Mindy McAdams
Educators confront tough decisions on how much scarce time in a semestershould be spent on teaching software tools vs. teaching reporting andwriting. But first, one has to define what online journalism is -- and whatmakes it unique.
Mindy McAdamsPosted: 2004-04-09You may feel excitement or dread -- or a combination of the two -- if youhave been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It's atall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you'relikely to wish you had at least three semesters in which to covereverything.
This article assumes that you must fit it all into one semester (possiblyeven a 10-week quarter) and that this course will offer students in yourprogram their sole opportunity to learn about online journalism. Yikes!Where should you begin?
First, ask some basic questions:
Will the students produce an online publication as part of the course?
Will the course include some lab time, no lab time, or will it be taughtentirely in a computer lab?
Are there journalism prerequisites, such as a reporting course?
Are there computer science prerequisites, such as a basic Internet course?
The answers will help you figure out how much of the course can or should bedevoted to skills, such as basic HTML, Dreamweaver and Photoshop. If thecourse will be a large lecture with only one hour a week in breakout labsessions taught by grad students, you probably cannot produce an onlinemagazine. If the primary goal of the course is to produce an onlinejournalism site, you might spend the first half of the semester teachingskills and the second half on reporting and writing.
After you have determined how much of the course, or how much of each classmeeting, will be devoted to instruction in producing online journalism, youwill know how much time is available for lecture and assignments aboutpracticing online journalism.
The Debate About Software Skills
You could spend an entire semester listening to conflicting advice fromjournalism educators about how much time should be devoted to teachingsoftware tools. The opinions run the gamut from "Just tell the students toread the Help files; don't teach software explicitly" to "Teach them to doall the tasks they might do in an online journalism job, including writingJavaScript and editing video."
Your decision is made more difficult by working online journalists who say,"Just teach them how to write and get the facts straight. We can teach themthe software after we hire them." Before you heed that advice, however, takea look at some ads for online positions at news organizations:
From TCPalm.com (portal for several southeast Florida Scripps newspapers):"The position requires a self-motivated, skilled journalist with anunderstanding of Web design and coding, as well as copy editing skills andnews judgment. Programming abilities would be a plus."
From TheUnion.com (daily newspaper, circ. 17,000): "The Web Editor will keepthe site updated as news unfolds throughout the day and work with staff tocreate Web-exclusive content. Creativity, technical innovation, soundediting skills and writing talent all will be vital for this position."
Requirements for a photo production intern at Washingtonpost.com: "Knowledgein and proficiency with Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, DeBabelizerand/or Macromedia Freehand; working ability with both Macintosh and PCplatforms; ability to work as part of a team; working knowledge of graphicsfile formats and production tools; multimedia or photography experience."
Skills do matter, and they can give the aspiring young journalist a leg upin getting a good internship -- or a good first job. If students can comeout of an online journalism course with at least a rudimentary understandingof HTML and enough knowledge of Dreamweaver and Photoshop to build a basicWeb page with links and images, it may be enough to open some doors thatwould otherwise be closed to them.
Find descriptions of online journalism jobs at:
?JournalismJobs.com (search menu for Web designer, Webmaster)?MediaBistro.com (search keywords for Web)?Monster.com (search keywords for Web editor)?Washingtonpost.com (listing of internal jobs and internships)
What Is Online Journalism?
We'll get back to skills later on, but first consider other key informationabout online journalism that you need to include in this course.
Students often have no clear idea about online journalism as a form thatdiffers from print or broadcast journalism. After all, they've seennewspaper stories and TV news segments on Web sites, and there is verylittle difference between the Web versions and the originals. Your firstchallenge will be to show students that there is something called onlinejournalism that can be distinguished from other forms of journalism.
Fortunately, it's easy to find examples of good online journalism by usingsites such as:
Andrew DeVigal's Interactive Narratives?The Society for News Design's SND.ies?J-Lab?NetMedia?Online Journalism Awards
Once you have established what online journalism is, you can focus on someof the elements that clearly distinguish it from print and broadcastjournalism. Three areas are worthy of at least one full class period apiece:
Ethics of linking; choosing what to link as an editorial decision.
