JPROF.com celebrates 5th anniversary

JPROF celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

In the past five years the site has grown in size (more than 400), expanded in purpose and reached around the globe to people I never would have touched or heard from.

JPROF was originally conceived (in my small study in Emory, VA, where we were living at the time) as a large, personal filing cabinet for material that I had accumulated during more than 25 years of teaching journalism. The amount of material on the web was expanding exponentially (as it still is), and I also wanted a place to store the things I had found that I might be able to use.

And, because I had several textbooks in print at the time, I wanted a web site that would give users more expanded and up-to-date material.

Since that time, JPROF has also become a forum (particularly through the companion blog http://jprof.blogspot.com for my impressions of what is happpening in the world of journalism and a site for all of the courses that I teach.

Because of JPROF, I have taken on some interesting and exciting projects, particularly this year for Edgenics.com -- something you will hear a great deal about during 2010.

Much has changed in my life during the last five years. I am now on the faculty of the University of Tennesse, having moved from Emory and Henry College in 2006. I am the faculty adviser for the Tennessee Journalist, the students news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, and through it, we have been able to launch a national organization of campus news web sites, the Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN). At UT, we have been able to change our curriculum in an interesting and innovative way, and I have the privilege of being in the midst of those changes.

The field of journalism offers many excellent opportunities for our students, and I am happy to still be a part of it.

Personally, 2009 brought Sally and me a move to the farm where she grew up and a new daughter-in-law. Our video review of the year is now on YouTube.

As ever, I am profoundly grateful for the friends I have made through JPROF and for all of the people who have contacted me over the years because what they have found here.

Now, as is my usual custom on this date and because it is New Year's Eve, I bid you: Party on!

Have a great New Year.

(In case you're interested, you can read what we said about JPROF on each of the previous anniversaries on JPROF's About page.)

A new edition of Fowler

Early in my academic writing career, I met Fowler.

I was putting together the first edition of Writing for the Mass Media and was looking for some basic writing references and somehow -- I don't remember how -- came upon Fowler. It was, the parlance of that day, the real thing.

Fowler is an "it," as well as a "he."

He is Henry Fowler. It is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, or as Jim Holt notes in his essay in the New York Times, "among its devotees it is known, reverentially, as 'Fowler.' ”

Holt tells the interesting story of how Fowler became "Fowler." Henry Fowler was a former school teacher and amateur wordsmith who lived on the island of Guernsey with his younger brother Frank. In the first decade of the 20th century, Henry and Frank published a book titled The King's English, which, despite their amateur status, was a great success. They took on the editing of The Concise Oxford Dictionary and then planned a larger book on the language, but World War I occurred. Frank died of tuberculosis, and Henry barely survived a bout of illness, But when he did, he took up the project that he and his brother had envisioned.

As Holt relates in his essay:

The book was published in 1926, to immediate acclaim and brisk sales. Although language, as the truism goes, is an ever changing Heraclitean river, Fowler was not revised until 1965, when Sir Ernest Gowers gave it a light going-over, preserving both the spirit and the substance of the original. (The same cannot be said of the 1996 third edition, heavily reworked by R. W. Burchfield.) Now Oxford University Press has reissued the classic first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ($29.95), with an acute new introduction by the linguist David Crystal. It is a volume that everyone who aspires to a better command of English should possess and consult — sparingly. (emphasis mine)

Sparingly, as Holt points out in the rest of his essay, is the key.

You can't take Fowler too seriously because, for one, Fowler doesn't take himself too seriously. The language should be whatever is useful and not laden with a lot of half-wit rules (such as never splitting an infinitive).

The dictionary isn't a dictionary of definitions but rather a collection of short essays on the language. Most of them are short, thought-provoking, delightful and informative.

Fowler/'Fowler' has been a good friend for a quarter of a century, and it's good to know that there is another edition for the next generation.

An almost new way of organizing news

The way a news organization arranges its content -- news, business, sports, editorial, etc. -- has been a standardized and unquestioned mantra of journalism for many decades.

The front page, or in the digital age the "home page," had a mix of stories and subjects, but each section such as sports had stories that could specifically classified as belonging to that section.

But is this how the readers really want their news?

What if there's a topic you're especially interested in and you want everything a news organization has on that topic in one place? And, if it's breaking news, you want those stories updated the moment new information comes in. And you don't want to wade through a lot of other stuff.

That kind of organization -- one by news topic rather than section heading -- may be on the way. GoogleLabs has teamed up with the Washington Post and New York Times to experiment with something they call Living Story Pages. These pages take a topic and group everything the news organization has about that topic together.

You can see the results of the experiment at this GoogleLabs page.

The Post has three pages, one each on health-care reform, D.C. schools and the Washington Redskins. The Times has five: Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, swine flu and health care. These are topics the news organizations are paying a lot of attention to and to which they are continually generating new information.

This is a departure from the standardized news site organization, but it isn't totally new. Newspapers did this years ago when they would group all of their stories about a big news event together on a page or in a special section.

The news here, however, isn't the idea so much as that fact that the news organizations are working with Google -- not going to war with the search engine behemoth as Rupert Murdoch apparently is determined to do.

And there is yet another departure from the traditional thinking: the Living Story Page mixes news and opinion together. That's a bigger break from the past than most people realize.

Bad news

I am currently working with Edgenics.com to develop a new course curriculum for high school journalism. You will be hearing more about this project as we go along.

Here's a short audio slideshow on the fact that journalists have to tell their audiences "bad news":

Journalists have to tell their audiences bad news. It's not fun or pleasant to do this, but you're going to be a journalist, that's what you have to do.

Niles: Murdoch thinks he can screw Google. Think again.

Bob Niles is taking Microsoft and News Corp. to task for trying to restrict access to content. Their agreement, he says, is oh so 20th century -- when you could get away with creating content and then parceling it out.

Not any more:

But, today, it (the deal) illustrates just the latest example of backward-thinking by legacy media executives who've been left lost and clueless by the Internet revolution.

Niles is more than a little gleeful about this wrong-headed move because he detests "the Fox News' cynical Republican-propaganda-masquerading-as-news" stuff that News Corp. produces.

