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.)

Here are a few highlights that appeared on this editable site as of the posting of this Tidbit (although I can’t guarantee any of this will still appear exactly as described, or at all, when you go there):

• Definition of newspaper: “(obsolete) Defunct media form, no longer supported.” Also on that page, don’t miss the instructions “to add content to a historical newspaper.”
• 5 Return from La Brea Tar Pits: Breaking news story with hyperlocal focus.
• The sports schedule has a World of Warcraft category.
• Crime blotter for 5285 Pine Street (Madeline, Amanda, and Carolyn’s House): “Sunday March 23rd, 3:04 pm: Complainant reports dirty guacamole bowl loitering in sink since Suspect A’s Saturday night get-together.”
• Obituaries, DIY-style.
• International News: US Gives Rationale for War With Iran

Want to join the “staff” of the Los Wikiless Timespedia? just sign up as a Bunkwiki contributor and post/edit to your heart’s content!

(I cross-posted this piece from Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Thanks to David Thomas for the tip via Twitter.)

Even the best journalists and editors sometimes make mistakes. Or sometimes new information surfaces that proves old stories — even very old stories — wrong, or at least casts them in a vastly different light. What’s a responsible news organization to do, especially when those old stories become more findable online?

On Aug. 28, Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg posted a thoughtful response to a Aug. 26 column by New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt: When Bad News Follows You.

In a nutshell, the Times recently implemented a search optimization strategy that increased traffic to its site — especially to its voluminous archives. This meant that stories from decades past suddenly appeared quite prominently in current search-engine results. The Times charges non-subscribers to access archived stories.

Hoyt wrote: “People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.”

“…Most people who complain want the articles removed from the archive. Until recently, The Times’s response has always been the same: There’s nothing we can do. Removing anything from the historical record would be, in the words of Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor in charge of maintaining Times standards, ‘like airbrushing Trotsky out of the Kremlin picture.’”

Hoyt’s column offered no options for redress. He didn’t suggest that the Times might start researching more disputed stories or posting more follow-up stories. Nor did he suggest that the Times might directly link archived stories to follow-ups.

Rosenberg asserts that the Times has an obligation to offer redress. Personally, I agree. Plus, I’ve got an idea of how they (or any news org) could do it — and maybe even make some money in the process…

According to Rosenberg, “The Times’s success at boosting the value of its archival content …has had the unintended consequence of unearthing every unfixed error and reopening the argument over every disputed story in the paper’s past. …If the Times is truly the ‘paper of record’ that it has always positioned itself as, and its archives deserve high Google rank by virtue of their unimpeachability, then the paper needs to divert some of the cash it will take in thanks to that rank and fund an operation to look into reader complaints about old articles.”

I think Rosenberg makes a good point. Journalism isn’t just like any other business. We have an obligation to accuracy — and not just today’s accuracy.

One of the great treasures of news organizations is their role as keepers of the past. They provide continuity and context for communities. That, in large measure, is why so many people trust mainstream news organizations. Trust is, after all, the foundation of the news business model. It seems to me that refusing to correct or update the historical record directly undermines that trust — and thus, the news business.

Understandably, resources for this kind of effort are finite at any news organization, no matter how wealthy. And once a news org starts revisiting a few old stories, the floodgates will open and more complaints and disputes will pour in. What to do?

Blogger Brian Slesinsky suggested in a comment to Rosenberg, “A quick fix would be to put a disclaimer at the top of the article, Wikipedia-style: ‘Some of the facts in this article have been disputed…’”

That got me thinking: maybe what’s warranted is a moderated corrections wiki.

Picture this: The kind of disclaimer notice Slesinsky proposed could appear on the story and link to a wiki page for that story. There, the original text of the story would appear, and disputed or incorrect portions would be visibly highlighted. Each highlighted section would link to a sub-page where the dispute or error would be discussed and/or corrected — including direct responses from involved people or anyone with more information.

