This post is the second of mine in the Carnival of Journalism. The first is here.

I had a media literacy course in community college. It was an elective. I liked it. It was cool. I don’t remember much from it, though.

I also had a critical thinking course at the same college. It was a requirement. I loved it. It changed my life. It wasn’t a “journalism” class, but it definitely focused a lot on the media. And it was more than cool.

I remember being asked to clip advertisements and identify the marketing tactics used to sway people into buying the product. I remember we were asked to memorize seven most common logical fallacies and apply them to different news articles we found.

Both assignments would have worked wonderfully in the media literacy course. But nope. Missed opportunity for the elective, but thank God students had to take the critical thinking course to transfer to a 4-year university.

We need more requirements like this, for everyone.

Media works best when the public is smart

When I read “Study: Many college students not learning to think critically,” I wish I were more surprised. This is not a j-school problem, it’s a school-school problem. And a painfully obvious one to boot.

So to address the root problems in this month’s Carnival of Journalism, we have to go deeper and wider than just the journosphere.

The Knight Foundation loves to use wording like “journalistic activity” and “information needs” to step away from thinking that only journalists can impart good information. I like that.

So to apply it to the role of the university, how about empowering departments who conduct original research to write for the public? Much of their work is inaccessible because of academic jargon or restrictive publications. If the school has a journalism program, what about a tighter and more in-depth partnership with them? And what if the journalism schools were able to broadcast this to a broader audience?

A scenario

Let’s invent an example. A university with a great biology department discovers an important find. A peer-review journal has published the study and it is passing the test.

To spread it to the community at large, the university PR department sends out a one-page press release describing the research. It’s not very in-depth, and frankly, the poor overworked PR department has other things to do.

If there were no journalism program at the university, an outside entity (such as the Knight Foundation!) could set up content-production training with the people in the biology department. It could give them tools to build their own website, seminars on how to write engaging blog posts, workshops on how to publish a database to the web.

But luckily for this fictional school, they do have a j-school and it has a special reporting class. (Yeah, yeah, I know I said let’s look outside the j-school, but let’s return to navel-gazing for a bit. Humor me.)

The class’ sole job is to maintain different online journalistic outlets — websites, blogs, newsletters, etc. The class maintains a handful of niche websites or blogs, and they keep the content coming every day. The niches could be on science, entertainment, politics, finances — whatever is an identified information need, whether it’s a local or a national niche. (The publications stay the same, no matter what semester.)

So the biology department’s press release lands on the instructor’s desk. She gives it to the student assigned to writing for the science blog that day (each student has to be well-rounded enough to rotate through all the blogs). They notify the established student media that they’re working on this article. They might do a short write-up, or they might wait until the student does something more in-depth on the science blog. They choose that route. The student then acts as the liaison with the science department into helping them translate this finding into English, obtaining some databases or spreadsheets, and posting it in an interactive way to the blog. If the science blog had a national audience niche, even better. The class could also set up a place on the site where the biology department themselves could upload and post articles. The student newspaper does a short write-up and references the science blog in a link or QR code from the article.

How is this different?

I view this kind of scenario as different from the current student media setup in that it encourages national audiences with very specific niches and consistent writers. How many good blogs do you know have gone dead because the person behind them got sick of doing it?

Research needs to be done in each community on what the information need is, however, not what the students want to blog about. That’s for their own blogging time (and it’s good journalism training to write for subjects you didn’t choose).

The flagship student media should represent a general-interest campus niche and should focus all of its efforts on that. But this class would allow students to identify information needs and focus on that regardless of campus relevance — or if there’s a deeper relevant topic on campus, it could fill that need where the established student media can’t devote the resources.

I will say, it IS similar to UC Berkeley’s Mission Local, but I’m imagining an undergraduate class writing for national audiences. I like to dream big.

Ideas more practical than that one

I’m full of too many ideas, and frankly, I need to wrap this up, so I’m going to toss out a few ideas of practical things that 1) don’t involve a brand new class and 2) is related to the Carnival of Journalism topic:

I originally was going to use this space to bitch and moan about how journalism schools should never lose sight of the basics, but I’m sure you all know that by now. I’d rather leave you with a sprinkling of ideas that you could turn into actual classroom exercises. Hope you do.

