I use Facebook strictly as a casual way to communicate with people I know. I’m not a heavy Facebook user because their interface sucks, and it keeps on sucking. But there’s one thing about Facebook that was really bugging me, and I finally just figured out how to fix it.

The Problem: The default setting for your Facebook news feed (list of recent updates) is “Top News” — which is somewhat misleadingly named, since it’s really only updates from the friends and pages that Facebook’s algorithm, in its infinite and inscrutable wisdom, believes you interact with the most.

In order to see in your news feed updates from ALL the people and pages you’ve chosen to connect with on Facebook, you need to select the “most recent” option. Totally unintuitive, but that’s par for the course with the Facebook interface.

BUT: In order to routinely see updates from all your Facebook friends and pages, you must change that default setting. Facebook doesn’t make this easy — again, par for the course for Facebook.

I figured out how to do it. Below is my quick video tutorial.

WATCH VIDEO TUTORIAL: Facebook News Feed settings

…You’d think that with all the money they’re making, Facebook could afford to hire some good UI designers and do some usability testing! I think I might mail them a copy of Don’t Make Me Think (old by internet standards, but the principles are timeless).

1. What is the most important skill you use in your posts on the Web?

Having a good sense of what’s likely to be interesting to the people I’ve connected with (or who I’d like to connect with), and why.

2. In your opinion, what is the most effective way to tell a story online (pictures, text, sound, video, etc.)?

You should know how to use all these tools and know the people/communities you want to connect with, and what their media preferences are (both for media content type, and the tools they tend to use most). Then tell your story in a form that will work best for them.

Stories don’t exist for their own sake, and you are not your audience. It only works if you really connect with people, and that means taking them into account from the start.

3. What is the hardest part about being an online professional?

Anyone these days who’s doing any kind of media work is inherently an online professional in some way, directly or indirectly. People who deny that or try to avoid it make their own careers impossible.

4. What core skills do you think every journalism major should have?

Many, but the most basic one is: How to define and connect with communities. This is the basis of all media activity, including journalism — but too often it’s taken for granted and not studied and understood in its own right.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to participate in the chat since I’ll be heading to the airport at that time. However, I have had a great deal to say about this topic earlier on Contentious. Here are my posts from last year:

• April 9, 2008: Journalism remains a smart career, despite shrinking newsrooms. This theme in my posts began in response to Elana Centor, who asked me: “Is journalism still a smart career path?” My answer began: “Personally, I think that developing journalism skills and experience is valuable for many career paths — but I think that betting that you’ll spend your career working for mainstream news orgs is a losing proposition in most cases. I think most j-schools are setting bright students up to fail, and that bugs me. A lot….”
• April 10, 2008: New J-Skills: What to Measure? This followup post is a reply to Mindy McAdams’ thoughtful response to my earlier post. She challenged me to translate my original quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.
• April 16, 2008: Overhauling J-School Completely. This begins: “I’ve heard from some journalism educators that the kind of preparation I’ve proposed is far beyond what most existing j-schools could offer. I understand that. Really, I think what may be needed is to completely re-envision and rebuild j-school with today’s realities and tomorrow’s likelihoods in mind…” (This post also includes links to many other posts sparked by my previous posts on this topic.)

Again, I wish I could sit in on the Poynter chat. But hopefully this material might help inform the discussion. I look forward to reading the live blog and chat transcript after I land.

That’s what Horn Group VP Susan Etlinger did earlier, for the PR/Blogger panel her company is hosting tonight. She’s one of several Twitter users who helped launch this hashtag simply by adopting and promoting it:

hashtag

Susan Etlinger helps launch a hashtag by using it.

And here’s the fruit that this kind of coordination can bear: Check out the #PRblog hashtag

…So: what’s a hashtag, and why is this so important?…

A hashtag is just a short character string preceded by a hash sign (#). This effectively tags your tweets — allowing people to easily find and aggregate tweets related to a topic, person, or event. For instance, for the recent Thin Air Summit, many Twitter users included #TAS08 in their tweets. Take a second now and check out that link to see how easy that hashtag made it to follow the action during and after the event. That’s much easier than trying to find and follow everyone who happens to be tweeting that event. It’s also a great way to discover new people you might want to follow on Twitter.