But he also makes the point:

The Internet is killing one legacy media business model, however, and that's the supply-side model based on creating value by restricting access to content. That's the model upon which the News Corp.-Microsoft deal is based. While it might have worked in a pre-Web, channel-driven world, the public simply has spun too many ways around content-control deals to make this one worth Microsoft's time or investment.

Can't say as I disagree with much that Niles had to say.

Stepping on the Big Feet of Washington journalism

David Sirota, writing for Salon.com, steps on a couple of the Big Feet of Washington journalism for supporting the Idiocracy:

First came a now-famous column about Afghanistan by the Washington Post's David Broder. The "dean" of the press corps attacked President Obama not for choosing any particular policy, but for simply taking time to meticulously consider his options in the Central Asian quagmire. "The urgent necessity," Broder asserted, "is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right."

This was followed by Jackson Diehl, the Post's foreign policy "expert." He wrote that the White House’s assiduous Afghanistan deliberations are not a sign of reassuring prudence after the bring-it-on Bush years, but instead a "compelling cause for unease about this president." Diehl's rationale for such an incendiary statement? He alleged (without proof, of course) that "there is unanimity in the Pentagon and considerable agreement in Congress and among the NATO allies" that a military escalation has to happen -- and therefore Obama "knows (the pro-escalation) course he must take" but "can't bring himself to embrace it."

Good points. Worth reading the whole thing.

University of Tennessee proposes new curriculum for journalism students

UPDATE: The college faculty just voted to approve, with minor changes, the proposed changes in the journalism curriculum and requirements. (Nov. 20, 2009, 10 a.m.)

The faculty of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennnesse has proposed a number of changes to our curriculum. These changes are based on the following goals:

• To create an innovative curriculum designed to address the changes occurring in all media.
  
  
• To create a more flexible curriculum in the wake of economic realities at UT and in media industries.
  
  
• To prepare graduates who are capable of working in all media.
  
  
• To eliminate current bottlenecks in the curriculum preventing some students from graduating in 4 years.
  
  
• To simplify the curriculum by eliminating tracks and by reducing the total number of courses.
  
  
• To create a curriculum we can deliver with 17 faculty members, some lecturers, and GTAs.
  
  
• To integrate new media in as many courses as possible.

The proposed curriculum includes a core and upper division electives. The proposed core is designed to ensure that all students should have the following knowledge and skills:

• An understanding of the principles and history of all media.
• An understanding of media law, diversity, and ethics.
• The ability to write, report, and present news and other content in all platforms.
• An understanding of the business of journalism and media and the issues affecting the business.
• Professional experience

CHANGES TO COURSES OF INSTRUCTION

The new curriculum eliminates the "tracks" (magazine, sports, broadcasting, etc.) Instead, all journalism students will be required to complete the following core (22 hours).

JEM 200—Media Writing (3)
JEM 250—Visual Communication (3)
JEM 275—Principles and History of Journalism and Media (3)
JEM 300—Media Reporting (3)
JEM 400--Mass Communication Law and Ethics (3)
JEM 465—Media, Diversity, and Society (3)
JEM 492—Practicum 1-2
JEM 499—The Media Business and Future of Journalism (3)

This is a huge and important change. The faculty of the entire College of Communication and Information is set to vote on this change this morning.

The entire proposal can be found in this Word document (auto download).

The demise of newspapers - revisited

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about the demise of newspapers being a good thing for the future of journalism.

Today, I am using those ideas -- and a new more -- as a basis for a speech I am giving to the Knoxville Torch Club.

Here is the basic text of the talk:

---

A couple of weeks ago, my son got married in Washington, D.C., at the Willard Hotel . . . [STORY] (audio to come)

What’s this got to do with newspapers? Nothing. And that’s the point.

What’s this got to do with journalism? A lot, I think.

Our world of communication – and our way of delivering the news – has shifted dramatically over the last ten years, even over the last five years. Print is no long a viable option of telling ourselves about ourselves on a timely basis, which is what journalism is. Print is slow, cumbersome, limited and expensive.

The web, on the other hand, is fast, flexible, inexpensive and seems to offer the future of journalism a cafeteria of possibilities that make the future both bright and interesting.

That’s why I believe the quicker we can get over our adherence to print in journalism, the better journalism will be.

Now, notice the wording of this talk. I said the demise of newspapers, not the death of newspapers. I do not wish death upon newspapers.

I grew up, so to speak, with newspapers. Reading them and later working for them. I have worked for six different newspapers as a reporter and editor, and since I have been in academia I have consulted with many more. I have many friends and former students who are fulltime newspaper people. I do not wish them ill.

And, in fact, I do not believe that newspapers in general are going to die. Some have, and some will, certainly. But when you look at the newspaper industry as a whole, particularly smaller newspapers, you see an industry that is in pretty good shape.

Smaller newspapers are better able to weather the rough economic climate that we are experiencing today. And, I think, they have more time to figure out the new media environment that we are in. Plus, their structure makes them more flexible and adaptable, and I think there is a great chance that they will come through all of this – though I believe their days of monopolistic practices and fat profits are over.

So, if a journalism student still wants a career in newspapers, I think it’s still a viable option.

But if a student is interest in doing journalism, I no longer think that newspapers are the best option. In fact, I’m not convinced that they are a very good option – for the reasons I mentioned earlier. They are slow, cumbersome, and expensive.

And they are limited.

Newspapers, by their very nature, can give you the news in only one way – print. The web can use a variety of forms and formats – text, pictures, audio, video and combinations of these platforms. Newspapers are geared to production deadlines. The web has significantly less production time involved in the process, and that production is significantly cheaper.

The quicker that newspapers transform themselves into news organizations – ones where print is only a small portion of what they do – the better off they will be. And the better off we, as news consumers, will be. To do that, newspapers will not only have to change what they do but also the way they think.

And here, I think, the evidence is discouraging.

Newspapers should be hiring reporters and editors rather than firing them.

Newspapers should be investing in journalism and in innovative ways to inform their readers rather than cutting back on page numbers and page sizes.