This post is the first of mine in the Carnival of Journalism. And this one is my second. Go forth and be a part as well!

I have written so much on the subject of journalism education, I wanted to make a condensed post of some of those ideas first before I jumped into a point-by-point response to the Carnival of Journalism’s questions.

In February 2009 a group of journalism students held a massive online chat to talk about how journalism education needed to be revamped. Here are the highlights. It’s a great read.

In August 2009, I had the good fortune of appearing on a panel at AEJMC with the likes of Dan Gillmor and Sandeep Junnarkar. Before the panel, I hosted a #collegejourn chat and asked participants what I should tell the room full of educators. Here are the key bullet points of what I gathered:

• It’s going to take much more than throwing social media classes into the curriculum to make real changes needed. Read Daniel Bachhuber’s thoughts on this.
• There’s a lesson plan in comparing ethics policies, legal quandaries and best practices of news organizations using social media. Less emphasis on teaching the tools, more on teaching principles.
• Students who know social media should become TAs or peer teachers, or help organize a bootcamp/BarCamp at school to teach both students and the professors about social media.
• But, professors, please still keep hammering fundamentals. Don’t get lost in the latest buzzword. Everything taught about social media should point straight back to the basics.

A few ideas I wrote about after the panel:

• Students want the ability to experiment and fail. There needs to be a grading system that allows for this.
• Educators and even some students feel queasy about marketing themselves. With all due respect, they need to get over it.
• Don’t teach social media tools, teach concepts behind them. Don’t teach Twitter, teach why Twitter.
• Too many students think someone’s going to fix the industry for them. Sorry. It’s all on the students now.
• From what I’ve heard of Arizona State’s program, it has a lot of things going for it. Gillmor sets up a Ning for each of his classes and has students write and correct Wikipedia entries. There’s also an entrepreneurial class, and (if I remember correctly) students edit each other’s work on live on WordPress.

But to be more on point with the topic of Carnival of Journalism — “the changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community” — I really want to focus on another idea altogether: going outside of j-school to get this done.

Watch for my follow-up post.

• find story ideas
• report stories
• build a relationship with readers
• promote stories or the newspaper and website itself.

Her textbook is geared toward student journalists who want to know everything there is to know about the student newspaper process.

So this is what I told her, and I’m sharing it with you now:

Finding news stories on Twitter

We used a site called Hootsuite.com to manage our Twitter and Facebook accounts. It does a million things we like: It lets several people co-manage accounts without having to sacrifice password security, we can schedule tweets and Facebook posts into the future, and we can set up searches and friends lists to easily sift through all the noise. There’s also analytics built in, which is a nice add.

We have a search set up in Hootsuite for anyone on Twitter who mentions SJSU. (You can also just use search.twitter.com.) That has proved invaluable in a handful of cases. We can be alerted to news stories posted by the mainstream media the second they appear, and we can take action.

We can also get specific leads for stories that no one else really sees. For example, I found one Twitterer in my SJSU search who mentioned a blind classmate in an orchestra class. I messaged her and got more details: Apparently the Braille technician on campus had moved on to another job, and the blind student wasn’t able to have the sheet music printed in Braille, so the orchestra had to be limited to pieces that were already available in Braille. It was an interesting story I don’t think I would have found any other way.

Using social media for reporting

Social media was extremely helpful for one of our biggest stories of the semester, but our big breaks in the process came from old-fashioned reporting.

Last March, a man named John Patrick Bedell brought a gun into the Pentagon and opened fire. No one at the Pentagon was seriously hurt, but the man was shot and killed in retaliation. We had heard he was a former SJSU student, so we worked all night to verify that fact.

Bedell was quite tech-savvy and had accounts on LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Amazon that mentioned SJSU and revealed more pieces of his character. We used that in our stories, but we didn’t have definitive verification until the school’s media relations officer came through. She had access to a student database we didn’t have, and she provided the student photo that matched the photo the FBI released.

We also wanted to find a student who knew the shooter, so we scoured Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and web bulletin boards. We came very close to finding students who would speak to the media, but they never came through. We used our newsroom Google group to e-mail the entire news staff, and it turned out that a friend of an editor knew someone who had a class with him. We eventually nailed the story.