RESOURCE: The Wild Apricot nonprofit technology blog offers a great tutorial: Introduction to Twitter hashtags. This explains how to use hashtags in tweets, and follow them via Hashtags.org. However, you also can follow a hashtag simply by searching for it via Twitter search.

It’s essential to coordinate, promote, and use hashtags at least a few hours before an event starts. That way, your Twitter followers will know that the event is happening, and how to follow it. They’ll also know how to spread the word of the upcoming coverage.

Ideally, use the hashtag in promotional tweets a couple of times before the event — and include in those tweets a link to the event’s info page, if any, so people know what you’re talking about.

Then, just before the event starts, do what Susan did and post a heads-up on the hashtag. Then just make sure you include the hashtag in all your event tweets. The easy way to do it is to leave it as a snipped on your clipboard. But if you’re typing it manually every time, double-check your spelling before you post! A misspelled hashtag won’t do folks much good.

This kind of coordination would have been a big help at last night’s Changing Media Landscape panel at the Columbia Univ. school of journalism. Sree Sreenivasan assembled a stellar panel of media innovators, it was worth watching. (See Columbia blogger Greg Bocquet’s wrapup of the session.)

Columbia live-streamed this session on Mogulus, which provides a chat room for backchannel discussion. That is helpful — but it’s kind of a walled garden, and it also demands a fair amount of dedicated attention. Aside from the audio portion, that kind of live coverage is not the kind of thing you can have running “in the background,” to follow while multitasking — which is what a lot of Twitter users do.

Some people at the Columbia event or watching on Mogulus were live tweeting it — but they weren’t using a hashtag. In fact, they didn’t choose and start using a hashtag (#cml2008) until the session was almost over. Unfortunately, this meant that very little of their Twitter coverage was easily findable. It was also harder for their Twitter followers to promote this live coverage.

Why should Columbia j-school care about hashtags and live Twitter coverage of their events?

• Expand public discourse and awareness with a key community. Columbia is teaching new media, and Twitter is where more and more thought leaders, innovators, and new media enthusiasts hang out. These are the people who would be especially interested in panels like this — and who would forward to their followers (“retweet”) posts that resonate with them. Best of all, you get this benefit by requiring a minimum of effort from the community. They don’t have to go to your streaming video site and log in to participate in a small, closed chat unconnected to the rest of the internet. They just follow the Twitter hashtag.
• Gauge community reaction. People live-tweeting your event will do more than report on what’s happening — they’ll comment on it. They may even praise it, or criticize it, or raise questions. And other Twitter users may react to those tweets. If all or most of that discourse includes the event hashtag, it’s easy to follow later and get a sense of what people thought and felt about the event. This is often important after the event as well as during, since people tend to mull things over and debate.

What do you think about hashtags for live Twitter coverage? Do you use them? Got other tips? Please comment below.

Uncle Jay Explains the News: Sept. 22, 2008

I think he really nailed it with this week’s “news word.”

I’m at the BlogHer 2008 conference in San Francisco, where later today I’ll be giving a writing workshop. I’m a last-minute replacement for BlogHer cofounder Lisa Stone — talk about someone who’s tough to replace! But I’ll do my best.

Feel free to contact me with followup questions or discussion:

• E-Mail: amy@gahran.com
• Twitter: agahran

Here is my “online handout” for this workshop, with links to several resources I might mention. After the session I’ll update it with additional resources to cover whatever comes up. I also created a writing exercises wiki for this workshop.

So here’s the plan…

OPEN QUESTIONS to start discussion

• Why write at all? Why bother?
• Why write online?

GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER

• What kinds of writing do you do?
• What do you like about writing?
• What aspects of writing are more difficult?
• What more would you like to be getting out of your writing?
• Any specific issues you’d like addressed in this session?

CAVEATS / GROUND RULES

I definitely DON’T know everything about writing! So I’m hoping we can learn from each other in this session.

I’m pretty opinionated and unconventional about some writing/editorial issues, and many smart people disagree with me. If you disagree with or question anything I say or recommend in this session, please speak up! We can explore it.

In writing, there’s rarely an absolute right or wrong. Most important is for you to tune it to what sounds like potentially useful or fun options for you to try.

I apologize that several links within my older Contentious.com posts are broken. I’ve been doing this blog since 1997, and I’ve endured five major CMS changes. My archives are a mess.

