Our experiment begins

My Advanced News & Feature Writing students and I are working with the local newspaper, the Greeley Tribune, to create a Web magazine that will be part of the Trib's site. I'm very excited. My students are feeling a bit like guinea pigs, but that's understandable. Although my classes have created Web pages in the past, this is the first time I've worked with an outside entity to go online. It looks promising so far. Most of my students have taken the first step into the multimedia world by creating their own blogs.

The class is the capstone course for all the news-editorial students in our program, which means students must show off what they've learned in their time as JMC majors. I require them to cover beats. A beat is a fancy word for a topic that a reporter covers on a regular basis, like education or business or high school sports. Students choose their own beats and write three major articles during the semester. Each student's blog is based on his or her beat. Check out these blogs by clicking on the links at right.

My hope is that students update their blogs twice a week to let readers know what they're working on or what events are happening on their beats. The next step is to work with Jessie Williams, the Tribune's multimedia editor, to create the Web page. Once that is done, we can upload students' stories, photos and other work. I'm hoping we can put together some slide shows, and Williams said she might even teach us about podcasts and videography. This is new territory for me, but Williams has the talent to help us do a great job, as you can see from the Tribune's Web site. See Williams' bio.

Once the page is up, I'm hoping we can link to the students' blogs -- as well as mine. That way, site visitors can find out not only who produced the stories but how and why they produced them in the way they did.

These are the days

It's been more than a week since I returned from the Convergence for College Educators conference at the Poynter Institute for journalism studies. I left feeling positively giddy about where journalism is going. The Web allows us to tell stories in so many ways. And people are doing some simply amazing things.

I had resisted the need to bring convergence into my classes since I came to UNC in 2000. I thought teaching students the basics – what makes news, how to report and write, ethics – was enough. But it’s not. Being a “print” journalist is no longer an option. Journalists can’t do just one thing anymore. They have to be at least a little familiar with how to tell stories using five media channels: text, still photos, video, audio and graphics. But who am I to teach convergence? I’ve never written a story for TV or radio. I’ve never written a story for anything but a newspaper. I still consider myself a print journalist at heart. But what is print journalism? Isn’t writing an important aspect of Web journalism? Don’t online stories have to be concise, clear and grammatically correct? Shouldn’t online stories be newsworthy? Don’t they have to be factual? Ethical? Free of libel? Well, then, I guess I am NOT stuck in the 20th century.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m still a fan of newspapers. I can’t be the only person who reads a paper version of The New York Times every day. I mean, you can’t do the crossword puzzle online. Oh, yeah, I guess you can. … Well, it’s just not the same.

So here I go. Teaching convergence. I’m reminded of all the stories the older reporters and editors used to tell when I worked at the Connecticut (nee Bridgeport) Post about the days when the clacking of manual typewriters filled the newsroom. ... When copy boys roamed and editors swore like sailors. When cigarettes dangled over the edge of the copy desk. … Those must have been the days. … So now I tell my students about the days before pagination, when we had to cut the stories using blue pencils, and grizzled men with razor blades did the cutting. Those were the days.

So here I go. Beginning this journey with a lot of other journalists and educators who started their careers before the Internet took over our newsrooms. I’m blogging. My students are blogging. I’m helping my journalism program figure out how to teach convergence to students. I’m learning something new every day. And come to think of it, that’s one of the reasons I went into journalism in the first place. I’m positively giddy.