My takeaway was this: You get better sources and better information with established connections. It’s tough to make cold calls, and they come through sometimes. It’s also tough to make cold connections on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We got the best results when we had pre-existing relationships with sources, or friends of sources. There’s an established trust, and that reinforces the need for journalists to make online connections through social media before those connections are needed. Start following Twitterers in the area, or be active on Facebook fan pages and other bulletin boards.

Building a relationship with readers

On our newspaper’s Facebook fan page, we made sure we asked questions of readers, at least one every day, about the issues of the day. We tried some different things with that. For example, if two columnists write opposing views on one subject, we asked the Facebook fans to “like” the article they agreed with the most.

Because of abuse and lack of moderation options, we had to shut down the ability for fans to post on our wall. At the time Facebook had no way for us to moderate wall comments. But our workaround was having an “Open-topic Friday” every Friday where people could post their rants, raves, events and news items in one thread. It’s actually a good idea to have those kinds of posts occasionally anyway, because some people won’t contribute to the community unless there’s a reason.

Another idea: Create a graphic of a scale of 1 to 10, and ask Facebook fans to tag themselves on the photo that best reflected their viewpoint. For example, if they were for tighter gun control, they would tag themselves near the 1, and if they were against, they’d place their tag near the 10. That way, their friends are notified that they are tagged in this photo, and they are automatically subscribed to the comment thread. It’s another way to make an issue of the day go viral.

Promoting stories

We actually slow-released our headlines on Twitter every fifteen minutes in the morning. It avoids the RSS dump most news feeds have when a site goes live. We used to post every story to the Facebook page but we wanted to avoid overload, so we picked a good representative of stories and released them throughout the day via Hootsuite. We’d post our three top headlines at 7 a.m., a discussion-generating question at 10 a.m., an opinion column at noon, a feature or entertainment story at 3 p.m. and a multimedia piece at 6 p.m.

[Note: Since I originally wrote this about a month ago, Facebook has revealed that 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. are the best times for reader engagement, according to a presentation the company gave at a Hacks/Hackers meetup. For more, read Poynter's article on the subject. There's also an interesting spike of activity after midnight, they said, something that I found true when I had to post something late and got surprisingly immediate comments. Then again, this is a college newspaper, and college students are notorious night owls. I would take advantage of that.]

If I had more time as the online editor, I would have submitted our stories to StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Delicious, with the proper tags attached. I’ve found StumbleUpon to be one of the top referral sources to my own website, and research shows that to be true on a wider scale. So don’t make the mistake I made, and find time to promote your site beyond Facebook and Twitter.

So what practices have you found that work for you? Do you have any specific examples?

But now that j-school is officially behind me, I have a new perspective on that monstrous beast of an experience I just went through. And I’m also being asked for interviews about that perspective.

Dan Reimold called me up from Singapore a few months ago for an interview and just today posted the results. (Thanks, Dan, for making me sound smart!)

Alesa Commedore, an intern at Ourblook.com, did a video Skype interview last week that should appear on the site later on. I’ll let you all know when it’s posted.

And Rachele Kanigel, an instructor at San Francisco State, asked me some questions over e-mail to help update her textbook, The Student Newspaper Survival Guide. I have to say, I wish I knew this book existed before I was interviewed for it.

With her permission, I’m sharing my advice for student journalists at campus publications with you. (I’m only speaking of roles where I’ve had extensive experience — my apologies to the photography and videography students out there. For that, check out the excellent blogs from Mindy McAdams or Mark Luckie.)

I actually have another post waiting in the wings to expand on the role of online editors at student publications. Keep tuned in.

Photo by John C. Liau for the SF Public Press,
a news organization participating in Journalism Innovations III.

