Tag: Journalism

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Spring New Media Lecture Series

Gearing up for another big week at the J-School, as we compress our semester-long multimedia training program into a single week for mid-career journalists from around the country. As always, lunches and evenings are filled with great speakers, which we’ll be webcasting live. If you’re in the Berkeley area, the conversations are open to the public – come on by!

Featured speakers are Joe Howry, Anthony Plascencia, Colleen Cason, Tom Kisken, Ventura County Star; Lisa Stone, Blog Her; Kevin Sites, Yahoo!; Sean Connelley and Katy Newton, Oakland Tribune; Rob Curley, Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive; Matt McAlister, Yahoo!

The Kevin Sites presentation last year was riveting, and Curley is a must-see for anyone interested in pushing old-school media properties in new directions.

Music: Jonathon Edwards :: Sunshine
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News21

Got pulled off my regular job a couple months ago to work full time on the Carnegie-Knight “Initiative for the Future of Journalism,” an aggregate effort by five of the top journalism schools to revamp and renew approaches to journalism, and ultimately to transform the way journalism is taught.

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five participating deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.

Online now is a starter/brochure site, and currently all of the advance reportage is happening through external blogs. But a compadre and I (yes, we have two webmasters at the jschool now!) have been hard at work building a custom content management system* to meet the project’s fancy multimedia and nested template needs — the largest pure programming job I’ve ever been involved with, and the first time I’ve done any kind of team programming — a very satisfying experience. We’ll be rolling out the “official” site on top of our CMS later this summer. For now, the reporting fellows are scattered all over the globe, gathering material.

The project was recently blogged at Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, at Boing-Boing and also at Utterly Boring, though the interesting stuff is yet to come, once the story packages are completed by the fellows and we wrap up the CMS.

* Will have to post separately sometime on the old build vs. buy CMS question.

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Brown Shoes Don’t Make It

Cringely: Alongside all the other bad news for traditional media, the “brutal honesty” of pay-per-click advertising could make it impossible to reproduce the ad revenue models of the print world — which would in turn make it impossible for print publications to survive online migrations.

There are of course lots of other reasons why print pubs don’t make it online as “shovelware” — going for it without “getting” the web’s unique capabilities spells doom in general. But the fact that focused digital advertising provides a level of transparency that traditional media can’t withstand is something I hadn’t considered.

Shacker’s bold and ruthless prediction for 2006: Two major newspapers will fold entirely.

Thanks Colleen

Cool: MT’s “Post to the future” scheduled posting system works nicely (we used to call this a “drip date” in the CMS we used at ZDNet).

Music: The Jewels :: This Is My Story