Shortchanged without shorthand?

Posted by Dave Lee on 9 May 2008 at 12:02
Tags: Courses, NCTJ, Newspapers, Student Journalism

It may look like dribbly scribble on scrappy bits of notepad, but shorthand has long been a skill that journalists have come to rely on to report accurately.

Over on our sister blog, The Wire, they’re discussing whether journalists need shorthand anymore. This is in response to a post from Charlie Beckett from Polis suggesting that it’s a handy skill rather than an essential tool.

Comments have been coming in on both posts, and while I’d love to agree with the ‘ditch it’ camp (I can’t do shorthand), I have to concede that I think it is definitely vital to a journalist.

I can cite a very memorable example of when it would have been useful. So far, we’ve heard the strong argument of court reporting needing shorthand. Yes, it does, and to send a non-shorthand-trained journalist to court is a legal battle waiting to happen.

But my experiences of feeling at a loss without shorthand come in less-likely situations.

On one of my first ever stories, I was sent to interview a lovely old lady who would turn 100. A nice, simple local press story; one that I should have been able to tie up and spit out 500 words with no hassle.

I took my dictaphone and notepad to do the interview. The idea would be to chat to this lady as naturally as possible, making it seem like a casual discussion and not an interview. Of course, all interviews should be like this, but in this case it was especially important. If she saw me scribbling away furiously as she spoke I’m certain she would have gone shy on me.

By popping my dictaphone on the table I could not worry about notes.

“What’s that?” she asked. Gulp. I didn’t for a moment think that this bit of technology would make her so uneasy. But it did. She wasn’t happy doing the interview with the dictaphone, for reasons I do not know. Generational, perhaps, which meant I had to rely on notes. If I could pull out shorthand in this situation I would have been fine, noting down each phrase she came up with.

It was a great interview. She told me of how she drove an ambulance in London during the Second World War, dodging the onslaught of the Blitz as she went about her business. But, sadly, I don’t feel I caught the drama as well as I would have done with verbatim quotes. A big shame.

Another, more recent example, came from a task that involved transcribing a speech by Nicolas Sarkozy. There was no time to set up my dictaphone, or to get at a computer to get typing. Nope, good old pen and paper was all I had.

No matter how advanced the technology gets, it’ll still, every so often, come down to that. Learn shorthand.

Who’s using Dreamweaver then?

Posted by Dave Lee on 24 April 2008 at 18:14
Tags: Courses, Newspapers, Online, Student Journalism

Here’s a good interview in the New York Times for the web buffs among us, but it also has some interest for those who aren’t so tech-savvy.

The interview chats to Mr Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, and is about how they came to build the New York Times website.

I’m basing this on little more on my own opinion, but I can safely say the New York Times website is the best newspaper site in the world. It’s incredible. Spend a few moments surfing around their multimedia and admire how great it is. It’s a style of publishing that journalism students everywhere should be learning to emulate.

Dug within the interview lies yet another comment which substansiates the claim that Dreamweaver is a tool that, really, shouldn’t be taught in our online classes.

Vinh says:

“It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.”

So, in summary, web designers aren’t using Dreamweaver. Web journalists aren’t using Dreamweaver. Indeed it seems nobody in the industry is using it. Which begs the question, why do so many journo-institutions insist on teaching it? I’m truly baffled.

Greenslade: Hail City University’s student bloggers

Posted by Dave Lee on 27 March 2008 at 09:23
Tags: Courses, Online, Student Journalism, facebook

Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade has been highlighting the fantastic efforts of City University’s student bloggers.

Among the posts, Matt Bolton’s interesting look into the Evening Standard’s coverage of the mayoral election raises some good points. Such a well written piece deserves plenty of publicity, so I hope readers of this blog will go and have a look at what Matt has to say.

The world of social-networking can be a bit creepy, reveals Kaya Burgess, who set up a fake Facebook account featuring an attractive female character he’d invented. A simple idea finely executed, Kaya’s article on the project reveals alot about the advancements of young men online.

Be sure to check out all the blogs Roy mentions in his post. If your’e not a blogging student already, it might just provide some inspiration.

From mobile to front page: Journo student makes a splash

Posted by Dave Lee on 12 March 2008 at 13:57
Tags: Courses, Lincoln University, Newspapers, Student Journalism

The key to making a name for yourself in local newspapers? Find some naked men!

It’s a tactic that has worked wonders for journalism student Robyn Brooke, whose quick-thinking has landed her a front page splash on the Lincolnshire Echo.