I don’t really blog about Bay Area journalism-related events often, but there’s just too many coming up this month to keep to myself. So if there’s a journalist out there in the San Francisco or San Jose areas wanting to network, brush up on some digital skills or just goof around, you got plenty of opportunities coming up soon:

• Journalism Innovations III happens this weekend, April 30-May 2 at USF. Register soon — it’s the most affordable journalism conference you’ll love. I’ve been to last year’s event and it was awesome. This year promises to be even bigger, with sessions on:
  • journalism career coaching
  • the status of Bay Area college media
  • new storytelling ideas
  • using new media tools for reporting
  • future business models for news
  • life after journalism school
  • examining old-fashioned journalism ethics in a new media world
  • building an open-source newsroom

• Also, RemakeCamp is happening May 2 in partnership with JI3. It’s a half-day unconference where all things journo-geeky will be discussed. The beauty about unconferences is that you never know who will show up and decide to speak. The unplanned nature is half the fun.

• The SJSU Magazine Club is sponsoring a panel of editors from McSweeney’s 6 p.m. Monday, May 3, room to be determined. The panel will talk about the San Francisco Panorama, the latest edition of their literary mag that is a super amazing cool newspaper. (I had a very small hand in the production of it: I provided them a high-resolution vector logo for the SF Public Press, and I helped fund the cover story through Spot.Us. But I still treat the paper as my own.)

• On May 7-9 there’s a big collaborative project called the 48 Hour Magazine (@48hrmag), where writers and artists from pubs like Rolling Stone, Wired, Dwell, Gizmodo and GOOD are going to put together a magazine in two days. May 7 the theme is announced, May 8 everything is due, and the magazine is sent to print May 9. Headquarters are in the Bay Area and you’re allowed to produce your work there, within reason methinks.

• If you are interested in developing journalism for the iPad, don’t walk, run to the Hacks/Hackers Unite on May 21-23. There a hack (that’s the journalist) and the hacker (the programmer) will work in teams to explore the unique storytelling capabilities of the journalism’s newest darling, the iPad. It sounds really exciting. I’ve never worked directly with a programmer to tell as story before. I’ve never had the opportunity. Until now, of course.

In yesterday’s CollegeJourn chat, a group of student journalists produced a road map for our first global collaborative reporting project. Sarah Jackson blogged about the idea here, and Josh Halliday wrote about it for the Online Journalism Blog here.

Students, join us. Take up the assignment. Use this opportunity for one of your journalism classes, produce a piece for your college media outlet, or just jump in because you want the unprecedented experience for your resume. Teachers and pros, we welcome any help and guidance you can give us!

We split the topic of health into two, so that the feature writers and beginning reporters could jump in to one area and the data-miners and investigative reporters could jump into another.

If you want to do a news feature, here is your assignment:

What does health mean in your area?

Get creative. We want to get humanizing stories from around the world. How does your town’s attitudes toward health differ from the rest of your country, and how does your country differ from other countries? Find those stories and share them.

Here’s some prompts you may want to explore:

• What is physical health?
• What is mental health?
• What is good health care?
• What is a healthy work/leisure balance?
• What is healthy eating?
• What are healthy relationships?
• What is addiction?

Use writing, video, audio, slideshows, whatever you see fit. You can produce one story or many. It’s up to you to get creative. But do get specific to your geographic location.

If you want to help us with the data-driven reporting, here is your assignment:

How does the health care on my university campus compare to the health care at other universities?

We want to examine what happens when a student becomes sick or injured on the university campus. What process do they go through, what’s the quality of care, and how does it rank with other campuses around the world?

The first leg of the assignment: Establish a narrative on what happens to a sick or injured student on campus. The second part is gathering data from each area, such as:

• Distance to nearest hospital or clinic
• Ambulance response times
• Average cost of visit (if not to student, then to whom?)
• Number of clinicians per 100 students
• What services are available on-site
• Population statistics over time for the campus
• Statistics like weight, pregnancy, AIDS diagnoses, gonnohrea/syphillis, etc.

Any statistics we can find that will help us compare campuses, we want to dig up. It will also take a basic explainer on how your country’s health care system differs from others, and that will take collaboration and note-sharing.

We realize this can be very complex. We also want to be flexible in case the stats are unavailable, but we want you to use good reporting skills to do whatever necessary to find out.

I should also mention that the coordinating and planning will be conducted in the English language, but we are open and willing to find a way to accommodate non-English speakers. (Suggestions welcome!)

