Teaching Journalism

Social media is so new, it's easy to claim you're an expert on the subject. But some journalism professors are finding ways to teach the new medium as part of the curriculum....

Yahoo has decided it's time for an alternative to traditional style guides when it comes to text written for the Web. In July, 2010, it will launch The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.  Like the CP Style Guide, it will be a guide to grammar, punctuation and style for online writers and editors. But the Yahoo guide suggests some different spellings. For example, it says email should not include a hyphen and smartphone should be one word. 

It will be more than just a style guide, too. It will include advice about adapting written material for an online audience, making the text more accessible to search engines and writing strong headlines. It plans to release a print version of the guide, as well as versions for Kindle and the Ipad.

Will Canadian journalism educators teaching online journalism consider using this?

This is a step by step guide from the BBC about how to produce digitial stories, which it defines as "mini-movies" or "short, personal, multimedia scraps of TV that people can make for themselves."

But even if that's not your goal, there are good sections here on how to develop story ideas and how to gather and edit audio and video.

A very gifted, very tech savvy and very generous multimedia professor has produced a 42-page guide to basic mutimedia skills for young journalists and made it available for anyone to download free, use and share as long as it is attributed to her. Mindy McAdams teaches multimedia journalism at the University of Florida and writes the very helpful blog Teaching Journalism Online. This guide began as a series of 15 blog posts earlier this year but when so many people requested she pull all the posts together into one document, she did. She posted the link to the PDF version of her guide on her blog, along with details about how it should be attributed.