This corrections wiki wouldn’t be a free-for-all, of course. In order to weed out frivolous complaints, participants would have to provide verifiable information about who they are (including contact info, which could be kept private at the news org’s discretion), their connection to the story (if any), and a verifiable source for the facts they assert (including contacts, citations, or files, which could be kept private).

Contributions to that wiki would have to be moderated, to keep out libelous claims, spammers, etc. This would be an expense for the news org, but it might be worth it. The payoff is potentially huge.

A news organization that offers such comprehensive public redress would demonstrate its commitment to accuracy and fairness as well as respect for the voice of its community. This would likely yield significant loyalty — the ultimate cash cow and raison d’être of any news org. Also, those wiki pages could also further enhance the news org’s search visibility (read: site traffic). And of course, you can serve ads on all those wiki pages.

There’s obviously a huge public demand for updates to old news stories. If news orgs don’t meet this demand, someone else undoubtedly will. In another comment to Rosenberg, Tidbits contributer Tish Grier noted: “If no one’s willing to pony up the money for the necessary staff to do this, then the new the Google News comments feature may end up making Google the ‘paper of record’ because of its quicker correction rate.”

Seems to me that if news organizations want to complain about how Google’s eating their lunch, they shouldn’t keep handing it to Google on a platter.

(NOTE: I originally wrote this for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, which is mainly read by pro journalists. I’m cross-posting it here because I think Contentious readers might find it interesting as well.)

Lately there’s been a meme going around called the “W list” — a lengthy list of links to high-quality blogs published by women.

As far as I’ve traced it back, the kernel of this movement began with an Aug. 7 post by PR blogger Valeria Maltoni. But the momentum really picked up when my friend and colleague, the noted PR/marketing blogger Toby Bloomberg, christened an expanded version of the list “the W list” on Aug. 16. Since then, the full list of links has been reposted on many blogs around the world.

The W list was Toby’s response to Ad Age’s Power 150, “a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik.” That list was based mostly on quantitative popularity in Google, Technorati, and Bloglines — and it contained very few blogs by women.

Toby’s laudable aim was to bring much deserved attention and “Google juice” to accomplished female bloggers, many of whom are writing for niche communities and so don’t make the kind of numbers it takes to get on Ad Age’s Power 150. I think that’s crucial in any field, since (especially when you’re talking about blogs for a particular niche or industry), the quality of the content usually is far more important than search engine ranking, site traffic, or number of subscribers.

I’m honored that Toby included me on her W list, and I recognize many fabulous bloggers there that are worth checking out. I definitely don’t mean to trash this effort. However, there is a problem with it: I think it’s become a link farm, which could end up backfiring on the bloggers who post the list of links, and perhaps those who are included on it.

Here’s why I’m raising this red flag…

Earlier this year a similar list-meme of recommended bloggers, 2000 Bloggers, was making the rounds. Instead of a text list with links, this meme featured thumbnail photos of 2000 bloggers of all sorts, assembled into a photo montage with links. Bloggers were encouraged to republish that montage on their sites in order to increase the number of inbound links from around the web to the listed blogs, thus hopefully improving their positioning in search engine results.

Here’s the trouble with that general approach, as I discussed Feb. 6 in The Right Conversation:

“[Because of this meme,] there’s an awful lot of identical cross-linking happening online. And I can see it happening. Every time I check my feed reader (I have several search feeds for my name and URLs, so I can find out when I’m being discussed or linked to online), I see a slew of new links from new people who have posted the 2000 bloggers photomontage.

“Normally, inbound links are a great thing for traffic and search engine placement. And of course, there’s some social networking potential here too. However, tons of identical links from multiple sites might look like link farming to Google and other major search engines.

“Link farming is a problem, since it’s often employed to game the search engines to artificially boost the rankings of involved sites. Since it’s a problem, search engines have devised sophisticated algorithms to identify it.”

In a followup Feb. 7 post, I noted that Technorati had indeed responded to 2000 Bloggers as a link farm — in effect, erasing those links (and their effects) from its index. Since then, 2000 Bloggers appears to have constructively altered its approach to increasing the visibility of lesser-known bloggers.