Newspapers should be looking for new ways to serve their readers. They should be trying to find new services based on the fact that they are the chief information gatherers in their communities.

Newspapers should be more attuned to what their audiences want and need. And they should be more responsive.

Several months ago, I was trying to sell a house. I visited the web site of the local newspaper to find out information about buying a classified ad. That began a rather torturous journey that wasted an hour of my time . . .[STORY](audio to come)

If newspapers are going to have paid subscribers – and I think that is a BIG IF – they should stop whining about the Internet and charge those subscribers something much closer to the cost of production than what they do now.

Finally, newspapers have to accept two irrefutable facts:

• Their economic environment has changed. They are no longer the monopolies that can command 20, 30, or even 40 percent profit margins.

• News and information is no longer what they thought it was.

In the good old days – about 10 years ago – news was a product. Newspapers produced it and sold it.

But the world is shifting so that news is now conversation. Economically, how does that work? The answer is we don’t know. But there it is.

Let me give you a non-newspaper example of this:

I coordinate all of the sections of our beginning news writing course. We offer about 11 sections, and once a week, all of those sections come together for a lecture that I give. There are between 150 and 200 students there. Most of you have probably heard of Twitter. [EXPLAIN] Well, Twitter is not all that popular with students . . .[STORY] (audio to come)

Unfortunately, I do not see a lot of evidence that newspaper are accepting their new environment or changing their thinking. There is very little innovation going on with newspapers now. It’s most retrenchment and hoping that all of this will go away.

The innovation is being done by Google and Yahoo and the small entrepreneurs who will shape the new media world. They are the ones that are creating a very bright future for today’s journalism students.

And that is why I believe that the demise of newspapers, ultimately, will be a good thing for journalism.

The Intersection of Journalism and Fiction

The Ossoli Circle -- one of the oldest women's clubs in the South -- has asked me to speak today.

The invitation came because of the mystery novel, Kill the Quarterback, which was published last year. The following is a text of some of what I plan to say:

When people ask what Kill the Quarterback is about, I have a ready answer. “It’s not about football.”

The story is about a police reporter in Nashville who covers the investigation into the murder of a star quarterback. The reporter, Mitch Sawyer, finds out things about the murder that the police do not know. Mitch has friends on the police force, but he also has enemies. One of those enemies is the guy who heads the muder investigation.

So, Mitch – an independent cus – doesn’t tell what he knows.

Besides, Mitch thinks the police should do their own investigating. He doesn’t feel the need to help them out.

Mitch gets more deeply involved in all this, and he finds a far more complicated story than what he had imagined. And he finds this story hitting close to home.

Eventually, Mitch becomes a target of the murderer. And thereby hangs the tale.



I have taught journalism and writing for more than 30 years. I am fortunate enough to have a textbook on writing that has been in print for 25 years and is now in its seventh edition. I am former newspaper reporter and magazine staff member.

So why write fiction?

First, I think stories are important. Whether they are fiction or journalism, the stories that we tell each other have a great deal to do with who we are, what kind of a society we have and what kind of a life we lead.

• Our religious beliefs are based on stories.
  
  
• Our history – and our ideas about how we got to this point – are based stories.
  
  
• Our view of the world around is based on narratives – the narrative of Barack Obama, the narrative of September 11, the narrative of Tennessee football. Our thinking about all of these things is conditioned by the stories that we hear about them.

All this is journalism.

But our fiction is also an important factor in the way we view the world. We may look at fiction as just entertainment, but I think it is far more than that – that it has a much higher purpose.

Fiction is a powerful part of the culture, and our ideas about who we are and what the world is like come through our fiction.

That’s why I have turned to fiction, at least briefly. I want to use whatever modest gifts I have for writing to tell stories.



Besides, there are many similarities between journalism and fiction. I know a statement like that invites many acerbic and waggish comments about too much journalism really is fiction.

But, of course, I’m talking about something that goes beyond the daily news reports and how accurate we think they are.

One of the things I teach students is that all good media writing exhibits four characteristics:
-- accuracy
-- clarity
-- precision
-- efficiency
(explain)

In journalism, we try to descibe the world we see as accurately as possible. Journalists take great pains to make sure their facts are right. They quote people correctly. They check and re-check their information. While they do not always succeed in this difficult task, they try as part of their professional responsibilities.

I would suggest to you that fiction writers do the same thing. They try to describe the world as accurately as possible. Only, the world they are describing is one of their own making – or one of the readers’ expectations. Fiction writers have to be true to this world just as journalists have to be true to the world they are in.

Yes, you might say, but a fiction writer can just make things up.

That is true to some limited extent. Let me give you a somewhat silly example of what I am saying:

Let’s say you’re writing a Superman story. Part of the story has a busload of kindergarten children careening off a cliff. Well, this is a Superman story, so what has to happen?

That’s right. Superman has to save the children. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Superman, and this wouldn’t be a Superman story. The writer who didn’t let this happen wouldn’t be true to the world in which Superman operates.

Likewise, the mystery writer – something I aspired to be in writing Kill the Quarterback – has to live up to readers’ expectations about the genre.

• The mystery has to be solved.

• The major dilemmas have to be resolved.

• Clues about the killer should be left out in the open.

• Good has to triumph – to some extent – over evil.

And this has to be done through the natural order of things in the world that the writer has made. The writer can use coincidence to get his characters into trouble, but he or she cannot use coincidence to resolve the big dilemmas or the story itself.

These are some of the rules. Some are based on the common practices of mystery writers. Some are the expectations of the readers.

Plotting a good mystery novel – and staying true to the world of the genre – is a challenge. It’s fun, but it is definitely a challenge.

Personally, I find plotting far harder than the writing itself. Tracing the arc of the story so that the protagonist gets from the beginning to the end is something I struggle with. It would be much easier if I didn’t have to follow the rules – if I didn’t have to be true to the world in which the story is set. If, in other words, I could just make it up.


Any writer asks two things of a reader:

• the reader’s time and attention

• a suspension of disbelief – that is, acceptance on the part of the reader that the place where you are going is a world created by the writer.


