Silfies Scope Geekish journalism and media ramblings from a student.

Rebuilding a Web journalism class from scratch

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As the potential handful of readers of this blog know, I’m a recent graduate of  Northampton Community College’s journalism program.

And I’ve also blogged about what I think of the journalism program at NCC. Quite frankly I think I’m lucky to get out of there with any idea of what online news could become.

So let’s change that.

I’ve been unofficially tapped as a curriculum adviser to NCC’s journalism program (sidenote: I kinda started doing this during my last year there, I helped start a beat system in the news writing course and I’ve pushed for more online content). That’s right, I’m helping to shape a journalism curriculum, not bad right?

My goal is to provide enough of a groundwork for familiarity with online news production so that the students can start to function in a Web world after completing the two-year program and if they decide to transfer (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) to get a Bachelor’s degree the course will act as a stepping stone.

OK, enough babbling, here’s what I have so far:

• Beat blog: each student in the class is assigned a beat at the college, ranging from career services to security to sports to dorm life. The new blogger has to use the blog as a way to generate content beyond the painfully infrequent publication dates. Moreover the conversation can start between the beat audience and the blogger.
• Video story: One of the huge advancements for a one person small news outfit like The Commuter is our Flip video camera. Unfortunately I we didn’t get to use it much but I figure each student in the new class should produce a small video piece to either augment a story from the beats or as an independent multimedia story. The students would have access to the college media lab and could get assistance using Final Cut Pro or iMovie depending on their comfort level. Promotion is the second part of this assignment: upload it to YouTube via The Commuter account, share it on the paper’s Facebook page and also post it on their blog.  Which brings me to my next point.
• Building a sense of community: Using a free wiki platform and Facebook the students should create an online community where readers can go to share information and ideas about the beat. This task is designed to teach the “be the paperboy” thought that Paul Bradshaw mention over at the Online Journalism Blog.
• Social Media/RSS: This last part seems to be a “catch all.” I figure the potential online journalists should learn about Twitter and how to promote people following their escapades on their beats. Furthermore I see basic skills teaching like RSS, social bookmarking, SEO (if I could find a way to teach the professor), and how to work a CMS.

So there I have it, mostly. I’m not too sure if this class would be too ambitious for the handful of students actually registering for it each semester — when I had the class this spring I was one of seven people versus my 20-some classmates for other journalism courses.

I’d also run into a bit of a snag with textbooks/resources. So far I’d go for Journalism 2.0 and a few sites as learning materials but that’s not set in stone.

Next class to work with: Desktop Publishing. I mean seriously, do we need to teach every j-student how to design on dead trees?