I now have a new floor in my house and I’m glad to get rid of the old carpet. The yearbook is finished for one more year and we are in the down slope of the school year. So, I’ve been inspired to issue an additional cool links post! Two days trapped in the breakfast nook will give you a lot of time to surf the net.
1) This is a sad photo of the offices of the Rocky Mountain News after the shutdown. And another one that shows that they may be down, but they’re not out.
Rocky Mountain News Aftermath
Sarcastic Comments - Journalists Love 'Em
2) Journalism education shouldn’t be about just one medium anymore, the BuzzMachine says CUNY is getting it right by doing away with media tracks. Everyone must learn it all web, video, audio, writing, interviewing, etc.
3) Kevin Kelly has Eight Things that are better than free. This is a great list: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. I really want to share this with my yearbook staff an see how we can apply this and the lessons from WWGD to improve our yearbook for next year.
4) The New Republic has an interesting article CORRESPONDENCE: A New Era of Corruption? by Yochai Benkler. This article both agrees and disagrees that we will have more corruption as the media changes from the traditional model of corporate funded journalism to smaller niche based journalism shops. I think the worst argument for saving newspapers is that they can save us from corruption and government excess. They did a poor job of it during both the run up to the Iraq War and the economic meltdown that led to the current recession. So, lets hope that newer forms of journalism that aren’t tied to corporate models can be more independent and accurate.
5) As a teacher of journalists, I think this is why our job is so hard – we have to instill these ten values that the Poynter Institute says journalists have and why they make good employees even outside of journalism.
6) Here’s a great story of a North Carolina TV station that is going all in for online. They want to win the next war – and stop fighting the last one. This has been our school’s media strategy for the last year.
7) I just learned that those really useful web navigation text bits at the top of pages on sites like Amazon.com are called breadcrumbs. I definitely need to add this to our web design curriculum.
8 ) This one is just for teachers of all types. Maybe we can replace some of our administrators with FedEx.
9) The Scripting News blog says that journalism teachers should be added to math, science, language arts and social studies as a 21st Century skill since we will ALL be journalists in the future.
10) Here’s a cool tool – the Flash Bit Rate Calculator. This just does what it says.
11) I just had to include this one since my newspaper staff watched and discussed “Good Night and Good Luck” during a mandatory benchmark test day. What would Murrow think? Well #CollegeJourn chatted the question up the other night about the Stewart/Cramer throwdown – here’s my favorite quote:
“What he did that night was undoubtedly journalism, at it’s best you might say. Whether that makes him a journalist or not. . .” -joshhalljourno
Read more at Innovation in College Journalism
What Would Murrow Think?
12) Blogush asks the question to all tech type teachers - Are You A Geek? And if you are, find a way to get the “cool kids” to adopt your coolest tech stuff and let them show others they way.
13) This tiny camera is just too much fun to resist. Here’s a whole article about the tiny cams.
Fun Tiny Cameras
14) Here’s a post from another journalism teacher Mediamum on what we need to teach our students so their next job does not contain the phrase “Do you want fries with that?“
15) The 10,000 Words Blog has this interesting site called Journalism Is Dead. Reload it and it changes. It appears to be Twitter tweets with the key phrase in it. Cool mashup.
That all came from two days with nothing to do but listen to a band saw, watch movies and surf the net.
2 Comments
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The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle PI situations are just so sad, but emblematic of the way the world is going these days. I have students who won’t willingly read a book…so why would they read a newspaper?
I don’t know that it is all bad. People are just reading in different ways and books have not died. Kids do read books that interest them. I know even my own reading habits have changed because I read SO MUCH MORE online. It does cut into time to read paper based products like newspapers (way down near zero), books (down a lot) and magazines (down some).
But online I’m reading publications I could never afford to subscribe to or find time to go to a library to access. I read five to 10 newspaper articles online each day – usually from different publications. I’m thinking of getting more books via audio since I love listening to podcasts on my iPod. Anytime I’m at the doctor’s office, grocery store, stuck in traffic, etc. a podcast makes the time go faster. Audio books would do it too.