“I was in my room when I heard lots of people running and shouting outside, I looked out the window and saw a naked guy running with horse manure in his hands,” she said.

“I grabbed my phone, shouted for my friends and dashed outside – I was still in my slippers.”

The men in question formed part of the University of Lincoln Rugby Union team.

“I knew they had been dared to do it because their friends were watching with us and laughing at them. After about 10 -15 minutes a big police car came and they were taken away,” recalls Robyn.

After all the excitement had calmed down, Robyn started to plan what she could do with her snaps.

“I didn’t think the Echo would be interested at first, I was just taking pictures for the fun of it and to laugh about it with my friends. It was a pretty funny anecdote. But back in my house I suddenly thought: ‘Why not just see if the Echo would want them?’”

“I was so nervous, having to say to the Echo that I had naked photos!”

The pictures appeared on newsstands all over the county the very next day.

One of the pictures Robyn Brooke took with her mobile

BBC looking for trainees

Posted by Dave Lee on 11 March 2008 at 16:16
Tags: Courses, Television

This may be of interest for anyone who fancies a bit of telly work with the BBC.

YouTube Live will revolutionise student journalism

Posted by Dave Lee on 5 March 2008 at 09:25
Tags: Courses, Online, Student Journalism, Television

We haven’t touched much on student television journalism on this blog yet, and for good reason.

There isn’t any. Or rather, there isn’t any we can watch and enjoy. Plenty of j-schools have TV modules – some even have dedicated TV courses – but the public enjoyment of this work is often restricted to the campus it is created on.

Which is all well and good, but it puts student broadcast journalists at a distinct disadvantage over their print counterparts. Aspiring TV journalists are not google-friendly. You’d never stumble across a brilliant piece-to-camera by accident. No, you would need to consciously go and download it.

And even if you got to that point, what university has the resources to be hosting all this multimedia? Not to mention the fact that many of the ‘men upstairs’ in British universities quiver in their leather chairs at the very thought of letting student journalists run riot under the university’s good name.

Is that all about to change? Yes! It certainly is! Woo hoo! Hip hip hooray! And so on. With this single announcement, student TV journalism has taken a whole new meaning.

Why? Because soon, this year, we’ll be able to broadcast LIVE using YouTube. To an audience of… millions?

Well let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To go from broadcasting to your classmates and your tutor to speaking to, for example, the local community, is pretty exciting.

Those of us who are lucky enough to have a radio station on-campus will know how much you raise your game when it’s likely to be heard by someone who isn’t just your mate. Knowing your content is up for both legal and critical scrutiny is always healthy as well, as your skills will subconsciously become stronger and the real stresses of journalism will emerge. As will the adrenaline rush, of course.

It’s time, then, for TV tutors out there to ask themselves: “How can we incorporate this?”

Exact details of YouTube’s plans are not clear, but it’s fairly likely that users will be able to embed the live video into their own site, much like the way we do with normal clips now.

If convergence is the way forward – which, let’s face it, it is – then how better to teach multimedia journalism than to create a website that is rammed full of text, images, audio, multimedia and now, gloriously, live television. Every j-school has the resources to do all of this, which means every j-school should do it, no excuses.

When it comes to inspiring great, high quality work, you really can’t get much better than this.

3 comments

Dreamweaver does not make an online journalist

Posted by Dave Lee on 14 February 2008 at 08:01
Tags: Courses, Lincoln University, Newspapers, Online, Student Journalism

When studying to be a print journalist, students will definitely spend considerable amounts of time in printhouses, learning to operate machinery that puts the ink to paper. After extensive training, we then must prepare to build our own printing presses.

I’m kidding. We’re not taught like that. All we, as print journalists, need to know about the printing presses is that they exist and they work. It would be a waste of time to think otherwise.

So why don’t we take the same approach to learning online journalism?

If you’re an online journalism student and find yourself aimlessly clicking away at Dreamweaver and wondering “What’s the point?”, you’re not alone. There are hundreds of us.

It’s an issue that has caused great concern for Amy Gahran, writing over on Poynter Online about the pointlessness of such an education:

“Dreamweaver is a decent Web design and development tool,” she writes. “However, it’s not very relevant to journalism, because it does not include a robust content management system!