I’m concerned that mass cross-posting of the W list links might backfire in the same way — which is why I haven’t posted it to Contentious, even though I support its goals and am a fan of many of the bloggers listed there. In my experience, trying to game search engines (regardless of intentions) is always a losing game for all concerned.

On the bright side, there are a couple of other W-list efforts I believe are very constructive and helpful. First of all, there’s now a W-list Facebook group (which I’ve just joined). That’s a great example of working with the intent of an online tool to further your community’s goals.

Also, there’s a W-List wiki, which could eventually have a beneficial effect on female bloggers’ visibility as long as its feed gets distributed to all the major aggregators (Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc.)

What do you think of the W-list? Did you decide to publish it or not, and why? Please comment below.

(NOTE: I’m cross-posting this from Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, since I thought Contentious readers might find it interesting as well.)

Today I received an intriguing query from my colleague Dave Poulson, associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. With his permission, I’m excerpting and answering it here.

Poulson wrote: “…I’m going to take your concept of coming up with a toolkit of basic online stuff a reporter should know and turn it into some class assignments. I’ll have them pick a beat and set up Google Reader to [subscribe to] relevant feeds. I’m not sure how I’ll evaluate the result.”

That’s a great idea, Dave! Make sure they practice subscribing to search feeds (about topics), as well as feeds from specific sources (like blogs). And here’s a short video tutorial on Google Reader I made for one of my clients. The first half of it is the bare basics, most applicable to what your students would be doing.

To evaluate this assignment, you could have student export their feed list as an OPML file and send it to you. In Google Reader, that’s under “manage subscriptions,” then “import/export” (choose the “export” option there.) You can then import that OPML file into your Google Reader (or many other feed readers) to see what they’ve subscribed to.

Poulson continues…

“Maybe the assignment will be simply to list the feeds and produce three story ideas that came from them. I already have an assignment where they must join and monitor a [discussion forum] for a week and produce three story ideas and a posting that they made to the [forum].”

That’s also a great idea. Of course, focusing on a single post doesn’t capture the core value of conversational media. Maybe in addition to asking students for story ideas, you could ask them to summarize the value of one or more discussion threads, or the culture of that forum, and to explain what they learned by participating actively. This would include links to a few posts they’ve made, not just one. Ask them to initiate threads as well as respond to threads. Get them to consider the nature of an ongoing conversation, not just treat posting as a writing assignment.

Poulson also asked for assignment ideas related to commenting on blogs. I’d recommend combining this with the Google Reader assignment — making an effort to comment on blogs they’re subscribed to. Ask them to actually read comment threads, not just blog posts. On the environment beat, Treehugger and Inhabitat often feature very lively and thoughtful discussion in the comments.

Furthermore, learning to track online conversations is very useful for journalists. You can ask students to use the dead-easy tool Co.mments to track the blog comments they make, and the responses they get. They can subscribe to their own Co.mments feed in Google Reader to easily see when their comment has received a response. (Here’s my own co.mments feed, as an example.) They can also give the instructor their Co.mments feed so the instructor can easily watch for activity.

Again, making a lone comment really doesn’t give you a sense of participating in a public conversation. I’d expect at least 5-10, personally. Probably making at least three to the same blog (even in the same thread, if it’s a lively thread).

Dave wrote, “I could have them write a wiki entry for any wiki, including ours. Is that relevant to journalism? We’re running a wiki, but I would never let a student cite a wiki as a source in a news story. I would allow them to use a wiki as a way to find links to original source material that they used in a story. Maybe that’s the assignment.”

I think you answered your own question there, Dave. However, I do think that learning how to contribute to a wiki — and use ancillary information like discussion or revision histories of specific wiki pages can impart journalistically useful context. Maybe even let them play with WikiScanner, see if they turn up any intriguing conflicts of interest.

…Those are my ideas for Dave Poulson. Do you have suggestions for him? Please comment below. And thanks for starting this discussion, Dave.