We are going to use Paul Bradshaw’s Help Me Investigate website to coordinate. Please contact either me (suzanneyada ~at~ gmail) or Josh Halliday if you want to participate, and we will invite you to the HMI group. (We also have a WiredJournalists‘s group you can join here without invitation.)

This means for you North American CollegeJourners that the Sunday chats will be moved up to 3 pm ET/noon PT until further notice, so we can chat at a reasonable global time and update each other about our progress.

So you have your assignment. It’s due Oct. 30, but each week we will advance our reporting and share notes, so we will know where we need to go for the next week. You’ll have a support group and clear guidance for what’s expected week by week.

More logistics will be hammered out, and we will keep you informed.

Any questions?

EDIT: Here is the Google group we are using to do internal coordination. Leave a comment here on this blog and then join — I’d like to know who you are!

This time, we’re breaking out of the navel-gazing. Let’s stop talking about journalism and do some journalism.

We talked last Sunday about ideas for student reporting projects (transcript here), then quickly realized that there’s real potential for online collaboration around a particular story or topic.

Two ideas popped up, and they could go hand-in-hand. The first one focuses on data-gathering from all over the world on a particular issue. This is more geared for hard news. What information can you waaaaay over there access that my readers waaaaaay over here would want to know? Is (insert topic here) really this good/bad around the world? This one was inspired by ProPublica’s Adopt-A-Stimulus-Project efforts, but we need a subject that students around the globe could tackle.

The other idea would be focused on a word, like “victory” or “death” or “love” or “injustice,” and have student publications around the world publish stories that reflect their geographical location and culture with that theme. This could be feature, or hard news, or even arts and photography students could contribute.

It’s possible to cross-breed the two, but I had an idea of offering both assignments at the same time — the theme-based idea for audio/video reporters, feature writers or beginning journalists, and the data-gathering idea for the investigative journalists, data visualizers and computer-assisted reporting students. (BTW, I’m not suggesting multimedia reporters can’t be investigative and vice-versa, but some stories and topics lend themselves to different platforms, you know what I mean?)

On Sunday (that’s tomorrow!) we’ll be deciding many of the details, such as what the assignment will be, deadlines (if any), how to collaborate and what to do with the final product. Sarah Jackson (@sarahsodyssey) has already blogged about her vision here. It’s an exciting one.

Please join us at 8 p.m. BST if you’re in Europe and 3 p.m. ET/noon PT if you’re in North America. Those locations have already had CollegeJourn chats set up, but we want to expand to other continents, too, so please check out what time that will be in your time zone.

Also, join the newly formed CollegeJourn group on WiredJournalists. It could be just the platform we use to do the planning and collaboration.

From left: Moderator Geanne Rosenberg, Suzanne Yada, Sandeep Junnarkar, Dan Gillmor. Taken by Dan Kennedy: http://twitpic.com/crwn1

I came back from the AEJMC conference full of ideas. I think my panel on social media with Dan Gillmor and Sandeep Junnarkar went really well, though Jeff Jarvis had to cancel for health reasons.

First, what I told the educators (in addition to the points in my last post):

• Try BarCamps. Let the students organize themselves for one weekend a semester, and have them put on their own conference. Assign it if you must, but let them decide what needs to be taught.
• Students want the ability to experiment and fail. There needs to be a grading system that allows for this.
• Educators and even some students feel queasy about marketing themselves. With all due respect, they need to get over it.
• Don’t teach social media tools, teach concepts behind them. Don’t teach Twitter, teach why Twitter.
• Live-twittering or putting your face down to your notepad, it’s the same thing. It’s “continuous partial attention,” and it’s what journalists do. (I’m not particularly good at it, so I didn’t live-tweet the conference.)

Other ideas from the panel:

• Too many students think someone’s going to fix the industry for them. Sorry. It’s all on the students now.
• J-profs need to get out of “oracle mode.” Gillmor said he had to learn to hold his tongue, and Junnarkar said he had to find ways to be less harsh in editing but still get the students to correct themselves. (I’m torn on this one; I want my stories ripped apart!)
  
