Me at Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach, San Francisco

I’m leaving San Jose in two weekends, back home to Visalia. Whatever “home” means nowadays.

I have no idea what’s next, but I’m open to any possibility. I could up-sticks and move clear across country – I could use a bit of East Coast butt-kicking in my life. I could end up in the Middle of Nowhere, Kansas, and reconnect with that whole Real America contingent, as opposed to the Fake America I now live in.

But for now, I have to unlatch myself from my current Bay Area location. Which means I have to get my kicks in now in case some opportunity draws me far, far away.

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that San Francisco is no longer going to be in my backyard.

There is so much I wanted to do up here and never did: cheesy touristy crap like ride the cable cars, or sophisticated geeky things like sit in a café in North Beach and write my heart out.

The second item on the agenda is being fulfilled right now. Here I am at Vesuvio Cafe, on the second floor that overlooks City Lights Books. If it was good enough for Jack Kerouac and Francis Ford Coppola, it’s good enough for me.

Sign for Vesuvio Cafe, San Francisco

I felt like I’ve been applying to jobs left and right in the area, to no avail. So I’ve expanded my search nationwide. It’s no secret that it’s competitive up here. Look, I can throw down with the best of them, and I’m still hustling to find something in the web producer or social media arena. I have confidence I’ll land something great soon.

But this idea of saying goodbye to the Bay Area has consumed me at the moment. It’s ironic that the handful of job applications in my queue that could allow me to stay here permanently are being put on hold for this ridiculous, drawn-out, sappy farewell.

I feel like I’m in mourning. Or in panic mode.

When I was in Visalia, I would drive the three-and-a-half hours fairly often to be in San Francisco. When I moved to San Jose, I took advantage of BART and CalTrain connections constantly.

My admiration for this city is making me do strange things now, like spelunking in buildings I have no business entering, or paying far too much for ferry rides to Sausalito _{(OMG I’m on a boat!!1).}.

It also led me to the epicenter of San Francisco tourist traps: Hyde and Beach streets. But I was only happy to be trapped in such a beautiful panorama.

Behind me, Ghirardelli Square. In front of me, the cable car turnaround. To the left was the Golden Gate Bridge gently arching above blue bay waters. To the right, Buena Vista Café, where I met Sean Blanda not too long ago and sipped an Irish coffee while talking tech and journalism, an issue this Silicon Valley place helped create.

People give their life savings to be in this city. They travel halfway around the world to be here.

I’m here now, eyes wide open, phone camera at the ready, neck craned upward.

I’m here, San Francisco.

Not for long, but I’m here.

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.

Designed by my sister Jo Anne.

Please RSVP.

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.

I have a shorter two-minute edit at the ONA website.

In digging around on my hard drive, I remember I had an extended cut, and it might be of interest for Leo’s fans.

I also live-blogged his keynote speech as it happened.

And if you really want the full live stream, you can check it out on PaidContent.org.

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.”