Although I’ve outlined some topics I want to cover, we don’t have to stick to this agenda. We can definitely take this in whichever direction we want to go.

BIG PICTURE

How you THINK about writing is as important as writing itself.

• Much more about process than product.
• Just keep writing.
• This is NOT easy
• Conversational writing (even Twitter, IM, e-mail) can be an important part of your process if you use it that way
• Be willing to experiment — especially online.
• Don’t be boring. Especially to yourself. If you’re not having fun or feeling engaged, you need to change what you’re doing.

EFFECTIVE WRITING

Effective Writing for the Real World

Most of us don’t just write for the hell of it.

Clarify your purpose or goal: What EFFECTS do you want to happen because someone reads what you write? Be specific

Who must you reach in order to make those desired effects happen? They’re your core community (not “target audience”)

• What are those people really like? Preferences for tone, credibility, professionalism, personality.
• How will they probably encounter your work?
• What do they know, believe, or feel about what you’re writing about?
• What is their single greatest point of connection, concern, or resistance regarding your topic, venue, or you? (Good to lead with the “so what,” from their perspective.)
• How much time will they realistically give you? Multiply number of minutes by 250 to get a rough target word count.

ENGAGE YOUR CORE COMMUNITY

Picture gears turning: It’s a visceral process. Plant nuggets throughout your writing that they can easily grab. This will pull them through to the end.

Reflect your audience:

• Show that you really understand them — or at least want to.

• You are NOT your audience. If it doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work.
• People generally like to see themselves, put themselves in the picture. Compelling context.

GET TO THE POINT

Efficiency (tightness) is neither crucial or most effective for every type of writing, but it generally is the default. Therefore, if you choose to be less efficient (or more rambling), be conscious about it. Make sure you have a damn good reason — one that will work for your core community. Also, develop an alternate strategy to keep them reading.

Copyediting for readability is extra work, but it also is well worth the effort. More people will read you if you are easy to read.

• Set context. Tell them right away why what you’re going to say matters.
• Then make your points.
• At the end, after you’ve built momentum by making your points, send them off in a useful direction (call to action, suggestions for next steps, ask questions they might consider, etc.) This can even apply to personal expression or fiction.
• Average reading speed online: 200-300 words/min. Call it 250. Use that to calculate target word count, and try to stick to it. Great exercise. Check your own reading speed.

Amy’s triage editing tips for improving readability quickly.

DON’T MAKE READING A CHORE

Poor readability can be a significant obstacle. And online, ANY obstacle is potentially a show stopper. Readability IS usability.

Cut the flab: Tight writing is easy to read.

• My target sentence length: 15-20 words max. (YMMV)
• My target paragraph length: 60-75 words max. (YMMV)
• Don’t over-tighten — too choppy

Amy’s readability tricks:

(See the writing exercises wiki for this workshop.)

The ear catches what the eye misses. Read sentences and paragraphs to yourself to catch clunky or flat parts.

Strong words free your mind. To loosen up, go way overboard with your first draft. You don’t have to show it to anyone. Faster way to get to the heart of what you want to say, in a way that will resonate with your core community. It’s always easier to tone writing down than to punch it up.

Keep sentence structure simple. The easiest way to do this is to fix your verbs first. Choose strong, specific, vivid verbs — and use active tense unless you’ve got a damn good reason not to. Simple sentences are especially useful if you’re writing modular content.

Eliminate unnecessary prepositional phrases and gerunds (-ing words where a verb masquerades as a noun).

Stay on track: Frame before finishing. Sketch out the broad strokes of where you want to take your readers — write the transitions first so you make sure your pieces fit together and build momentum. Then flesh out details. Saves time, keeps you from rambling.

Bulleted list tips.

Strong Finish: Writing Effective Conclusions

OTHER TOPICS WE CAN DISCUSS

• Being a writer (even if you don’t feel like one).
• Inspiration and motivation
• The “lone writer” myth: Most people think and write more clearly through engaging in conversation. (Social media really does “count” for writing practice!)
• Perfection sucks: How to get out of your own way. Being willing to make mistakes, even in public.
• Does grammar matter? When, how, and why?
• Ethics: Transparency, accuracy, fairness, etc.
• Voice: Finding it, using it, not getting trapped by it.
• Are you having fun or getting other rewards? (Money is almost never enough.)
• Handling criticism: Kickboxing (or other stress release) helps — better than kicking yourself. Handling criticism, knowing your vulnerabilities, and setting boundaries is an important part of writing process.