The reader must be willing to make this investment.

The writer, on the other hand, must understand that this investment on the part of the reader is limited.

The writer’s first job is to be true and faithful:

• true to the world the writer has created

• faithful to the generally accepted rules of that world

But the writer must then open up that world to the reader in a way that is entertaining, enlightening and informative.

The central responsibility of the writer, I think, is to give the reader an accurate portrayal of the world that he or she is describing. That is the service the writer performs.

And that responsibility does not change whether one is writing fiction or journalism.

TNJN Nutshell - a new form for getting information on the web site quickly

One of my big concerns is that our journalism students (at the University of Tennessee and elsewhere) do not understand the immediate nature of the web. As a news medium, the web has more immediacy than even broadcasting.

But the students don't seem to get that.

And, of course, that means we're not doing a good job of teaching it.

Too much of what is on the Tennessee Journalist, the student-operated news web site at UT, is old news -- sometimes several days old. And the students seem fine with that. They give themselves several days to write a story after an event has occurred when they shouldn't be giving themselves more than several minutes.

Consequently, I am planning on introducing a new form for the Tennessee Journalist tonight at the TNJN staff meeting. Below is the handout that I will be giving the staff and talking to them about.

---

TNJN Nutshell
Jim Stovall
October 8, 2009

The TNJN Nutshell is the standardized form for getting news and information on the site quickly. It consists of the following:

• headline
• summary
• lead paragraph – who, what, when, where and the most important piece of information
• three bullet points about the story – preferably in complete sentences (Check out CNN news story pages for examples.)
• explanatory paragraph after the bullet points (optional)

Concepts governing TNJN Nutshell:

Gather accurate information. Accuracy is always the first priority.

Work BEFORE the story occurs by

-- setting up the page
-- writing the headline (you can/should/will change it later)
-- writing the summary (you can change that, too)
-- finding and putting in the links you want to use
-- finding the pictures/audio/video and any other sidebar material that’s relevant

Prepare to take pictures of the event

How do you quickly download, edit and upload your pictures. Figure that out before you cover the event.

Write as the event occurs.

Post as the event occurs, if possible.

Find ways to post your information in places other than TNJN.

-- post the bullet points on Twitter with the hashtag #TNJN
-- post the bullet points to Facebook (better: set your system up so that your tweets automatically show up on Facebook)
-- find other web venues to put your information. Many site accept reports from unpaid reporters. Begin with CNN’s iReport. But that’s just the beginning . . .

Return later to write a full story.

---

I invite any and all comments.

Writing for the web: making a (bulleted) list

The list is one of the most important aspects of writing for the web that the writer must master. A well-formed list not only adds visual variety to the writing but aids in comprehension. The list invited the reader to scan the text, but it can offer the visual cues to arrest the eye.

Lists do not form themselves. The writer must make them happen. Here are some considerations and guidelines:

• Appropriateness and significance. Lists are fairly easy to form, but they must be appropriate to the subject matter and significant to the subject. They must help introduce new information and concepts to the reader that are due some consideration on the part of the reader.
  
  
• Number of items. A list must contain at least two items. In web journalism, the best lists are three to five items, but there is no hard rule about the number of items in a list.
  
  
• Use of boldface. A list is best used when one or two of the most important words can be boldfaced. Doing this aids the reader in finding the words with the most informational value in the list. But boldfacing should be used sparingly. If you boldface an entire item in a list, you dilute the effect of the bold type.
  
  
• Numbered and unnumbered lists. Two of the most common types of lists in HTML are the numbered and the unnumbered list. The numbered list uses numbers to introduce each item in the list. Use the numbered list when the numbers are important either for sequence or importance. When numbers are not important to the list, use the bulleted, or unnumbered, list. Numbers can be distracting if they do not carry any informational weight.
  
  
• Parallelism. Ideally, lists should be constructed so that they are parallel. That has two meanings. One, grammar constructions of all items of the list should be the same. If one is a complete sentence, all of them should be. If one is a fragment beginning with a participle, all should be.
  
  The second meaning of parallelism is that the items in a list should be of the same type or alike in a discernible way. Another way of saying this that no one item in a list should seem out of place with the other items
  
  (Parallelism is an important tool of the writer -- one that should be understood thoroughly so it can be put to good use. The concept goes beyond the explanation presented here. To learn more about parallelism, start here at the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.)

What good is all this?

Jakob Nielsen's research group has confirmed that readers of text on a web page are likely to do so in an F-shaped pattern. The research produced the "heatmaps" shown here that indicated the hot spots on a page of text where the eye of the reader tends to stop.

Nielsen says this about the implications of this pattern:

The F pattern's implications for Web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:

• Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

A well-structured list thus plays into the tendencies of the reader and gives the producer of the web page a great chance to satisfy the reader.

Writing for the web: guidelines for an introductory writing class

The following are some notes I have made for a discussion I am having with the JEM 200 writing instructors about what we are teaching concerning writing for the web. I invite your comments.

As we move from writing in print mode to writing for the web, here are some general principles that we should keep in mind:

• The writing should be tighter – more concise.
  
  
• Writers should use words and phrases that are information rich.
  
  
• Writing should be shorter but with no loss of information.
  
  
• Writers must learn to write quickly and with confidence.

We need to explore in some depth what each of these principles mean with our students. I admit that we haven’t gotten them all figured out yet, but all of us have ideas about them that we should share.

For instance, what are words and phrases that are information rich? Well, I know one that isn’t: “There is.” We should avoid those kinds of constructions. Maybe you know of others.

Possibly one way to think of information rich is to think of the Ws: who, what, when and where. If the words we use don’t convey something about those, we probably shouldn’t be using them.

But I digress.

Here are some specific guidelines that I want us to discuss at our meeting on Friday:

-- No story should be more than 200 words unless there is a compelling reason for it.

-- Summaries should be a maximum of 35 words.

-- Headlines should be a maximum of eight words. They should be abstracted sentences. That is, they must contain a subject and a verb and be as specific as possible. No puns, no play-on-words. Use alliteration only when it makes sense. In the words of Jakob Nielsen, they should be “pearls of clarity.”

