An extensive and detailed guide for educators on investigative journalism from the people who produce the show seen on PBS called Exposé, America’s Investigative Reports. It includes links to useful pieces by professionals about selecting stories, conducting interviews, locating documents and packaging stories.
They are a challenge every journalism educator faces at some point — students who cut and paste material from stories on the Internet; fabricate quotes; or pad bibliographies and source lists. In this thoughtful piece, Alex Gillis, a journalism instructor at Ryerson, describes his first experience with cheating students and what he learned from it. He outlines some of the surprising…
This website includes links to a few short, effective tutorials about such things as using RSS readers, DIGG basics, blogging and alerts that online journalism students are bound to find useful as part of any lesson on new online tools. They are produced by an online marketing firm and public relations firm, but don’t let that stop you…
If you are teaching a journalism course about blogs, or using blogs, you may find this list by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU helpful. It is an initital list of blog postings (with links) that have revealed information that served the public good before the information appeared in the mainstream media. He has invited others to send…
An instructor who took on the challenge of teaching a senior workshop in online journalism at a university in Texas outlines how he tried to ensure the focus remained on journalism and not skills training and reflects on the lessons he learned.
If you are looking for exercises to help students learn to write effective headlines, you may find this site helpful. It’s an online interactive workshop for which copy editors have submitted stories. You read the story, write a headline in the space provided and then click to find out what the pros wrote, and then…
In this Chicago Magazine article, the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism, responds to critics who say his new curriculum sacrifices the principles of journalism for the principles of marketing. John Lavine has kept his promise to “blow up” the old curriculum and replace it, this fall, with one that emphasizes new media and “an understanding…
Dan Gillmor, a leading online journalist and advocate of citizen journalism, offers his ideas about how journalism schools are not keeping pace with the new demands of the re-invented world of journalism. He outlines his ideas about what should be taught instead of the age old courses on Beginning Newswriting.
News21 is a project sponsored by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations in the U.S. in which specially-selected journalism graduates were challenged to produce a journalistic package about Faith in America in ways that push the boundaries of how online journalism is produced. For anyone looking for new ideas about what’s possible online, this site may…
Many award-winning journalists never studied journalism in university, raising the question whether people who don’t study journalism make better journalists. In an attempt to explore that idea, Betty Medsger, a leading U.S. journalism educator and former Washington Post reporter, argues that journalism educators would be more effective in improving journalism and journalism education if they became…