1. Transforming The Journalism Curriculum Presentation by Mindy McAdams University of Florida 2008

2. What we do well now Teach students how to report and understand the professional norms of the field Train them in a specialization (e.g., such as photojournalism, print editing, on- camera reporting for TV)

3. What we don’t do well now Teach them how to survive and thrive in the field that journalism is becoming

4. Our challenges Our current department structures are not designed to support cross-platform journalism Our faculty are often not well-versed in multiple platforms, new technologies Our students might resist, saying “I only want to …” Our schools lack equipment and facilities, e.g., software, updated labs

5. Is it an option to wait and do nothing?

6. Possible solutions Hire one versatile faculty member and set up “convergence” courses Doesn’t this encourage the same silo mentalities among both students and educators? Does this prepare the students to “think different”?

7. If we want to train students to think different, then we’ve got to do it ourselves.

8. These reasons don’t cut it “We don’t know how” “We don’t have equipment” “We don’t know what they’re doing in these newsrooms”

9. Video

10. Example from the Toronto Star Example Example from the San Jose Mercury News Example Example from The Spokesman-Review Example And some blogs to keep you well informed …

11. Angela Grant: News Videographer

12. Colin Mulvany: Mastering Multimedia

13. Cyndy Green: VideoJournalism

14. Richard Koci Hernandez: MultimediaShooter

15. Cade White: Digicade

16. Databases

17. Five things you can do now Assign articles by or about Adrian Holovaty Study EveryBlock Discuss any New York Times data project Assign a project to be built with Atlas Use exercises from NICAR to teach Excel

18. “The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do: 1. Gathering information. 2. Distilling information. 3. Presenting information. ‘Doing journalism through computer programming’ is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.”

19. http://www.everyblock.com/

20. New York Times data projects

21. http://fmatlas.com/atlas2/

23. http://www.ire.org/resourcecenter/tipsheets.php

24. Graphics

25. Chicago Tribune

26. Another good use for Excel

27. Houston Chronicle

28. Newsweek: 2007 Wildfires

29. Photo

30. Two issues Visual skills for all students—not just the photojournalism students Composition Rationales Ethics Editing and formatting photo files for online

31. http://markhancock.blogspot.com/

32. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3842331/

33. Magnum in Motion

34. Audio

35. Audio is easy and cheap Microphone handling Interview techniques Digital editing (Audacity is free)Audacity Save file as MP3 Use a free audio player to embed the MP3 directly on a Web pagefree audio player

36. HTML and CSS

37. Why teach HTML and CSS? Dreamweaver is not necessarily as useful as HTML and (at least some) CSS Facebook / MySpace will not help them in a journalism job It’s a leg up

38. Ways to introduce HTML and CSS One solution: Use blogs (covered in a later session) Require students to build a simple Web page by hand with HTML Headings Links Images

39. Pssst! My own secret I have usually learned technology that I teach in class less than one week before the first time I taught it! You don’t need to be an expert; you just need to know a little more than the parts you will teach!

40. In conclusion We all need to start now We are all behind—but we can catch up!

41. Transforming The Journalism Curriculum Presentation by Mindy McAdams University of Florida