JPROF's third anniversary

JPROF observes its third anniversary today. Three years ago, after a couple of months of preparation, I launched JPROF from my small study in the house we were renting from Emory and Henry College in Emory, Va. The site was a personal endeavor, designed to help me keep up with the field of journalism so that I could stay current for my students and so I would have material at hand to updatte the textbooks I had written. I had no ambitions for the site other than those. If the material that I put on JPROF could help other instructors and students of journalism, that would be great, but that was not my first priority.

That's the way it's worked out, however. JPROF ended last year with about 1,400 unique visitors a day (see below). This year the audience grew enormously, and I am not certain why. In November, JPROF averaged more than 8,000 visitors a day, and there were three days that month with the visitor count topped 10,000. That figure has dropped back for December to nearly 5,000 visitors a day. (You can check out the stats for JPROF if you are interested.) The image to the right shows the monthly totals, and you can get a larger view of it here. JPROF comes up near the top when a Google search of "teaching journalism" is done.

I sincerely appreciate the time that people spend with JPROF, and I hope there is material here that they find interesting and useful. I also enjoy hearing from folks and certainly don't mind when people point out errors of fact or grammar.

A couple of other items of note before we close out 2007:

I am in the process of changing JPROF from an HTML tables code to a cascading style sheets (CSS) code. I am testing the frontiers of my technical knowledge by doing this, but so far, there have been been few problems. I hope this will make the site more stable, and it will load faster for users. It will also simplfy the layout somewhat. The big differents users may notice is that more pages will have search functions. I hope that helps.

The publishers of Writing for the Mass Media has asked for a seventh edition of the book, and I will be working on that full bore this spring. The sixth edition was used as a text in about 240 colleges and universities, and I am greatly humbled by that fact. Thanks to all.

By far the biggest web thing that has happened to me this year is the phenomenal growth of the Tennessee Journalist, the news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee where I teach. I got TNJN.com rolling in October 2006 with a lot of help from some very good friends. I was blessed with a set of students who quickly took ownership of the site and are making it into something to be proud of. Their hard work and enthusiasm leaves me awestruck, and there were will many good things to come of that in 2008.

With that, I'll stop and bid you my usual New Year's greeting: Party on!


Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Audio slide shows

Web journalism students should learn how to produce an audio slide show.

These things are not easy to do in that they require students to select pictures for a slide sequence and write a script that will be recorded for that sequence. But they are certainly well within a student's grasp.

This article on JPROF lays out some of the principles to following in producing an audio slide show.

There is also a practice assignment that students can use to learn how to select and sequence photos and how to write a script. The assignment includes pictures and information for a script.


Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Launching Politico

The coming launch of the political news web site Politico has drawn much attention from those who wonder about its longevity (see the latest New York Times article about it; and an earlier one). I have no idea about how long it will last -- though, being a political news junkie, I hope it will be for a long time -- but I am fascinated by the ideas that its founders have about how it should be structured and how it should operate.
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Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Tributes to a coach

Not a football coach, though it is that time of year. A writing coach.

Don Murray, a man whose work and ideas influenced many of us in the business of writing and teaching writing, passed away Dec. 30. Writing gurus Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlon at the Poynter Institute have written fitting tributes to the man they knew personally and the one who talked and taught writing for all of his professional life. (There is a lot more about Murray on the Poynter website.)

Murray won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in the 1950s -- the youngest ever to do so -- but he didn't let that stop him from a long and prolific career as a magazine journalist, newspaper columnist, fiction writer, and university professor. His idea about the five steps of the writing process have been referenced by JPROF here.

The world could do with a few more like him.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

2007 -- year of the First Amendment?

Well, it isn't likely, but I always begin a year with that great hope -- and very little else.

There is no reason to be confident. Our leaders want to diminish the rights of the Constitution because it will make them more comfortable and more secure in their power. The people seem to buy these outrages in the name of solving "problems." The problems are rarely solved, but the politicians get more comfortable.

This past year we saw the Federal Elections Commission "reprimand" a NASCAR driver because he had a "Bush-Cheney" sticker on his car during a race. We can only hope that the FEC continues to make such ridiculous decisions so that people will wake up to how dangerous that agency has become.

Meanwhile, we can hope (but, as I said, without a lot of confidence) that high school principals will leave the student press alone, that prosecutors will find other ways to pursue their cases besides jailing journalists, and that FEC bureaucrats will get stuck in traffic on their way to work.

And to give you a taste of what is going on with the First Amendment and the Constitution, I recommend the following as a starter:

• George Will, "A Retreat on Rationing Free Speech" (Washington Post)
  
  
  
• Dahlia Lithwick, "The Bill of Wrongs" (Slate)
  
  
  
• Bradley Smith, "New Rules Might Silence Democracy" (Ft. Worth Star Telegram)
  

Looking after the First Amendment is never easy, but it's always worth doing.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.