Types of media used online (e.g., audio, video, still photos,infographics, maps, animation, text); choosing appropriate media to tell agiven story.
Interactivity: discussion forums, newsgroups, chat, e-mail, Listservs.
You'll also want to cover:
Copyright: Where did the online news site get its graphics, photos, audioand video? Can anyone use an AP photo? Can you rip a song from a music CDand use it as a soundtrack for your photo slide show? Many studentsmistakenly believe that it's legal to use copyrighted work if they include acredit line. Because it's so easy to copy material from any Web page and useit on their own pages, students need to hear the facts about copyright.
Verifying information: Online editors often enhance a news story by addingrelevant links to online resources. How do you know when a source isreliable? Students can be taught various methods for verifying the accuracyof information they link to, as well as efficient ways to search forbackground information and to double-check facts and figures. When providinga link to outside information, use the title of the resource as the linkedtext, and also identify the source of the linked information. Example: Codeof Ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists
Types of online journalism jobs: Students with no artistic talent or lowconfidence in their software skills can be put off by elaborate multimediapackages. They may be too quick to say, "I could never do that!" What theyneed to understand is that the most complex packages are produced by teamsof writers, editors, designers, photographers and others -- and some of theteam members may not officially be part of the "online staff" of the newsorganization. Chances are good that today's journalism students willcollaborate on an online project sometime in their careers, even if theytake a traditional print or broadcast job.
Common assigned activities for students include:
?Scavenger hunts (find certain kinds of content or features at online newssites).?Web site analysis (who built it? Is it reliable? How do you know?).?Enhance a specific print story with relevant links.?Create a resource links page for a specific subject or beat area.?Sign onto a Listserv and report on the topics discussed there.?Interview an online editor, producer or designer about his or her jobduties.
See the resources list for reference materials about these topics.
Creating an Online Publication
If you intend to produce an online publication as part of this course, anytime you have left over (after covering the topics discussed above) probablywill be spent writing, editing and getting the site online. Rather than askstudents who barely know anything about Web design to wrestle withmulti-column page layouts, it might be better to remove site design fromtheir plate.
For example, the design and production may be the responsibility of agraduate student who already has some Web design experience. Aim to reducethe technical aspects of producing the site to the smallest part of thecourse, allowing the students to focus on reporting, writing, editing andlinking.The drawback to this approach is that students might not learn much that isspecific to online journalism.
Once they focus on reporting a story, they may fall back into patterns theyhave already practiced in earlier courses, and their links and other onlineenhancements may be no more than an afterthought. It's quite challenging toget students with no prior experience in photography, audio, video oranimation to produce good online work in a single semester.
Mary McGuire teaches the course at Carleton University, in Ottawa, thatproduces the Capital News site. "We make it a priority to teach and evaluate(students') journalism skills -- pitching good story ideas, gatheringinformation, producing focused stories using a variety of elements (such as)tightly written text, photos, interactive features, audio and even videoelements," she wrote in an e-mail. "We don抰 even try to teach them thetechnical skills needed to design or produce our magazine."
Students working on the main news section learn "just enough Photoshop" toedit photos taken with the school's digital cameras, and "just enoughDreamweaver" to add stories and other elements into an HTML template.Students working on the special "Connections" section choose a topic, gathermaterial and present it "in creative Web-friendly ways" without the standardtemplates used on the rest of the site, McGuire wrote.
The key to this process is "a talented technical support person, who knowsWeb design and how to use Flash," who works with the students to put theirconcepts online. For the first few years, that person was a grad student.
Recently the School of Journalism and Communication created a position for atechnical support person assigned to work with the students in McGuire'scourse for three days out of each two-week publication cycle. The rest ofthe time, his job is computer support. He also leads a one-day workshop onPhotoshop and Dreamweaver for students.
Another approach to producing a publication is to put students into teamsthat encompass several different skill sets, then encourage team members tobrainstorm and discover the best way to tell each story.
