One U.S. journalism educator was less than impressed with his first visit to the annual conference of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. Steve Fox, a multimedia Journalism Coordinator at the University of Massachusetts, says he was disappointed to watch so many educators at this summer’s conference in Boston be so “print-centric.” He…
It’s that time of year. Profs across the country are busy preparing their courses for the fall term and producing a detailed syllabus for each course they will teach. How many are willing to circulate drafts of their course outlines, especially online, to seek suggestions, comments and feedback? Not many, in my experience. This blog post…
Choosing the right journalism school or program is more challenging than ever, given the changes in the industry and the uncertainty about the future of journalism as we know it. This new media journalist and blogger has some useful advice for prospective j-school students about picking the right school. Pat Thornton’s advice is for students in…
Teaching interviewing requires more than just giving students lists of dos and don’ts. Playing examples of television and radio interviews to illustrate the good and bad habits of interviewers is usually more effective. If you want to add some humour to the lesson, here’s a blog post with a link to an old comedy sketch.…
One journalism educator is rewriting her lessons for the fall semester to include more straight talk for j-students and less emphasis on old arguments about the role of journalists in a democracy. Danna Walker, a j-prof at American University in Washington, has come up with what she calls the Seven Laws of Journalism. Among them:…
New York University professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen led an online chat at Poynter recently to offer advice about to teach blogging and answer questions from educators about things such as how to construct and evaluate assignments related to blogging.The archived chat is available at this link. He returned a week later for an encore chat to…
A very public disagreement between two Carleton journalism professors about journalism students played itself out on the opinion pages of the Ottawa Citizen this past week. It all began with a column by Associate Professor Andrew Cohen called “Students of Mediocrity” in which he wrote about what he called “the trouble with today’s students — their…
Some journalism schools are adapting to the changing media world with major renovations to their curricula. They are updating their skills courses, teaching more multimedia journalism and offering courses to help the students become entrepreneurial. At one U.S. University, instead of studying the “business of journalism” and learning about the broken business model, students are now…
Salon.com offers some advice to journalism professors who may be feeling guilty about teaching students skills to work in a dying industry. The advice from Cary Tennis: “I do not think it is such a terrible thing that your journalism students are entering an uncertain world. It’s the kind of world that is ripe for…
Columbia University’s School of Journalism appears to be facing the same internal conflict about how, or even whether, to change its curricula to teach new media skills as so many other j-schools, including those in Canada. Some argue we can’t trade teaching core journalistic values and principles in favour of “playing with toys.” Others say…