JamesEd.com » journalism

New CCMS and New Media Institutions!

James — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:22:18 +0000

Zayed University’s College of Communication and Media Sciences is reinventing itself, as of next year a brand new curriculum will be taught.

Some may ask why change?

The media environment is changing and many, including me, will say the change is for the good.

But others will say journalism is on a death march why even consider it as a career?

Journalism, the art of telling a story is not changing just the focus and delivery is changing and that change has a lot to do with technology, space and time.

There are a few people today who are saying the well worn corporate path to conglomerate journalism is not the way forward.

Wilf Dinnick of OpenFile is one of those people.

Wilf has suggested that what we need today to make journalism relevant is a true local focus, think your neighbourhood.

Wilf also suggested we need to think of journalists as curators of today’s social media.

How do we do this?

New paradigms and in the case of OpenFile a new journalism institution.

Wilf Dinnick talking about OpenFile.ca.

What Wilf has described in his conversation is the path ahead for journalism education in general and what we are doing at Zayed University in the CCMS program.

Have we missed the point about the demise of journalism?

James — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:44:38 +0000

There is a lot of talk, globally, about why journalism is in the state it is.

Some point a finger at politics, others culture, others economics and many say WWW!

So what is it?

How do we even begin to think about the change that is happening in our communication landscape?

I point you to Robert McChesney and John Nichols.

Robert McChesney and John Nichols, who have co-authored four books on the subject. Their latest, The Death and Life of American Journalism, offers a brisk eulogy for the corporate media system, a dismissal of the Internet’s power to revive it, and a call for what they see as a return to government-supported U.S. media. The stakes for American democracy are too high to leave to a “free market” that no longer wants to invest in journalism, McChesney and Nichols argue. If Americans really want public-interest journalism to survive in the 21st century, they must financially support it—to the tune of $35 billion annually, which they note is close to what some European nations spend on media subsidies on a per capita basis.

Maybe they are on to something?

How are we linking news and information to public interest?

Maybe the current media/communication model is wrong?

Maybe the need to hyper localize and pull support from the state is a reality that needs to be re-visited?

Maybe it is not about converging interests and means of distribution but divergence and aggregation?

The Dubai School of Government and Dubai Municipality have begun these very conversation in terms of one aspect of the revised media landscape, social media.

What is clear is there need to be community conversations that look at all sides of this rubiks cube and explore the permutations that work for us here and now regardless of what is going on in other parts of the world contingent on another set of circumstances.

The new world of work

James — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:32:41 +0000

THE 2009 DALTON CAMP LECTURE IN JOURNALISM

Listen

One of the toughest parts of working in education is knowing that you are teaching a group of students of which some will go into careers that at this exact moment do not exist.

So, the question has to be, am I giving them the skills they need?

Unfortunately, and I do mean unfortunately, there are many academics around the world who really truly have no clue and are prepared to teach what they have been teaching the same way they have been teaching it for the last 2 decades with no care in the world for how their students might use, apply or think about that content.

Of course part of the problem is rapid application change of technology.

Technology itself is not really changing that fast but the way we use and apply it is strapped to a rocket heading for orbit.

So what do our teachers and professors need to do?

Look and listen more actively to their environment, oh and dare to try something newer.

I am particularly interested in the changes coming about in journalism and really see the trade having gone full circle back to the personalized niche content it was way back when.

I stumbled, quite literally, upon the Dalton Camp lecture on journalism being delivered by Sue Gardner executive director of the Wikimedia foundation.

For me, anyway, this talk helps me understand how the study of technology and the application of it might be refocused in the classroom and beyond to at least hint at how students might use old and new tools being delivered in academia for their future.

The lecture was broadcast on Ideas a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program.

I would love to read your comments!

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/audio.html is where you can hear more Ideas programs.

Here are the details of the Camp lecture.

November 26
THE 2009 DALTON CAMP LECTURE IN JOURNALISM

Listen

Journalism is facing new challenges as it evolves in the context of online environments. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation delivers the Dalton Camp Lecture at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.

Smart Journalism

James — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:34:30 +0000

Today the way we do journalism is developing before our eyes and many reporters do not even see it happening!

Smart phones are making the distribution of news and opinion NEW.

In the past I have called what is coming iJournalism but now I realize the new technology enables journalism is smart journalism!

Smart phones will be the saviour of journalism as we have known it!

Journalists need retraining, sort of!

James — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:12:04 +0000

Today more than ever journalists need to be retrained on how to connect their stories to their multiple audiences.

The problem faced by journalists today is very simply that their occupation is transforming and they do not know how to transform along with it.

When we academics talk about the changes taking place to journalism we love to use the word converging!