Thom Lieb, who teaches at Towson University, recalls a story about a tattooartist in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Md. To produce a Website about local neighborhoods, students from each of four classes were sentout as a team:
?Broadcast Journalism?Documentary Film and Video?Photojournalism?Writing for New Media
The broadcast student who reported about the tattoo artist came back withaudio -- and nothing else. Lieb wrote in an e-mail: "It never crossed hismind that the story might benefit from visual elements, even though he wasteamed with two visual media students. We all talked about it, andeventually the photo student covered the same story. But even then, it wastwo separate perspectives as opposed to a multimedia piece."
If you're not wedded to the idea of producing a publication site, you mightfocus instead on producing one or more story packages, built around aspecific theme or topic. With only one or two technically skilled students,a class can produce a good piece of journalism that has real online appeal.An example is "A Chilling Effect" (low-bandwidth HTML/high-bandwidth Flash),a package from journalism students at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,that won an Online Journalism Award for Creative Use of the Medium in 2003.
The single-story package approach may end up teaching students more newconcepts than producing a full publication.
Basic Production Skills
After you have figured out how much Web production work will be part of thecourse, and whether the students will produce any group projects or apublication site, you must estimate when they will be ready to start doingthat work. Most journalism students will have to start learning at SquareOne, unless your school requires a basic Internet course (taught by thecomputer science faculty, for example).
A little HTML at the beginning usually pays off later in a betterunderstanding of the code underlying every Web page, but there's no reasonto require students to spend more than one or two lab periods on HTML. Afterthat, concentrate on the basic use of Dreamweaver and Photoshop, as theseare the two programs most commonly used in professional Web site production.
Here's what you might expect in hours of lab instruction:
1. Basic HTML, including links and images: 1-2 hours2. Basic Dreamweaver, including links and images: 1-2 hours3. File management and uploading to the Web server: 30 minutes4. Dreamweaver tables for page layout/principles of page design: 2 hours5. Basic CSS (fonts and colors only): 1 hour6. Basic photo editing in Photoshop: 2 hours7. Creating display type and buttons in Photoshop: 2 hours
Knowledge of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is becoming more and moreimportant as most news organizations adopt large-scale content managementsystems for handling daily articles and other online materials. It may seemeasier to forgo CSS and teach the old, outmoded ways of controlling colorsand fonts on Web pages, but in the long run you would be doing the studentsa disservice.
As part of this instruction, courses typically cover (or review):
Color theory and Web-safe colors?Typography?Design principles?Writing useful links?Writing page headings and page titles
Common activities include building:
A bio page?A r閟um?page?A photo gallery?A 5-10 page feature story or research report, including images andrelevant links
In Ball State's new curriculum, the first "convergence" course includesbroadcast, online and print journalism. (The two journalism prerequisitesare Information Gathering and Journalism Writing Skills.) Students mustattend five 50-minute skills workshops scheduled outside regular class time.Three required projects are based on the workshops, which cover:
Digital audio recording and editing?Digital camera and Photoshop?Online I?Online II?Final project
Bob Papper, who team-teaches the course, wrote in an e-mail: "One of thebest moves we made was hiring a full-time workshop coordinator. Technically,she answers to both departments, and she teaches almost all of thejournalism-related (both print and broadcast) technical stuff -- all ofwhich we have moved out of the regular class periods."
The final project consists a small-group-produced package that examines acommunity issue in depth, including a 1,000-word print story and a Web sitefor which students write separate stories, produce 90-second audio stories,and shoot and edit photos.
Topics in Online Journalism
In addition to the essentials discussed above (linking, media types,interactivity, copyright, verifying information, and online journalism jobtypes), several other topics are worth discussing if you have the time tofit them in. Of course, you can mix and match from this list.
Convergence:1. Corporate ownership, partnerships, content sharing;2. Overlapping job duties, multiple skills sets, working as part of a team;3. Entertainment as journalism and journalism as entertainment.
Writing for the Web: Terse style, use of bullets, chunking; specialconsiderations for writing link text.
Weblogs, both as a form of journalism and as sources.
Is the Web changing journalism as it is practiced in other media? Forexample, is the 24-7 news cycle encouraging sloppy sourcing?