-- Use lists when appropriate. Teach your students how to create lists. Check out what I say about lists in the third lecture on writing for the web.

-- Paragraphs should be a maximum of two sentences and 50 words.

-- Only one direct quotation per story. Direct quotations generally do not pull their informational weight. They add a bit of color and character to the story, but that’s about it.

-- Every story should contain at least one in-line link to additional information. The link should be constructed in a way so that the reader will have a good idea as to where the link goes. Check out this article on linking on JPROF. Teach your students how to set up a link in HTML.

-- Teach the concept of key words. Students should identify key words and put the tag around them.

The goals of our writing should be to deliver as much information to the readers as quickly as possible. Send the readers on their way satisfied, and they will return.

Audio journalism III: Teaching j-students about recording, editing and distribution

• Beginning journalism students, in their first news writing classes, should be taught the basics of audio journalism and should put those basics into practice.

The concept of audio journalism takes us beyond the medium of radio and requires that we think about sound itself as an increasingly available and important tool of the journalist (as we argued in the first two essays in this series -- see Audio journalism I and Audio journalism II).

How then do we as journalism educators train our students to use this tool?

At the University of Tennessee, we are trying to turn our curriculum more toward the web and away from the traditional media forms of print and broadcasting. This is a systemic change that will not be accomplished by simply adding one or two courses on web journalism to the curriculum or even by creating a sequence of courses. Instead, it involves changing our approach in our most basic courses.

One of those basic courses is JEM 200 Introduction to news writing. This course is required of all journalism majors as the gateway course to the journalism curriculum, and it has traditionally introduced students to the concepts of good writing, AP style, attribution, the inverted pyramid and other skills necessary for a start in journalism. We are now putting more emphasis on developing skills for writing for the web -- conciseness, headlines, summaries, lists, linking, etc. -- and in the section that was once "writing for broadcast," we are now teaching the concepts of audio journalism.

Here's what we are including:

• Audio journalism
  The importance of sound. Sound can be an excellent way to go beyond the pictures and text a reporter produces in covering a story. Sound gives voice to sources in a way that text cannot.
  Formats. We reviewed some of the formats available to audio journalists in the second post of this series. Sound can be a complement to the other reporting or it can be the dominent form of the report. The web is allowing us to develop new formats, such as the audio slide show.
  
  
• Writing for audio
  Traditional radio formats. These forms of presentation of news and information including the drama unity broadcast story structure are still important for students to learn and use.
  New forms of writing for audio that web journalism offers. We have already referred to audio slide shows, but we also must give some attention to writing introductions that alert readers as to what they are about to hear and to describe links included with the sound stories.
  Writing scripts, questions and outlines. Most of what is broadcast in traditional media begins with and follows a script. Good scripts promote the efficient presentation of news and information, and they are likely to continue to be necessary on the web.
  
  
• Speaking clearly
  Enunciation and beyond. In previous times, training in this area could generally be ignored by most journalists, particularly those going into print. No longer. Journalists now need to use their own voices. Their accent, grammar and pronunciation skills must be developed beyond the normal level of speaking. Their speaking habits must exclude the use of the word "like" after every third word, and they must speak with the confidence that allows them to drop the hesitant pauses, the "uhs" and the "you knows."
  Developing habits and practices that enhance the clarity of sound and the quality of reporting. We might jokingly call this our "radio voice," but it is no longer a joke. Journalists -- all journalists -- must be heard and understood.
  Acquiring the skill of the short, concise question. Asking well-formed, concise questions -- and then shutting up -- is a rare skill, but it is one that should be developed by all of our students.
  
  
• Recording
  Tools and equipment. Basic recording equipment is inexpensive and simple to use. Every journalism student must have some kind of ditigal recorder and must be aware of its capacity.
  The importance of sound quality. Sound quality does not have to be an obsession because of the good equipment that is available. Still, journalism students must learn to make their equipment produce clear, understandable sound on all occasions.
  Ambient sound and music. The qualities of ambient sound and music can enhance the reporting. They are special products of audio journalism that cannot be duplicated by any other medium.
  
  
• Editing
  Putting audio files together for presentation. Editing audio can be as simple or as complex as the reporter and editor choose to make it. Some audio reporters, such as NPR's science reporter Robert Krulwich, develop their stories through complex and highly sophisticated editing techniques (see Darwin's Very Bad Day, for example). Our goals for beginning journalism students are more modest. Simply producing a clear, coherent recording would be enough.
  Multiple tracks. Student should have some basic understanding of mixing sound tracks.
  Importance of beginning and ending. Writing good introductions and planning the sound story from beginning to end is basic to good audio journalism.
  Standard constructions and techniques. Students should learn the standard techniques of audio editing as the well as the terms, such as fades, cross-fading, establish music, segue, transition, voice out, music up, and voice wrap.
  

Covering these areas in just a few weeks of a writing course is ambitious. Not all of these subject will be areas in which the students can acquire any mastery, but their introduction and practice can show students their importance.

Note: I post the lecture notes for the lecture section of JEM 200, and at this writing I have posted the notes for the first of three lectures based on these essays about audio journalism. Two more sets of lecture notes are planned.

Audacity

The one piece of software that students should learn for audio journalism is Audacity.

While editing sound has a wide array of possibilities, it has been rendered simple and easy by Audacity, a free and downloadable piece of software from SourceForge.net. Audacity comes with a set of tutorials, the basics of Audacity can be grasped in just a few minutes by those who simply use the software. Audacity allows users to add and delete portions of a soundtrack and to place new soundtracks into a file. Its visual dashboard (below) includes all of the tools for basic sound editing, and it is likely that student will be able to learn the program to create audio files very quickly.



Podcasting

Podcasting is a term sometimes used for the general idea of audio journalism, but in reality it has a much more specific meaning. Podcasting is a means of distributing audio files through RSS (really simple syndication) feeds. Students should be taught the basics of using this system for distributing the audio files they produce, but we will refrain from going into details about it until a later post.

