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.