Is the Web changing journalism as it is practiced in various countriesaround the world? For example, is access to news sources from outsidenational boundaries affecting the stories that are covered in-country?
Legal issues, including Web site privacy policies and terms of use.
Business models, including ethics of advertising online and uses ofsponsored content.
Web specials, including photo galleries and narrated slide shows.
Uses of animated infographics and maps.
Comparison of audio and video on the Web and their counterparts in radioand TV.
Three more advanced topics that might require more than one class to coverthoroughly:
Communities online, both as sources of information and as communitiesworth covering in their own right.
Nonprofit organizations' Web sites, both as sources and as competition forjournalism.
Web database applications, such as TBO.com's CrimeTracker, which could becombined with a brief introduction to computer-assisted reportingtechniques.
Intermediate Production Skills
If you've conceived this course as primarily a skills course (or you have agenerous allotment of lab time), you'll want to add some more contentrelated to producing online media:
CSS (padding, margins, positioning)?Screen/page layouts and design?Navigation and site structure?Usability issues?Audio?Image maps?Animated GIFs?Some JavaScript (rollovers, pop-up windows)?HTML forms
Students should be able to create a Web site with multiple pages that have aconsistent appearance and a clear navigation system. Keep in mind that thesetopics are demanding (of both the instructor and the students) and shouldonly be tackled if the course is intended to be a more comprehensive Webproduction course, or if the students have already had some Web productionexperience in an earlier course.
Advanced Production Skills
It's probably unreasonable to try to teach advanced online production skillsin the first course, simply because these require a lot of hands-on timefrom the students. Any one of these could easily take 6-10 hours of labtime, or three weeks.
Flash animation and interaction?Video editing and compression?Web databases
Rosental Alves, who teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, made Flash amajor part of his course this year. For the previous six years that hetaught the course, titled Multimedia Journalism, it was focused on creatingcomplete Web zines. Students were divided into groups of five or six; ineach group, usually one or two students took on the role of Webmaster.
"It's a writing class -- my focus is on journalism," Alves said in a phoneinterview. "This year I turned the class into a news provider for thestudent newspaper, the Daily Texan. We will provide individual stories orpackages to them."
The students this year are in two groups, one covering the music scene inAustin, the other covering the local film industry. "We don't have to forcethem to learn Flash programming, but we should encourage those who areinterested in this, and let the others know the potential of this software,"Alves said.
So while some students in the class are interested in learning Flash (andAlves' teaching assistant knows Flash and can help them learn it), otherstudents will not be required to learn much beyond the basics of Flash.
"We have been doing Flash packages in the industry since 1996," Alves said."With the significant increase in broadband for consumers today, it's veryimportant that we show the kids this. Even if they don't learn the technicalparts, they will learn how to use these resources."
Story Planning
When a team puts together a multimedia story package, a significant amountof planning usually takes place before the assets (e.g., photos, audio,video) are collected. A designer may sketch out a framework, or fullstoryboards, for the package (including the navigation), on a largewhiteboard where everyone on the team can see and discuss it. The assetsneeded will be discussed and assigned to various journalists, who will thengo out and gather them.
This process can be studied by deconstructing an existing online storypackage to determine what assets were used and what skills the journalists,designers and producers brought to bear. Students can be assigned to"reverse engineer" a multimedia package and try to figure out how all thepieces came together. Students can extrapolate from what they have alreadylearned in other courses about gathering information for stories and, indoing so, learn about how to apply skills they may not have yet.
The final step in this exercise is for the students to estimate how longeach step would take and to gauge the total production time for the package.
Conclusion
This article has not provided a simple blueprint for constructing a courseabout online journalism, because any simplified design would leave outelements that might be perfect for your program.
Consider the resources available to you and determine what will work bestfor you and your students. It would be possible to create a course that wasall online skills training, or a course that included no online skillstraining -- and yet, most courses examined for this article contained someskills training and hands-on production work, in combination with lecturesand assignments about the practice of online journalism today.
You should be able to use this article as a guide to select "one from ColumnA, one from Column B" and build the course best suited to your backgroundand experience and to your program. Make sure to consult the resources pageand the example syllabi that accompany this article.