• Students are becoming very reluctant to talk to anyone in person, even over the telephone. I’ll be honest here: I’m fighting this problem myself, and though I’m getting better I could use any prodding at my disposal. Instructors, wield the pitchfork.
  
• “Industrial journalists” was the buzzword of the panel, referring to the people working in the media that produces a physical product that requires manufacturing and shipping (i.e. a newspaper). Lots of people resented or delighted in the distinction.
• From what I’ve heard of Arizona State’s program, it has a lot of things going for it. Gillmor sets up a Ning for each of his classes and has students write and correct Wikipedia entries. There’s also an entrepreneurial class, and (if I remember correctly) students edit each other’s work on live on WordPress.
• In the old school way of sourcing, journalists had friends of friends, or sources of sources. With social media, you’re able to source at a more random variance, but not everyone in the world is on social media, and it limits your options. Use both.

In the discussion after the panel, there was a rift between longtime educators and others who felt that journalism education was going the way of the dodo. Or rather, the way of print.

That was to be a theme for the rest of the convention. People walked out on Nieman Lab‘s Josh Benton, who challenged the future of the copy editing, at least according to Doug Fisher’s write-up. (More of his AEJMC blog posts are here.)

The tone oscillated between old-school mourning and new-school chastising. But it honestly, truly, wasn’t as much of a downer as it sounds. I enjoyed myself. It was my first AEJMC, and I went as an undergrad. So I came with eyes wide open in the belief that AEJMC can’t really be that stodgy — when someone like Dan Conover writes a winning paper like this?

Other random AEJMC thoughts (because I have links to dump and I love me some bulleted lists):

• I have a new respect for educators and researchers. I still don’t want to go to grad school.
• The conference naturally had a heavy focus on research, which I love. Problem is, research is in the past. I’m also interested in the D of R&D. Let’s develop, yes?
• Check out Lisa William‘s slideshow, “Thinking like a startup for journalists” (which you will simply have to see in person for full impact. She’s hilarious).
• I went to visit the Christian Science Monitor newsroom. Bill Mitchell of Poynter was also there and already wrote up a great summation. I spoke with editor John Yemma and told him, in all honesty, that if I were to start a publication from scratch, it would mimic their model (online first, weekly print delivered by post, in-depth stories, etc.) Not a kiss-up.
• One of the highlights of the convention was the Great Ideas For Teachers presentation. Posters with curriculum ideas lined the walls of a ballroom. Read this year’s winner here, previous winners here, and order them all here.
• Guy Berger’s AEJMC assessment was based on the limited tweeting and blogging coming from the conference, and I wish I blogged as the conference was going on. (But the stupid hotel charged for Internet access. Who does that nowadays? Grr!) The gist of his blog was fairly accurate, though.
• Michele K. Jones, Alfred Hermida, Carrie Brown-Smith and Steve Fox also weigh in on the conference.
• Read AEJMC’s blog posts and Hot Topics. A lot of thoughtful observations there.

I will be speaking to a host of journalism educators, and I am not going to waste this opportunity.

So just a few hours ago, we held a CollegeJourn.com chat about what we, the journalism students already immersed in social media, wanted to tell these educators.

Read the full transcript here, but here’s a very brief summary:

• Professors need to not only teach social media, but practice it. It is now their job to understand this.
• The students are also resistant. Just because they’re young and on Facebook doesn’t mean they know social media.
• There’s a lesson plan in comparing ethics policies, legal quandaries and best practices of news organizations using social media. Less emphasis on teaching the tools, more on teaching principles.
• Students who know social media should become TAs or peer teachers, or help organize a bootcamp/BarCamp at school to teach both students and the professors about social media.
• But, professors, please still keep hammering fundamentals. Don’t get lost in the latest buzzword. Everything taught about social media should point straight back to the basics.

But even after all that discussion, the most telling is the separate session that happened among three college journalism powerhouses (if you don’t mind me being so bold). Daniel Bachhuber, Greg Linch and Joey Baker from CoPress were particularly peeved at the idea that all it takes is a few social media courses to bring j-schools up to snuff.

What they want is a revolution. A radical dismantling of the entire structure and starting from scratch. Adding a class on Twitter isn’t going to cut it.