“A working knowledge of real Content Management System (CMS) technology and how it integrates with the internet is what gives a journalist’s career legs these days,” she continues. “Requiring journalism students to use Dreamweaver is about as useful as requiring them to learn calligraphy. It makes your content looks really pretty — and it generally won’t be worth a damn on a real journo job or project.”

I really couldn’t agree more. I myself have written about this on my own blog many moons ago, as I was astonished to find I was “studying” online journalism using software that was out of date before I’d even started my A-Levels.

Gahran mentions in her post that it isn’t just the fact that most courses use outdated versions of Dreamweaver. It’s more the fact that using Dreamweaver — or any other web design software, let’s not forget — promotes a certain mindset when it comes to publishing online.

A Dreamweaver site, unless very professionally executed, is so very static… so very Web 1.0. Web 1.0 just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Think of your favourite websites. Which do you visit most frequently? The one that changes every day, or the one that changes every minute? The new web — Web 2.0 — is all about live information. When you log onto the BBC’s homepage, you know that what you’re reading is the most up-to-date news possible. That’s how online works.

Poke your nose into any newsroom across the country and see what they’re doing with the web. Are local reporters sat in front of their computers wrestling with HTML table alignments? No! They’re writing news stories, whisking them off to the web-bods who then place them neatly into a pre-designed CMS. Who designs the CMS? Why, web designers of course…!

That’s not to say we don’t need to know how some of it works, but simply learning Dreamweaver doesn’t bring us any closer to that goal. What’s the use in studying a program that nobody uses? Teach a few basic tags like bold, italic and underline, and then get onto the important stuff: Journalism.

Online journalism courses should ask questions like: What’s different about an online audience to a print audience? What can we do with online that would couldn’t do with print? How can we make this news story as accessible to our audience as possible?

It’s the decisions that arise from quesitons like these which make online journalism the most fascinating medium in today’s media. But, instead, many students are finding themselves making decisions over whether to implement a 1997-esque scrolling marquee.

HTML, PHP, MySQL and all those other complicated acronyms are to the online world what ink is to the print world. As long as we know it’s there, then that’s good enough. It’s time for less coding, and more reporting.

14 comments

Students to get greater say on NCTJ-led courses

Posted by Dave Lee on 30 January 2008 at 09:18
Tags: Courses, Newspapers, Online, Student Journalism

Journalism students studying on NCTJ accredited courses will now be able to have their say on how and what they are taught.

On 15 February, the NCTJ will hold its first student council, inviting a representative from each of the 41 accredited journalism schools to take part.

“We have involvement with everybody else in the industry, listening to what the papers are saying to us with regards to what they’re looking for in students,” says Shevon Houston, Events, Training and Diversity Administrator for the NCTJ.

“And we really need to listen to our students to get their views and issues with the NCTJ training scheme.”

The council is a fresh attempt at giving the work of the NCTJ greater transparency, and helping it adapt to an ever-changing media climate. In December 2007, students studying with the Up To Speed journalism school took the first ever NCTJ online exam, in which they had to adapt print stories for a web audience.

Houston hopes that the new council will help the NCTJ innovate further, and act as an effective channel of communication between students and tutors.

Joanne Butcher, Chief Executive of the NCTJ, believes that the student voice is very important.

“Many of them now have to pay thousands of pounds to fund their own training so it’s only right that we provide a forum for them to let us know exactly what they think about the way we do things and how we could improve the quality of journalism training.”

1 comment

Indy Reader’s Editor coup for UCLan

Posted by Dave Lee on 18 January 2008 at 08:00
Tags: Courses, Magazines, Newspapers, Online, Student Journalism, University of Central Lancashire

Students at the University of Central Lancashire can look forward to a strengthened teaching line-up as Michael Williams, former deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday, joins the University.

Williams, who currently holds the position of readers’ editor for the Independent series, will work at UCLan in Preston part-time, teaching media management and the business of journalism.

“I want to act as a bridge between UCLan and the nationals and allow students to utilise my contacts to gain experience working on a national newspaper,” said Williams on the UCLan Journalism website.

Also joining the University will be award-winning Clare Cook, who has been appointed as course leader for the Media Management degree program.

Cook is a former reporter for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and the Nottingham Evening Post. More recently, she has worked for celebrity titles owned by the Daily Express.

Speaking of the challenges faced by today’s journalism students, Cook said: “These days a lot is expected from a journalist. You need to get the quotes, the photo and sometimes the video footage. Newsrooms have changed so much over the last few years and journalists need to be able to work in the digital medium.”

More information on the appointments can be found here.

3 comments