At the unconference segment of BlogHer 2007 in Chicago, I sat in on a small-group discussion about wikis (sites that can be collaboratively edited either by a defined group, or by anyone at all).

The discussion was led by one of my favorite wiki mavens, Liz Henry of Socialtext. I was glad that this group included some total wiki newbies (even wikiphobes) as well as wiki fans. That diversity of view was useful because, I’ve found, the concept of a wiki is rather alien and even suspicious to many people. It’s hard to give up the idea of one person having control over a document.

One thing that emerged from this discussion is that most of the wiki newbies or wikiphobes did know, and had used, shared documents via services such as Google Docs or Zoho. That concept was less alien to them than a wiki because it utilized familiar document types (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) and because it solved a common problem — the frustration of a team working on a document passed around by e-mail.

That got us thinking: If you’re trying to introduce a team or community to wikis to aid some sort of collaboration, and if you’re meeting resistance or low adoption rates for the wiki, try working first with a shared document. Once they get used to the idea of collaborating on a document (any document, really) via the Web, wikis start to look more appealing and make more sense.

What do you think of this approach? Have you tried it? Did it work or not? Please comment below.

(NOTE: I originally published this item on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

As I mentioned earlier, yesterday I gave a workshop about current trends in online media to about a dozen staffers at New Hope Media here in Boulder. In that workshop I tried something new: using a wiki as a presentation tool.

Wow, that worked really well, I think! Definitely better than using a blog post as a presentation aid/handout, which is what I normally do — and of course light years ahead of a Powerpoint presentation, which I loathe under any circumstance.

Here’s the wiki I created for that workshop, using the free service PBwiki.

And here’s what I liked about this approach…

Generally, I don’t do monologues. I’m not good at them, and I’m not comfortable with that approach to public speaking. I vastly prefer engaging groups in discussion — not just relegating their input to Q&A at the end of the session.

Yesterday’s workshop was very heavy on discussion — and therefore a lot of fun. The folks at New Hope (at least the ones who attended my workshop) are generally pretty curious and open-minded about online, social, and conversational media. They asked excellent questions, which I was able to include in the wiki so we wouldn’t lose track of them. (See “participants’ burning questions” section of the wiki.)

Also, I tend to be flexible about the direction in which a discussion flows. While I had a few topics I wanted to be sure I covered, I left room to take the discussion in whichever direction the group wanted. Consequently, we ended up straying into topics such as blogging workflow management and content management systems that I hadn’t prepared in advance. However, I was able to add some content about that (including links) to the wiki on the fly.

One advantage of this approach is that the participants were in a more conversational mindset. They were very engaged in the discussion, and they weren’t just passively taking notes. In effect, I was taking notes for them while leading the discussion. That seemed to free them up mentally to engage more fully with the action.

Although wikis are excellent collaboration tools, I chose not to open this wiki to group or public editing. Right now, I’m the only one who can edit it. That’s because I wanted this wiki to stand as a record of the workshop. Also, the participants weren’t especially wiki-savvy and I didn’t want them to feel burdened by learning this tool — I wanted them to focus on using more important tools, like feed readers. And of course, I didn’t want them accidentally deleting important workshop content.

Of course, this approach only works in sessions with live, fast net access — which, fortunately, we had yesterday. I always plan my sessions to work in the event of net access or equipment failure, but when all the technology works it’s a bonus.

Has anyone else tried using wikis as a presentation tool? Or maybe for training programs or classroom work? I’d love to hear your experiences. Please comment below.

This is an open public wiki, so if you know of a link that should be on there but isn’t yet, please click "edit page" to add it. Thanks!

I’ve organized the wiki according to the conference schedule. General post-mortems appear at the end of the list.

Thanks to the people who have already been contributing to this wiki! I definitely can’t do this all by myself.

So here it is: the BlogHer 2006 Live Blogging Wiki

It’s a public wiki, so please feel free to edit it. I’ll be updating it throughout the weekend. Hope this helps!