We teach storytelling.

Some of the tools to tell stories are traditional, paper and the like.

Some of the tools to tell a story are electronic.

And the constant battle today is to find the mix, the right mix, of traditional and new journalism tools and technique.

What we often seem to forget is that tools and technique are not mutually exclusive.

This is a must read!

Journalists today need to work together and realize, and they don’t, that it is as much about how the story is communicated as what the story is.

The framework be it digital or hardcopy is the same, share ideas!

The last paragraph of the MUST READ article sums it up.

Foster dynamic mentorships

Traditional journalists often trot over to their (often newly-hired) social media editors and digital aggregators and ask those journalists for practical advice: how to use Twitter, how to navigate Facebook, how to mine data for stories. What once felt like a war between traditional and digital journalism has now settled into a somewhat uneasy truce – and into a (sometimes grudging) recognition that, increasingly, “digital” and “journalism” are inextricably connected.

But we’re all in this together, of course. And the onus is on digital journalists to welcome veteran reporters into the future’s fold — to help them navigate the new tools that will inform, if not define, the shape journalism takes going forward.

But the onus is also on digital journalists to learn from the veterans – to learn reporting methods and narrative techniques and skills that have nothing to do with Google or Facebook or Twitter, and everything to do with journalism as it’s been practiced throughout its history. The veterans may not be able to show you how to create Fusion tables, but I can promise that, from them, you’ll learn something new that will help your reporting more than the latest tools ever could.

I just read an excellent piece on the re-invention of journalism, sort of.

There is no question the journalism many of us have grown up with is changing or has changed.

Just the shift from broadsheet to tabloid has facilitated a very real change in the way stories are presented.

But where and when are we really thinking about fundamental changes in the way we do journalism?

The the Knight Foundation and Mozilla  have teamed up to create the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, this is really rather cool watch the video!

What is it all about?

This spring, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla took the premise of hacks and hackers collaboration and pushed it a step further, creating a contest to encourage journalists, developers, programmers, and anyone else so inclined to put together ideas to innovate news.

After 4 weeks of learning lab lectures there were some interesting results.

Finding 1:
* Open source is about transparency.
* Journalism has traditionally not been about transparency, instead keeping projects under wraps — the art of making the sausage and then keeping it stored inside newsrooms.

Finding 2:
* Open source is iterative.
* Journalism is iterative, but news organizations generally aren’t (yet).

Finding 3:
* Open source is about standards.
* So is journalism.

Finding 4:
* Open-source development is collaborative, free, and flexible.
* Producing news costs money, and open source may not get to the heart of journalism’s business problems.

What we have is an interesting group of findings that point in the direction of how we need to be thinking about journalism.

I particularly liked this idea.

The goal of MoJo’s learning lab, and the innovation challenge it’s part of, is simply to make the news better technologically — by making it more user-friendly, more participatory, etc. It’s not about helping news organizations succeed financially.

Making the news more user friendly and participatory.

I think if we can sort out how the news fits into the community and how the community can indeed interact and collaborate with it there will be a renaissance in journalism as a profession.

Is it really that bad if news begins to take on a more entertaining stance?

Isn’t the real issue whether the message is getting through?

The Swiss have found that what is being covered in their constituency is entertainment and less news.

The Swiss media tends to prioritise entertainment over news, according to a report into the country’s media released by Zurich University on Thursday.

It found that disasters, football and scandals dominated reporting in 2010 – ahead of the Swiss diplomatic spat with Libya, cabinet elections and the UBS tax crisis.

The Swiss Yearbook on media quality found that the media was reaching fewer people.

Maybe it is time they though more about how the news is reported?

Why is entertainment or soft news so much more engaging?

What does the Swiss media think?

The report into media quality in Switzerland is the second of its kind, with last year’s inaugural study causing a furore after it suggested that the popularity of news websites and free newspapers was eroding journalistic standards.

Maybe the standards of journalism are evolving and maybe there is no such thing as the news media but news medias!

Malcolm Gladwell spoke about this idea of there not being one definitive product but products!

Maybe it is time to stop thinking of media in singular terms.

Watch this video and think in terms of medias.

This is literally food for thought!

Or should the question be do journalism schools want to re-imagine what they are teaching, why and how?

The journalism of yesterday and the journalism of today are rather different!

Sure the physical act is the same, sort of, but the environment is changing if not changed.

It is no longer acceptable, as far as I am concerned, for one time journalists to parachute into journalism schools and teach based on what was.

Today we need our journalism professors to not only teach but to engage in the industry they are part of.

The big change as far as journalism is concerned today is the push to hyper local publications that may not even be traditionally published.

Going hyper local is a trip for the old school journalist who worked all his or her life to get to the big publication or go national.

But there are a lot of people talking re-imagining journalism.

There are academic strategies.

There are people talking.

There are new journalism students ready to act.

So how do we start?

The five key strategies for re-inventing local journalism include:

1. For-profit media organizations must re-invent themselves to extend the role and values of journalism in interactive ways.
2. Not-for-profit and non-traditional m
3. Media must be important sources of local journalism.
4. Higher education, community and non-profit institutions can be hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.
5. Greater urgency must be placed on relevance, research and revenues to support local journalism.
6. Government at all levels should support policies that create an environment for sustainable, quality local journalism.

Local, interactive and collaborative are 3 words that need to be put on every surface the NEW breed of journalist will look at.

So where do we start?

We need to start thinking more about the users/consumers of the information and not the industry.

And a good tool to begin the conversation that needs to take place is the Re-Imagine report.

Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World

A White Paper on Recommendations 1 and 3 of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy

Download PDF | View on Scribd |

Think the opposite of tabloid to the micro-point journalism.

I am talking about the long, full of detail, investigative story that we seldom get to read today in our commercial driven media.

Well sure if we are reading a news magazine we find some of these but even there the long story has become a rare breed.

Well  the old journalist can breath a sigh of relief, for now, there is a new kid on the block the micro-publishing effort called Byliner.

As Bloomberg Business Week says,

Byliner is one of the most recent entrants into the micro-publishing field, offering a selection of longer works by well-known nonfiction authors such as Krakauer, who wrote a long, magazine-style article about the alleged irregularities involving a charitable effort by fellow mountain climber Greg Mortenson. The piece was available as a free download for the first 72 hours—and saw more than 50,000 copies downloaded—and then was expected to become a paid download. Byliner said it’s planning to publish original works soon by authors William Vollmann and Anthony Swofford as well.

Byliner is offering an alternative press at an affordable rate, $2.99 for a Kindle or iPad download.

Byliner has only been soft launched, maybe they were testing the water, but there is no question there is an appetite for this brand of journalism.

50,000 downloads of the 1st story is pretty good.

Why not read Byline?

As Byline says itself, “Great writers. Great stories. Readable in a single sitting.”

Fingers crossed!

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.

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.

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 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!

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