MISCELLANEOUS TIPS AND TOOLS

• How to write good online headlines and other microcontent
• Tracking your comments: Why and how
• Lijit as a me collector
• Link text tips
• Setting context
• Strategic commenting
• SEO, keywords, creativity, findability, insight (they all go together)

PROFESSIONAL WRITING

• What kind of jobs? How to find them? How to get started?
  
• Being independent and riding the roller coaster
  
• Ethics on the job: Transparency, accuracy, fairness, etc.
  
• Copyright, Creative Commons, etc.
  
• Working with (or being) an editor.

GENRES

• Journalism
  
• Educational / how-to
  
• Community building
  
• Business/professional
  
• Academic
  
• Commentary
  
• Fiction
  
• Personal journal
  
• Seeking or offering support
  
• essay/op-ed
  
• analysis/synthesis
  
• humor
  
• briefs

FORMATS AND VENUES

• Your blog
  
• client/employer blogs
  
• team blogs
  
• intranets
  
• wikis
  
• community sites/forums
  
• news media
  
• e-mail lists
  
• blog comments
  
• Twitter and other bite-sized venues
  

For a change of pace, here’s an audio podcast. My good friend and environmental journalism colleague Dale Willman just got back from a three-week trip to Indonesia where he was training radio journalists there how to do an environmental radio show — and just how to do radio production, period.

Yesterday Dale and I had a fun conversation about his trip, the state of media in Indonesia, and why text messaging is so popular there.

Listen now! (Or right-click to download)

Dale Willman

In the studio: One of the Indonesian radio journalists Dale helped to train.

Well, there’s been a ton of great discussion lately on the theme of what kind of education and preparation today’s journalists really need, given the changing landscape of opportunities they’re facing. (Thanks to Mindy McAdams, James Ball, Paul Canning, Andy Dickinson, eGrommet, the Ethical Martini, Innovate This, Monitorando, and José Renato Salatiel for their contributions, to the many commenters on all these posts, and to Elana Centor who started it all. Here are my recent posts on this theme.)

I’ve heard from some journalism educators that the kind of preparation I’ve proposed is far beyond what most existing j-schools could offer. I understand that.

Really, I think what may be needed is to completely re-envision and rebuild j-school with today’s realities and tomorrow’s likelihoods in mind.

Here’s what that might look like…

At the undergraduate level:

• Keep the core basics: Training in reporting, writing, ethics, and editing skills. But make sure these are taught in the context of today’s media landscape. (For instance, the ethics course should cover the ethics of community management and comment moderation, as well as more traditional fare.)
• Minimize instruction focused solely on traditional roles and jobs. How many courses in magazine writing do these folks really need? Not much.
• Require at least two internships: One with a traditional news org (mainstream or alternative press), and the other with an independent or entrepreneurial venture or project. A good optional third would be internships that involve online advertising, search engine optimization, or community management. (Hey, I did four or five internships with my journalism degree.)
• Require at least one media business course on how the media landscape is changing — emphasizing the importance of entrepreneurialism, business skills, building a personal brand/network, and continuous self-education.
• Teach the right tools. Ditch Dreamweaver. Teach a real CMS (like WordPress or Typepad), a feed reader, media-sharing tools like Flickr, a key SEO tool like Wordtracker, using social media like Facebook, and basic mashup tools (like Yahoo Pipes or Google Maps). Experience with these tools provides a practical grasp of information architecture and why it matters. Of course, also teach the basics of capturing and editing photos, audio, and video — as well as GPS and geotagging. None of these tools needs to be in-depth. Just the basics will do for undergrads. No need to teach them separately — better to use them together in projects.
• Teach them to think on their feet and educate themselves. Have students create whatever content they can with whatever tools are available to them (including cell phones, digital cameras, text messaging, browser add-ons, Google Earth). Require them to figure out how to get mileage out of what they already have on hand. It’s more important to open undergrads’ minds to options, creativity, and resourcefulness than to impart detailed production skills that are quickly outdated. (Pro-level photo, video, audio, or design skills that journos are likely to use are better taught in workshops, IMHO.)

