By Mindy McAdams

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Teaching Online Journalism

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Notes from the classroom and observations about today’s practice of journalism online

Archive for the “teaching” category

Changing culture from the top down

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

If you were a fly on the wall inside any North American j-school, I think you would conclude that some faculty members are very forward-looking, some others have chained themselves to the barricades of old, outdated techniques, and a lot more are caught in the middle. There’s a lesson in this for newsrooms.
Vin Crosbie observed […]

Idea for class: Blogging assignment

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

One of the things we try to get journalism students to do is, um, read other people’s blogs. And not only their friends’ blogs! So I had a brainstorm for an assignment:

Choose any three blogs from this list of The world’s 50 most powerful blogs (from The Guardian). Make an introductory post linking to each […]

Testable, measurable skills we should teach in j-school

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Like a lot of j-schools, mine has been discussing updates to the curriculum. Much of that discussion concerns skills. So we ended up saying we need a list of skills. Then someone said, yeah, I’ve seen that kind of list, and I don’t know what some of that stuff means. If you say the students […]

Advice to journalism students: Forget grad school!

Thursday, April 3, 2008

While my internships post is still relatively fresh, I’d like to offer something else to journalism students who are really keen on becoming journalists — and maybe some of you in the newsrooms will weigh in as well.
Dear students:
This post is for your mom and dad, who are pressuring you to go to grad school […]

Journalists need business sense

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Here’s Paul Conley’s latest advice for those who are training the next generation of journalists:

Give up on trying to convert your peers.
Instead, push to give your students the tools that will allow them to see the world and the publishing industry clearly.
Fight to have a business finance and/or accounting course as a requirement for graduation.
Force […]

Catch-22 in journalism internships

Monday, March 31, 2008

Go to work for 10 or 12 or 15 weeks without any pay.
Give up your ability to work full-time and save money for the coming school year.
Pay rent in two places, if you can’t sublet your costly university-town apartment.
And — oh, yeah — pay for three academic credits (at full price) at your university while […]

Learning from MSNBC.com (part 2)

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Unlike that guy in the movie “The Graduate” who said just one word to Dustin Hoffman — “Plastics” — an MSNBC.com deputy editor had two words for journalism students:
Databases and Flash.
In fact, MSNBC.com’s Tom Brew told us he had been given those two words by Hal Straus, the interactivity and communities editor at Washingtonpost.com. […]