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?