Rounding-up discussion

I’m currently carrying about 22 open browser windows and 123 to-be-read-later Bloglines items, so I need to get some of this stuff off my mind. So: a collection of articles with brief comments:

Students: our computer experience is obvious. Steve Safran has a well-commented-on post about journalists-to-be needing to identify their computer skills to potential employers. Young folk who have the idea that those doing the hiring automatically assume they have well-developed computer skills just ’cause they’re young are following themselves. And, being able to write and save a Word document, upload a video to YouTube or send an IM doesn’t leave you all set for online journalism. When you’re applying for a job, detail all your skills. And, if you don’t have journalistic computer skills, go get ‘em.

Next.

Overcoming knowledge…, by Cyndy Green, follows logically from the above. The short version of her message is you never know it all and you never stop learning, a message she’s trying to drill into the heads of her high school students. She’s right: all of the journalists I ever worked with who figured they knew it all and didn’t need to learn more (about journalism, writing, themselves) are mostly still stuck where I met them or out of the business.

Next.

Big stories — too big. Mindy McAdams, perhaps the leading light in the development of online, multimedia journalism (through her teaching, her book, her blog and her enthusiasm), sticks up for print — so far — when it comes to big stories. The problem, she writes, is that we haven’t yet figured out how to package those big, sprawling stories online. This is another post I agree with: I can’t count the number of large online stories I have bailed out on halfway through because getting to all the good bits was too much work. “We should think of how to do this better,” she writes, and that’s a challenge worth taking up. (It’s a personal challenge, too, as I start remaking one of my courses for the fall to take it from basic multimedia story-telling to developing online story packages.)

Next.

Three essential web skills they should teach in J school. Howard Owens passes them along: how to be a guide and a researcher, how to grow audience, and how to lead communities. Admirable skills all. The first is relatively easy, being an extension of what journalists are already trained to do. But when it comes to growing audience and leading communities, while I can point my students to examples and strategies and start a thought process, these are things that are born of feet-on-the-ground experience. The idea of leading communities, for example, relies to a great extent on the experience of being an active, engaged member of a community. J-schools can start the process on these three, but bringing them to fruition is going to depend on forward-looking newspapers willing to mentor and train.

Enough for now: that’s four browser windows I can close. I feel closer to having things under control. (I feel much less threatened by the waves of information that keep coming and coming ever since I realized that not only can’t I keep up, I don’t have to.)

TAGS: JOURNALISM, MULTIMEDIA, TRAINING