I hate to break it to those academics but the convergence had happened and we are already on to the next thing!

One academic I spoke to today suggested that there are different understandings of convergence, no there is not!

Convergence as the 1st hit on a Google search suggests is a simple and I might add dated concept!

Search Results

Technological convergence – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to Media convergence?: Convergence of media occurs when multiple products come together to form one product with the advantages of all of them, …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence – Cached – Similar

In 1990 YES convergence was easily a newspapers website with audio, video and links on it.

Today we have a whole new journalism emerging because technology has advanced in a way that was never expected, control and creation have been very broadly moved from the hands of the few, the controller’s, to the hands of the many, the consumers.

And then along came WEB2.0, the whole convergent model was then thrown into the wind!

But there are plenty of academics and media organizations who are holding onto the old school convergent model much like a security blanket.

I would suggest the reason we see journalists and journalism organizations holding onto the old ideas of convergence, remember I am suggesting we already converged and have moved on, is because they are unsure what this means for them.

We hear a lot about citizen journalism, which is not convergence but a means of communicating information among the mass audience.

We read a lot about WEB2.0 and which is also not journalism but a delivery system for conversations and stories.

So where are we if convergence has come and gone?

We are in a new place, a place that sees the simultaneous existence of old media (with their converged offering), citizen journalism with everyone telling a story and what I am calling the iJournalist.

So where are we today then?

We are in a place where the writing, research, editing and presentation skills of journalism are as important as ever.

We are in a place where the variety of sources available to the journalist have changed and now include the immediate interaction of the public on the ground, the citizen journalist.

We are in a place where speed is important and deadlines have gone from being in hours to literally in minutes.

We are in a place where editing and production takes place during an event and the story is posted before, during and after that event.

We are in a place where there are multiple and simultaneous delivery systems that may but often do not reside in a single place although they can and often are collected.

We are in a place where journalism takes place using a smart form and is consumed using that same phone.

So what does this mean for journalism and where does the retraining fit in?

Journalists need to be trained for speed.

Journalists need to be trained on the new art of sourceology.

Journalists and editors need to be able to communicate fast and efficiently and both might today find themselves in the field.

Journalists need to understand the different delivery systems for their stories.

Journalists need to understand the new configuration needed for stories and the fact that this will influence the audience.

Journalists need to understand that their audience is no longer static but dynamic.

Journalists need to understand that their work is being consumed,in many cases from a phone!

I believe what we are about to witness is the resurgence of journalism as a career!

And for those who are not part of the 4th screen generation, wed to paper, it is time for a bit of retraining!

The New Face of Journalism I Imagine.

James — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:36:23 +0000

I believe journalism is in a crisis situation, the crisis of being irrelevant.

I believe that journalism is on the brink of becoming irrelevant as a field of study NOT because students are abandoning the field of study, but because the professors and practitioners of the trade are unable to grasp, see, live, adapt to the rapidly changing environment the news lives in.

YES THINGS ARE CHANGING.

YES WE ALL NEED TO RE-CONCEPTUALIZE.

TOO BAD THE OLD GUARD IS PUTTING UP A WALL OF PENS AND PAPER, I HOPE THE SHOW IS A S GOOD AS LES MISSERABLES!

So what do we need to do?

The solution is in your hand and staring you in the face!

We need to get our students totally involved in the journalism/storytelling process as it exists at the grassroots level.

I would call this pocket journalism.

Almost all students are in the possession of a Nokia/Blackberry/IPhone or variation of the ever common smartphone and they could use these as reporting and publishing tools if they knew how.

So lets show them!

Why can’t the old guard professors show the new guard the way forward combing the old and new?

We can have a print, audio, video presence tomorrow on every campus around the world, ok lets start here in the UAE that is manageable, REALLY tomorrow, if we embrace the idea that technology enables grassroots journalism, not to be confused with instant or citizen journalism.
We have a new journalism and it is hand held and App driven.

The sites below are the new tools of journalism.

www.audioboo.fm
www.twitter.com
www.12seconds.tv
www.youtube.com
www.facebook.com

By using a smartphone and only the smartphone we can create an instant, not to be confused with point and shoot journalism, media presence on the global stage! Students can talk to students, the displaced can talk to the displaced and leaders can talk to all and explain what is happening, why and how things will be resolved.
Journalism goes from being near history to immediate history.
What do we need? Build the living evolving course that applies our writing, research, design and thinking skills to the modern art of journalism.

Who is teaching the course?

Where is the course being taught?

Who are the students?

Tick tock, time to get activated the iPhone has changed everything when it comes to education and specifically journalism education time to get in front of the wave!