Read the two previous essays in this series on audio journalism:

Audio journalism I: Defining the field - the power and importance of sound

• A clarion call for journalism instructors to think beyond the strictures of radio and to teach audio journalism -- using sound as a reporting tool -- to all of their students.

Audio journalism II: Forms and formats

• Creative journalists can use the tool of sound as an effective in their reporting. They can start with traditional formats, but the web will allow them to develop their own.

Audio journalism II: Forms and formats

• Creative journalists can use the tool of sound as an effective in their reporting. They can start with traditional formats, but the web will allow them to develop their own.

Reporters and journalism students must stop thinking about sound as an exclusively radio format -- an argument made in the first of these three posts -- and adopt it as a reporting tool that can be learned and used to effectively deliver information to readers or listeners.

In this post, we will explore some of the forms and formats that are available in this new era of audio journalism.

(A third post in this series looks at how journalism students should be trained to be audio journalists.)

We begin with two principles:

• Every journalism student should know the basics of recording and editing.
  
  
• Sound can be the dominant form in a story package, or it more likely will supplement other parts of the web package.

With that, we should examine the formats that are available to online journalists who want to use sound as a part of their reporting.


Sound supplement formats

The audio clip is the first and easiest for the students to master. This is simply a short piece of sound, maybe as short as 15 seconds or as long as two minutes, that accomplishes a single purpose. It allows the audience to hear the voice of a source answering a question or making a salient point about the subject of the story. It is easy to produce and requires little or no editing.

(A good example of the use of an audio clip is in this profile story on a University of Tennessee soccer player.)

Given the ease with which audio clips can be produced, it is surprising that their use is not more widespread. Their absence shows that reporters are simply do not think about using audio, not that the hardware or software is difficult.

Another format is the reporter interview. Here, someone on the news staff other than the reporter interviews the person who covered the story. These interviews vary greatly in length, but they rarely run past five or six minutes. The New York Times (image at right) uses them on a regular basis to give background information on the story. With a minimum of scripting and editing, these reporter interviews can also be easy to produce and effective in enriching the story.

A variation on the reporter interview is the reporter round-table. Here several reporters who have interest and information on the same topic can tell what they know, ask each other questions and exchange views. Length on these pieces may vary, and they should be long enough to give a full airing to the information and views of the reporters. On the other hand, as with everything else on the web, generally shorter is better.

Yet another format is the reporter round-up. This format allows the reporter to tell the story in a one- to two-minute sound clip, much like a radio version of the story. The story is told as completely as possible and is read from a script written by the reporter.

These formats have many variations that will depend on the story that is being covered and the
inclinations of the reporter. At this stage in the development of audio journalism, reporters and editors should be encourage to experiment with these formats and even try to create new ones that may aid in the storytelling.


Sound dominant formats

Sound dominant formats take the audio tool from being simply a supplement to the text or pictures of a presentation to being the major way in which the story is presented. Such formats include:

• radio stories, which derive from the longstanding conventions and customs of radio. These stories are a mix of reporting, interviews with sources and ambient sound, and the best of them come from news organizations such as National Public Radio and Voice of America. At their best, these stories require high-quality sound and professional word and sound editing skills.
  
  
• audio slide shows, a web-originated format that is growing in popularity. Audio slide shows mix still pictures with sound, often but not always the photographer's description of the pictures that he or she has taken. Audio slide shows require photography, writing, speaking and editing skills, but they can be highly effective and entertaining in their presentation of information. (Read more about audio slideshows on JPROF.com)
  
  
• long-form sound stories, those where time and brevity are not major considerations. These long forms allow reporters, producers and editors all the time they need to tell their stories. They can include all of the sound elements previously mentioned. One of the most creative of these long-form formats is This American Life, an hour-long public radio that deals with only one topic during the hour. This American Life gives ample time for sources to tell their stories, but its editing and production are intelligent and clever so that listeners can easily get caught up int he story.
  
  
• talk-show and call-in formats, where audiences are invited to participate. The talk-show format is a highly popular one for traditional radio, and it is growing in popularity on the web with the advent of sites such as TalkShoe.com. Journalists can create their own call-in shows, advertise them and increase their audiences. Some news web sites, such as the Tennessee Journalist, are experimenting with this format to see what it will add to the richness of the site.

The list of formats here is not meant to be inclusive or prescriptive. It simply shows some of the possibilities of the use of sound as a reporting device. Imaginative and creative reporters will undoubtedly develop other formats and standards as online journalism itself develops.

Read the other two posts in the series:

Audio journalism I: Defining the field - the power and importance of sound

• A clarion call for journalism instructors to think beyond the strictures of radio and to teach audio journalism -- using sound as a reporting tool -- to all of their students.

Audio journalism III: Teaching j-students about recording, editing and distribution

• Beginning journalism students, in their first news writing classes, should be taught the basics of audio journalism and should put those basics into practice.

Audio journalism I: Defining the field - the power and importance of sound

• A clarion call for journalism instructors to think beyond the strictures of radio and to teach audio journalism -- using sound as a reporting tool -- to all of their students.

Now that the web has freed sound from the confines of radio, audio journalism needs to be a part of the skill set of every reporter. This series of articles sets out the parameters of audio journalism and outlines some of the things that we journalism educators need to be teaching our students.

Audio journalism is reporting news and information with sound. Doing this was once the exclusive domain of radio, and truthfully, it wasn't much of a kingdom. Except for National Public Radio and the efforts of a few isolated individuals and organizations, radio journalism has been a vast and neglected wasteland. Even where radio journalism was good -- and on NPR it could be very good -- it was still confined to the medium and restricted by time, programming constraints and geography.

The emergence of the web as a dominant news medium has freed radio journalism -- what we can more properly call audio journalism -- from those restraints.

The advantages of learning and using audio as a reporting tool are legion:

• It is easy to produce. The equipment necessary for recording can fit into your shirt pocket. The software (Audacity is among the best) is simple and can be mastered quickly.
  
  
• Sound can take a story beyond text (just as pictures can). Sound gives readers/listeners to a story an added dimension that nothing else can duplicate.
  