Read this, or better yet, download the podcast to hear for yourself. Also, read Daniel’s previous posts here, here and here on rebooting journalism education.

CollegeJourn had previously hosted a Bring-Your-Professor chat night, another must-read synopsis. It sounds like we might need another one. This time, will there be a single school out there who will listen?

ADDENDUM

Hoisting up some more links for your reading pleasure, thanks to comments from Daniel, Greg and Joey:

• Mark Hamilton’s “Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts.”
• Vin Crosbie’s “Anatomy of a 21st Century Media Executive“ and “Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way.” (Plus Joey’s Publish2 links.)
• Greg’s posts on “Wanted: Resident Butt-Kicker (Thoughts on journalism education)” and “Rich Beckman discusses how to reshape journalism education.”

It was a fun interview, but I tend to ramble when I speak, so let me emphasize a couple of points:

• Yes, j-schools should be weeding out students who aren’t going to cut it. There are simply more journalism students than jobs. Perhaps we should stop coddling the tagalongs. And perhaps deficiencies in the journalism curriculum help sort out the people who are there to get a degree only, and those self-starters who see something they need to learn and will go out and learn it, whether or not there’s a class offered.
• Fancy modern tools are great. Telling stories is better. I will stand by that and plan to emphasize that in tonight’s chat.
• By show of hands, how many students know they can directly approach whoever sets the curriculum at their school?
• I want to give proper credit to my own school at San Jose State University. During many weeks of the CollegeJourn chats, I realize that I am lucky to have professors who at least acknowledge the need for new media. There’s still room for improvement, there always is. But most of my concerns about the future of journalism are not aimed towards the SJSU faculty. They’re doing the best they can.

I did want to clarify one point: I said print is dying. That’s not the full truth. The INFLUENCE of print is diminishing and the demand for print-side jobs are on their way out, which makes it even more important to shake old-school professors awake from their belief that they should teach nothing but print skills. However, there are still niches available for print, so it should still be included as one of many things students should learn.

Here’s some specific contexts where print still makes a lot of sense, off the top of my head:

• Free publications, particularly in low-income neighborhoods or downtown areas.
• Coffee shops.
• Waiting rooms.
• In-depth weeklies or monthlies, publishing articles too long to be read comfortably at a computer. That is, until e-readers become as commonplace as books, which still has a long way to go.
• Public transportation – planes, trains and buses. Again, until e-readers become ubiquitous.
• College campuses.

Yes, I said college campuses.

Print makes sense there because of its small geographic circulation (the campus and its neighborhood), the advertising revenue and, perhaps most importantly, its lack of competition for attention.

Look at the way students pick up the paper. They walk to class, minding their own business, perhaps thinking about how boring their next teacher is going to be. Then they see a newsstand and remember that yes, there is a campus publication, and they pick it up, just in case class is going to be as boring as they feared.

If the publication was primarily online, what would compel any student to go there first instead of Facebook or MySpace? The only chance you have of getting read online is to post an article that went viral in other classmates’ Facebook news feed.

Another argument for print, which comes from a surprising source: I stumbled on this recap from a student Editors’ Day conference in Southern California (full disclosure: I participated heavily in JACC when I was editor in chief at College of the Sequoias). I was completely surprised to see one of the top complaints from students is that instructors push new media too hard.

It’s the students who still want to focus on print. And why not? Anyone can post a blog; not everyone appears in print. And because print still makes the most sense for college campuses, news staffs are already stretched thin just trying to put out a quality newspaper.

Students want to produce in print, and students want to read print. Most of the money is made from print. So what’s the problem?

The problem is after graduation.

Not every journalism student is going to be employed in print niches. That’s why it’s so important to diversify. But because print still makes sense on the college campus, how can we ask them to do more video, audio, blogging and multimedia for a publication that they 1) typically aren’t paid to work for and 2) may only be taking as a requirement for graduation?

I think we better figure out a way, and quick.

We’re going to try and limit (or carefully control) the “print is dead” discussion at tonight’s CollegeJourn.com chat. But as long as it’s relevant to the subject, we will carefully tread the subject. It’s is the main reason why I am blogging here: to get it out of my system and be fresh and ready.

So join us. 8-11 p.m. EST.