Where Would I Be without Mindy McAdams?
Probably everyone teaching multimedia journalism today has run across Mindy McAdams and her blog, Teaching Online Journalism. If you are teaching journalism at all, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to TOJ. I prepared and taught my first multimedia storytelling course last fall, and I have to say that I don’t know if I could have done it without the excellent information and experience that she shares on a near daily basis.
Mindy is currently in the middle of an excellent 15-part series titled “Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency” that summarizes much of what she has learned about teaching multimedia journalism. When she’s finished it will comprise an introductory course in itself.
Mindy is a true educator. She licenses her materials under the Creative Commons license, which allows those of us still trying to figure out how to introduce our students to these critical new ways of delivering stories to borrow and adapt her materials.
Thank you, Mindy McAdams, for the contributions you are making to contemporary journalism. And thank you, especially, for helping me better prepare my students to take their place in the modern newsroom.
A Small-College Prof Trying to Make a Difference
Bryan Murley has a post over at MediaShift that has finally motivated me to follow up on my intentions to launch this blog. Murley’s post is “5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them.” Murley, a young prof at Eastern Illinois University and director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, has named the forces I’m contending with as an aging teacher of English and journalism at my tiny college in central Kansas.
1. Small staffs and high churn rate.
Our staff has only one position dedicated to our online site and no student has filled that post for more than a year. I can’t realistically expect this to change. Rather, our entire staff needs to make online coverage and multimedia a part of their mindset and workflow. Now that a few have completed our first course in multimedia storytelling here at McPherson College, I’m beginning to believe that can happen.
2. Instructors who don’t get it.
Murley is talking about me. While I’m considered one of the “early adopters” on our campus, that doesn’t require a whole lot. (I don’t even own a cell phone yet, for gosh sakes!) I’m comfortable with HTML, CSS, and the static Web. I’m OK with a camera and Photoshop. But my experience with video, Flash and data visualization is limited to “playing around.” I am a convert, however. Although I’ll never renounce reporting and news writing as the foundation for all other forms of journalistic storytelling, I know multimedia skills are essential for my students’ success in the job market (such as it is).
3. Old mindsets from the students.
It’s true that as our staff constructs its budget, the print edition is foremost in their mind. That’s slowly changing, however. I hear more discussion about the part multimedia could play in covering stories. What’s still lacking is the follow-through. See Challenge #1 above.
4. Not enough payoff for students.
We haven’t produced and posted enough multimedia to know how it will be received by our community. We’ve done a poor job driving readers of our print product to our online publication. Largely that’s because our online has remained a shovel site that runs days behind instead of ahead of our print edition.
5. Sparse resources.
I’m fortunate to have a small capital budget approved for this academic year. I’ve been able to purchase four Olympus WS-300M digital recorders, eight Zoom H2 digital recorders, two Canon HV20 high-definition digital camcorders, two Canon Powershot A590 IS digital cameras, and assorted external mics. Our lab acquired eight hand-me-down, previous-generation 20-inch iMacs from our graphic design lab, and these came loaded with the full complement of Adobe CS3 programs. We also have 25 licenses for Soundslides, at the moment all installed on the new iMacs in the graphic design lab, where I taught Multimedia Storytelling I last fall. I’m sure we’re in better shape equipment-wise than most schools our size and should hold our own with what we have for a couple of years.
Among Murley’s suggestions, the ones most relevant to our situation here at McPherson include
1. Involve the web in all of your regular editorial meetings.
Our staff needs to consistently ask how to incorporate multimedia coverage with the print stories we’re doing.
2. Market your website.
We don’t even put our URL in our flag or front-page folio. We have to start there. Once we get some multimedia coverage to complement the print stories, we can drive more readers to the Web edition with refers. I wonder, too, if there might be ways to use Facebook to connect our students with online Spec.
3. Follow the ongoing journalism discussion.
I try to do this. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of many of the leading multimedia journalism blogs. This blog is a next step for me. Writing about what I’m learning will push my thinking into new areas and may well help me to make new connections and participate in discussions that will take me deeper and farther than I could go on my own.