  
• Audio literally gives sources a "voice." By using sound rather than text, their words, tones and inflections can be heard, not just described. Ambient sound can give these voices added context that increases the richness of the reporting.
  
  
• Sound allows listeners to "see" with the best lens of all, the mind.
  A personal example: For years, I have shocked people by telling them that as a baseball fan, I would much rather listen to a radio broadcast of a game with a good announcer (great ones include Jack Buck [deceased], Vince Scully, and Ernie Harwell) than watch the game on television. The reason: Video cameras are too confining; they do not give me a picture of the whole field or even a significant portion of it. If I am listening to it, however, I can "see" everything, and the experience is much more enjoyable and fulfilling.
  
  
• The idea of audio journalism at this point is largely unexplored. That means that the people who get into it now have an opportunity to define the form. They can experiment and be creative without having the burdens of "tradition" or the concept of "best practices."
  
  
• Audio is a presentation form that allows the audience to multitask. Reading text and watching video demand the full attention of the visitor. Audio lets the audience do something else in addition to taking in the information. As the demand for consumer time increases, this will continue to be an important consideration for the web journalist.

Finally, audio journalism is important because it is the dominant form of information distribution on The Next Big Thing in Journalism: mobile journalism. Despite all the current attention to texting, web site scaling and video on cellphones and hand-held devices, people generally use these devices to talk and to receive sound, either from other talkers or from audio producers.

All of these are compelling reasons why we journalism educators need to pay serious attention to the concept and forms of audio journalism. We need to teach our students how to use sound effectively in their report, both as a main form of storytelling and to supplement text, pictures and other formats at our disposal.

Two subsequent posts will outline how we can begin this process:

Audio journalism II: What journalism students should know - uses, forms and formats

Audio journalism III: Training journalism students - recording, editing and distribution

(Updated March 7, 2009, to include link to Audio journalism II.)

New York Times coverage of Obama's speech - a different reporting form

• The New York Times used the tools of the web to bring the story of Barack Obama's speech to Congress last week in a different and innovative way.

The web offers journalists many opportunities to report on events in ways that we never could have done with another medium. Witness the New York Times coverage of President Barack Obama's speech to Congress last week.

The Times had a straight news story on it, certainly, with all of the accompanying reactions and standard forms that print news stories are supposed to take.

But reporters and editors put together information about the speech in an innovative way that shows what can be done when a bit of creativity and imaginable are combined with the tools that the web gives to good editors and reporters. The screen shot to the right shows how the Times combined:

• a video of the speech;
  
  
• a marked timeline of the video so users could select a particular part of the speech if they wanted to;
  
  
• a transcript of the speech so readers could follow along the video or simply read it without the video;
  
  
• commentary and information from the reporters and editors about each part of the speech.

This package undoubtedly took some fancy coding to set it up correctly and some testing to make sure that it worked. No news organization could invest this kind of time and effort in anything less than a major story.

But here is an alternative to the straight narrative, and it is impressive.

A superior user experience

Those of us who struggle every day trying to figure out this new media thing and worrying about economic models for journalism get distracted by many ideas and lamentations.

Thanks, then, to Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president for product management at Google, for this long, thought-provoking, and perceptive piece that helps to refocus on what we should be about: a superior user experience.

. . . As written communication has evolved from long letter to short text message, news has largely shifted from thoughtful to spontaneous. The old-fashioned static news article is now just a starting point, inciting back-and-forth debate that often results in a more balanced and detailed assessment. And the old-fashioned business model of bundled news, where the classifieds basically subsidized a lot of the high-quality reporting on the front page, has been thoroughly disrupted.

This is a problem, but since online journalism is still in its relative infancy it's one that can be solved (we're technology optimists, remember?). The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers' business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.

What do readers want? My guess is that it's three things:

• news and information
• conversation
• opportunity

Opportunity for what?

We'll try to explore that in future blogs.
_________

And thanks to Jack Shafer, writing another excellent piece in Slate on business models for journalism (Not all information wants to be free), for pointing to the Rosenberg article.

Reforming the J-curriculum: beginning at the beginning

• To really reform a journalism curriculum, you have to begin at the beginning.

The faculty of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee decided at its first faculty meeting of the semester in January to make some definite moves toward revising our curriculum to recognize the realities of the changing media environment and to prepare our students for those realities.

During the past few years, the UT faculty had done what other faculties have done -- lay on a couple of extra courses about web journalism. Some faculty members had made some moves within existing courses (including changing the names of the courses) to include more about the web.

We had even taken a step beyond that in starting a student-operated news web site, the Tennessee Journalist (tnjn.com), that is a central part of the curriculum. The site operates independently from any single course and thus is open to being used by all courses.

All of these were steps in the right direction, but they have not achieved the fundamental changes within the curriculum that we have sought. At our January meeting, we resolved to take a big step (bigger, I think, than even most of our faculty realized) and change JEM 200, the introductory news writing course that is required of all majors and taken by many other students as well.

Because I am the coordinator of all JEM 200 sections, the task of rethinking and re-envisioning the course has fallen to me. We offer 11 sections of the course and enroll about 200 students each semester. The sections are taught by lecturers and graduate teaching assistant and occasionally (though not this semester) by full time professors.

In our new plan for the course, the beginning six weeks of the course have not changed substantially. During those weeks we introduce students to the following topics. (The links here take you to the weekly lecture notes for each of these topics that are posted on JPROF.com.)

• Introduction to media writing
• Basic tools: Grammar and style
• Writing in the media environment
• The inverted pyramid
• Basics of reporting and journalistic writing: sources and interviewing

What came next in the old syllabus was two weeks of writing for the web. That has been expanded to four weeks. My draft proposal for how these four weeks will go follows:

Week 7, Feb. 16-20
Writing sections: continue writing in the inverted pyramid form; emphasize efficiency and conciseness. Have the students learn HTML tags with this tutorial and this exercise.
Lecture: Writing for the web I Introduction to the web | The web as a word medium | How readers use the web | Important concepts | Headlines and summaries.