At the graduate level:

• Partner with a business school for an entrepreneurial journalism degree program. (Could be a specialized MBA.) This would cover all the business, marketing, management, and economics territory I discussed earlier. It would also involve running student team projects as businesses. (Like a mini startup incubator.)
• Open teaching to more practitioners. Let more people who actually DO today’s cutting-edge media projects do more of the teaching — either entire classes, or special seminars or team projects. Part of the problem with today’s j-schools, IMHO, is that too much of the teaching gets done by faculty who are out of touch, inexperienced, or in denial about media evolution. Students should get more exposure to practitioners than occasional guest lectures. Get rid of requirements that faculty have advanced degrees.
• Involve the students in evolving the curriculum. Require them to actively consider what opportunities they really face, and what they really need — and more importantly, what j-students will need next year, in five years, in 20 years. Keep in touch with grads, so they can be your radar screen.
• Let the undergrads in. If you have some promising undergrads, allow them to participate in grad-level activities and projects as time and resources permit, and according to their abilities. Feed the fire in the belly wherever it flares — don’t just ration knowledge and empowerment based on hierarchy.
• Let the geeks in. It’s vital to invite and engage technologists (programmers, search mavens, database gurus, mapping geniuses, etc.) in the field of journalism. We need each other. Offer these people additional training in journalism basics, and leverage their talents and perspective in planning and implementing projects.
• Continuing education. Offer options for mid-career journos and others with related experience or goals to take classes, participate in projects, etc. Don’t require people to commit to getting an expensive advanced degree in order to get value from — and contribute value to — this collective learning experience.
• Distance learning. To the greatest extent possible, make these llearning and collaboration experiences available online. After all, the teams behind many of today’s media ventures are widely distributed.

Seems to me this wouldn’t necessarily have to be a degree program or happen through a college/university to be useful. (IMHO, in journalism and media, advanced degrees are worth far less than experience — unless you’re specifically interested in academic research or a teaching career.) However, I’ve framed this in the context of higher education because that’s an existing institutional structure that might prove useful, as long as it doesn’t undermine the process with inertia and bureaucracy.

Whadya think? Could it be done? Would it help? What would you change? Please comment below.

2,400 Newsroom Jobs Lost: Biggest Dip in 30 Years

WASHINGTON — After years of mildly reassuring numbers tracking the size of newspaper newsroom staffs, the latest American Society of Newspapers Editors’ annual census leads with a bombshell. Fulltime professional news staffs fell by 2,400 last year, a drop of 4.4% to a total of 52,600.

It was an even larger decrease than the 2,000 drop-off in the recession year of 2001. Since the census is completed as of the end of 2007, the tabulation does not include hundreds more buyouts and layoffs already imposed in 2008.

Still think it’s fair to focus almost exclusively on preparing tomorrow’s journalists to work in yesterday’s media, while acting like the business of news isn’t really their business?

Picking up on my post yesterday, Univ. of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams challenged me (and her other readers) to translate my quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.

Here’s my first shot at that:

• Content management systems (including blogging tools): First, I’d have the students run a group blog on a topic of their choosing for a year to get comfortable with the content and commenting apects of blogging. (A group blog is likely to get more activity and discussion than individual blogs.) This blog should be based on an expandable, customizable tool like WordPress. Then the students should be taught the basics of information architecture, and from that figure out how to expand or customize their blogs to deliver or integrate new kinds of content or services. This could be as simple as finding and installing WordPress plugins to add features, or integrating content from other places (such as Flickr or del.icio.us). The goal would be to get them to not just understand, but demonstrate that on their own they can envision, research, evaluate, and act upon options to do more with their content online. There’s a lot you can do without getting too geeky. They need to gain the confidence that many options are within their personal grasp — they don’t always need to get permission or beg someone else to do things for them.

There’s a lot more on my list, of course…

• Mobile tools and mobile media strategies. These students all have cell phones anyway. Require them to subscribe to mobile news and information services, and critique the quality of the service and user experience. Also, require them to create whatever kind of content their phones support (photos, video, audio, GPS data, even just SMS to Twitter, etc.) and post or stream it from their cell phones. Include participatory exercises based on SMS or MMS to include students who don’t have data plans on their phones. Free services like NowPublic, Flickr, Qik and CNN’s iReport could be especially helpful and even fun for your exercises.

