The Atlanta Association of Black Journalists presents:

“Move over Scanners…We’re checking TWITTER”

Saturday, September 11, 2010
WSB-TV (community room)
1601 W. Peachtree N.E. Atlanta, GA 30309
11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.

This is no longer your grandfather’s journalism. We now have Twitter, Facebook, Four Square and other social media sources that BREAK NEWS. There are also viral videos popping up all over the Internet before camera crews can even get to the scene. So how do we as journalists adjust in this new world of journalism? Are our ethics re-defined? Are our ethics the same? When do we tweet news and when do we keep our mouths shut? When do we grab video off of a non-news blog and run with it?

Recent incidents such as the New York Times reporter who was reprimanded for saying “Toyota Sucks” or the international foreign affairs editor who was fired after 20+ years with CNN for tweeting, or the media frenzy surrounding the Shirley Sherrod clips without vetting the entire video in full context are forcing us to have this crucial conversation.

Panelists:

Hank Klibanoff, veteran journalist, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the press and the civil rights movement, and professor of journalism at Emory University.

Leonard Witt, director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism program at Kennesaw State University

Eric Stirgus, staff writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who tweets and covers politics through PolitiFact Georgia

Join us. Pass the word. Bring a friend. FREE For AABJ members / $5 for non-members

AOL made 900 hires over the summer with 50% of the new people going to local blogs network Patch, CEO Tim Armstrong just told employees in a company wide meeting.

Figure all-in costs for each new employee is $100,000 per year, and AOL is set to spend $45 million per year on its new Patch employees.

That’s right in line with AOL’s previously announced plans to invest $50 million in Patch this year.

Patch.com representatives are coming to Kennesaw State University via our Center for Sustainable Journalism and Department of Communication on September 15 to make a pitch to our students and alumni, looking for full-time or freelance work.

PBS Mediashift is running a special series called Beyond J-School, taking an in-depth look at journalism education in the digital age.

The series was kicked off by a piece I wrote on how to teach social media at journalism schools:

Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.

The article looks at how journalism professors are incorporating social media in the curriculum within an academic environment where the pace of change is slow. It includes practical examples of how educators are engaging with students.

The full piece is on PBS Mediashift.

The University of Colorado announced Wednesday its School of Journalism and Mass Communications will be discontinued.

Here is a press conference video produced by ColoradoDaily.com:

The Denver Post reports:

…shuttering the School of Journalism in its current form — a process called “program discontinuance” — will begin, although the committee could potentially recommend that the school remain as it is, (CU-Boulder Chancellor Phil) DiStefano said. All current students will be allowed to complete their degrees, whatever the changes.

“Discontinuance” is an unfortunate legal term, said journalism-school dean Paul Voakes.

“It implies that we’re shutting down, when the opposite is true. Discontinuance is the necessary legal process that would enable us to create the innovative new programs our students need,” he said.

The Denver Post adds:

The process leading to Wednesday’s announcement began in April when Doug Looney — a CU alumnus, former Sports Illustrated writer and then-chairman of the journalism school’s advisory board — wrote a “white paper” to DiStefano complaining of infighting in the school.

“The SJMC (School of Journalism and Mass Communications) and its dysfunctional faculty are hopeless,” Looney wrote. “Prospects for improvement are nonexistent. It should be closed.”

My essay on how the internet is changing science journalism has been published as part of a collection called Science and the Media by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The volume includes contributions from leading science journalists such as Alan Alda, Cristine Russell and Cornelia Dean, edited by Donald Kennedy and Geneva Overholser. The editors write:

The essays in this volume discuss the roles of scientists, journalists, and public information officers in communicating about science and technology. The authors look at the role the media play in boosting Americans’ scientific literacy and at how the new digital media are changing the coverage (and consumption) of science news. They discuss how inadequate press coverage combined with poor communication by scientists can lead to disastrous public policy decisions.

The collection is the result of a series of workshops organized by the American Academy and supported by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, which considered ways to enrich Americans’ engagement with science and technology.

In my chapter, I discuss how the internet offers new ways to cover science, concluding:

More than other media, such as television or newspapers, digital platforms can offer science journalism a greater diversity of coverage and voices. The multimedia, nonlinear, and networked nature of online journalism is forcing journalists to rethink storytelling for a digital age. For science journalists, the Web offers a multiplicity of ways to delve into complex issues. The participatory potential of the Internet offers the means to engage with audiences in ways that were unthinkable when those science writers came together in the 1930s to form a professional association. Today, the potential to reimagine and revitalize science journalism for a digital world is here.

The volume is available as a free PDF download or can be ordered from the American Academy.

At the AEJMC conference, Richard Karpel, executive director of the ASNE, provided an assessment of the state of the newspaper industry in the US.

He said the US had 1,400 daily newspapers. In 2009, the industry had lost 5,200 jobs, about 11% of full time jobs. This compares to 5,900 job losses in 2008

Now there were around 41,000 jobs in the newspaper business. Karpel expected the decline in positions to slow, partly because papers that were in the red are profitable, largely by cutting costs.

Karpel said the major trends in the newspaper industry was a rapid move to online and to mobile platforms.

It meant that newsrooms were seeking to employ journalists with multimedia and social media skills.

Additionally, due to a 24/7 news cycle, Karpel said reporters needed to be able to report and write faster, maintaining an acceptable level of accuracy.

There was also a greater need for journalists to be aware of the business side and be more enterpreneurial.

John Russial of the University of Oregon posed a provocative question at the AEJMC annual conference.

In a research paper, he and co-author Arthur Santana studied whether the industry wants every journalist to have cross-platform skills.

In a survey of 210 US newspapers, he found that different members of the newsrooms rated skills differently.

Russial argued that if role convergence was real, then newsrooms would share a common view of the essential journalism skills of staff.

The most role convergence was among the online staff, who tend to work across media as a rule.

The survey also found a slight increase in the creation of video by newspapers. But most were online doing a few video reports a week. And this was mostly done by photographers.

Russial suggested that there was movement towards cross platform work but questioned if this was as extensive as some might believe.

The study found that convergence of skills was taking place in the online parts of the newsroom, but much less elsewhere

Russial concluded that job specialisation remained the dominant organizing principle, with editors prizing depth rather than breadth.

Change, he suggested, was taking place in newsrooms but not on internet speed.