Week 8: Feb. 22-26
Writing sections: Write short (no more than 200 words) but information-packed stories; introduce and practice with writing headlines and summaries using the tutorials and exercises. Assign the preview story reporting/writing assignment that will be due for next week.
Lecture: Writing for the Web II The Tennessee Journalist | Important concepts (continued) | Technology | Writing for the web - the basics | Headlines.

Week 9: March 2-6
Writing sections: Reporting assignment (preview story) due on the first section meeting; upload that assignment to the TNJN server. Practice uploading pictures and writing cutlines as well as sidebar material if possible. Look for live stories on the Tennessee Journalist to show as examples for sidebar material. Pay particular attention to the "related links" function of TNJN and have students find appropriate links for their stories.
Lecture: Writing for the Web III Inverted pyramid | Visual variety | Lists | Summaries | Microcontent | Links


Week 10: March 9-13
Writing sections: Writing assignments should include writing headlines and summaries, creating links and lists, and taking pictures and writing cutlines. A second reporting assignment -- another preview story if you don't think they're ready to do anything else -- would be good.
Lecture: Writing for the Web IV Twitter | Photojournalism | Audio | What you need to do to get ready to work in the web environment.

That will take us up to spring break. During the week after spring break, you should continue doing whatever your lab needs. One idea is to assign them to do a photo story over spring break.

After spring break, we will devote three weeks to "writing for broadcast," but that will change from the broadcast writing section that we once had.

This draft plan has been written for the lecturers and lab instructors of JEM 200, but I am posting it here on the JPROF blog so that anyone who reads it can weigh in and help us with our deliberations. I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who can suggest additional resources -- readings, tutorials, exercises, examples, etc.

Resources:

Writing headlines for the web

Basic HTML tags

Finding links

The art of linking

Writing summaries

Guidelines for the student photojournalist

Audio slide shows

What's right with J-education at Tennessee

The call has gone out from Innovation in College Media for journalism profs to come together on Sunday for a chat on journalism education. It begins with a blog post, and one of the suggested topics is "What's going right at your school."

Here's what's going right at Tennessee:

The Tennessee Journalist (TNJN.com)

TNJN.com is the student-operated news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at UT. It is operated by a student staff and is independent of any particular course. It is part of the curriculum of the School, and there are too many good things about it to list in the short amount of time I have to post this blog entry.

But here's one: We have a weekly staff meeting, and every week -- EVERY week -- at least 35 to 45 students show up. Their enthusiasm is palpable.

Check out the site. I am privileged to be the faculty adviser.

Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN)

We have formed an organization of campus news web sites, journalism students and educators, and professional affiliates. Any individual, program or professional organization can join. Our first meeting was in Knoxville in January, and there will be more soon.

The web site is http://intercollegiatenews.com.

And join the Facebook group.

I am looking forward to the chat.

The demise of newspapers means better journalism

We who contemplate the importance of journalism look at the future with trepidation.

What happens to journalism, we ask, when newspapers continue on their inevitable decline? The question assumes that journalism itself will be diminished.

I am coming to a different conclusion:

Journalism will improve once newspapers die or decline to a minor medium.

Note that I said news-PAPER, not news organization. I have worked for newspapers in five cities (technically six because Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee, are two different cities). I loved the work and made my living at it for a while. I have many friends and former students who are newspaper people. They are facing difficult and uncertain times right now, and I wish them stability and good fortune.

But the medium they work so hard to produce -- the paper -- is holding back journalism from doing the best job that it can for society. The sooner the paper is gone, the better.

I have been thinking a lot about a piece that Steve Outing wrote for Editor and Publisher a couple of weeks ago. In it he envisioned the all-digital newsroom, and I teased out of that his list of qualifications that people who got jobs in that newsroom would have. Those qualifications are just the ones we need for journalism to thrive in this new technological age.

In addition, I was privileged to be in Nashville last week and hear Janet Coats describe how the Tampa Tribune (via TBO.com) is shifting its focus and operation from print to digital. (A short video of some of what she had to say is here on Jack Lail's Random Mumblings.) Her talk was fascinating -- a blend of practical and inspirational words that this beleaguered profession needs.

So, I began to think ahead to the day when won't be chained to the printing press. And my conclusion was that journalism will be better. Here's why:

• More reporting. I don't necessarily buy the argument that there will be fewer journalists in the new age of digital journalism. The numbers will drop if the current news organization managers (editors and publishers) are in charge. Fortunately, they won't be. Instead, we're likely to have managers who recognize that good reporting -- and lots of it -- is an asset to the organization, not a cost to be cut.
  
  
• More reporters. Students in my experience are wildly excited about this new age of journalism. I am honored to be the faculty adviser to the Tennessee Journalist , the student operated news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. More than 35 people regularly show up at our weekly staff meeting (only the editors are required to come) and the numbers are growing. The number of our majors has grown from 350 to 450 in just one year.
  
  
• More, different and better ways of telling a story. Newspapers and the people who run them have stifled the development of digital journalism. Slavery to print -- as well as simple laziness and stump stupidity -- have sucked the energy out of efforts to creatively use this new medium.
  
  
• Recognition that journalism occurs outside the traditional news organization. Digital newsrooms will form in places that never thought of themselves as news organizations. All web sites that attract an audience are news web sites. Visitors demand new information. That why people return to a site. Journalism would do well to embrace this concept.
  
  
• More respect for the audience. The accusations of arrogance leveled against traditional journalism are unfortunately correct. The web -- with its interactivity and with the ability of the audience to leave in an instant -- does not tolerate the arrogance of the journalistic priesthood.
  
  
• Better writing. As Jakob Neilsen, usability guru, says, readers are "selfish, lazy and ruthless." They will not put up with the flabby, self-indulgent prose we produce.
  
  
• Better reporting. With the audience involved in the process, we will have more sources and more points of view. We won't be gatekeepers. On our best days, we'll be conversation starters and guides. But we won't be in control. And that is a good thing.

Despite the current financial woes of news organizations and the generally hard economic times, the future of journalism looks bright and exciting.

And it will improve when we are done with print. I say, speed the day.