of my dogged work on behalf of the candidate, but it's really due to a great group of campaign workers who've flooded the state in the past several months. It was amazing to me during my volunteer shift on Sunday afternoon that I was one of the few people there who actually live in Ankeny. Many of the volunteers had come to the area without pay from California, New York, Colorado, Ohio and Florida.