• Social media. The point here is to help students learn a key tool for engaging communities, while also gaining experience with how influence works and information travels through social media. I suggest starting with whatever social media services most of the students are already using (like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter) and explore both the one-to-one and group interaction options through exercises. For groups, it’s probably better to get them involved with existing, active groups on these services — rather than try to start a new group from scratch. Where possible, use both web-based and mobile options for these services. They should learn to use these tools for community outreach, story/issue research, and promotion of their work.

• Economics and business theory/models. Journalism students should be taking courses in the media business that offer the fundamentals of historical, current, and emerging media business models. They should learn what budgets and balance sheets look like, how grant funding and investment works, and how to evaluate the economic environment they’re operating in — including how it’s changing. Get them used to seeing the big picture and looking ahead. Practical skills could include analyzing the economic environment of the local community, spotting emerging trends that could offer journalistic or other media opportunities, and writing a basic business plan to capitalize on those opportunities.

• Business skills. This could involve evaluating and estimating revenue options from grants to investors to advertising to subscriptions to partnerships and more, as well as knowing what steps to take to pursue that funding. Example exercise: Develop a strategy and action plan for increasing online revenues for the campus or local daily paper — including calculation of expenses and revenues, and a timeline for implementation. In addition, they should be aware of what it takes to start and run a business — requirements for taxes, healthcare, getting SMS shortcodes, working with advertisers, etc. No part of the business that supports their journalism should be alien to them.

• Management skills. I’m envisioning this both from an entrepreneurial and organizational perspective. In all exercises, put the students in a decisionmaking role and guide them through learning how to manage time, resources, and people — whether employees, collaborators, or community members. For instance, if a class project is increasing online revenues for the campus paper, divide that mission into sub-tasks, assign someone to manage each part of that project, and require them to make decisions and delegate. Teach them how to use tools like Basecamp to coordinate team efforts. In fact, it might be a good idea to coordinate projects with other j-schools around the country or world, since increasingly in the media business project teams are widely distributed. The point is to encourage them to take charge of the process, not just to pigeonhole themselves as content creators.

• Marketing, advertising, and SEO. In addition to taking a marketing basics class oriented toward media products and services, j-students should learn the basics of search engine optimization — since findability generally translates into traffic, engagement, and revenue for most media ventures. Exercises can include learning to use Wordtracker to optimize headlines, stories, and metadata to increase both traffic and relevance; using Google Analytics to analyze traffic patterns to a news/info site (such as for the campus paper) and suggest strategies to boost traffic and engagement; developing and running Adwords campaigns (with a modest budget) to promote a class project; researching niche ad networks that might help support various types of coverage or beats, etc.

• Community engagement and management. This is perhaps one of the most marketable skills any journalist can have for the next several years or decades. The point is to get them used to creating news as part of a conversation, rather than simply as a one-way product for publication. It’s about promoting constructive public discourse through active engagement. Exercises could include participating in an active community forum; working as a volunteer moderator for an active forum where contentious topics arise; taking and active role in editing and discussing a Wikipedia page of interest; helping to coordinate (not just cover) local events like town hall meetings, conferences, or festivals; participating in or running local meetup groups, etc. These experiences tech how to handle conflict, foster consensus and diversity, produce events, and demonstrate respect and understanding for communities in order to build credibility. In this respect, working through local government, advocacy groups, social service agencies, neighborhood associations, and ethnic or religious groups could be as valuable (maybe more valuable) than working through journalistic or media organizations.

…I realize that my list sounds like a hell of a lot of stuff, but I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what today’s journalists really need in order to take advantage of current opportunities, spot emerging opportunities, and take charge of their own destinies (rather than relying on a paternalistic news org to shelter them while they write, write, write).

I realize also that there may be resistance in journalism schools to much of what I propose, for reasons ranging from “we’re not a vocational school,” to IT staff resisting implementing the kinds of tools I’ve mentioned, to the need to integrate curricula more closely with business schools, to the tenured faculty who must teach at least some of these topics not knowing or caring much about them.

I’m not saying this would be easy. But I do think what I’ve outlined, in addition to teaching core journalism skills and values, is what today’s j-students really need to prepare for the kinds of careers they are most likely to have — and the kinds of media they can play a key role in inventing or developing.

Thoughts?

(And thanks, Mindy, for making me think this through more.)