Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube?

Via Media Shift

by Mike Rosen-Molina, 12:13PM

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.

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Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility

Via MediaShift

by Alfred Hermida, 6:25PM

 

Alfred Hermida

At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow.

At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs.

The advice for graduates was that they need journalism plus a new set of skills. The basics of journalism — curiosity, passion, accuracy, serving the public interest — were still important. But journalist students also need to learn about how the digital revolution has changed, and continues to change, the media.

This involves understanding how people are consuming media and how content flows online, as well as being aware of the importance of community and the conversation taking place online. Teaching journalism has become “journalism…plus” as Robert Scoble says below.

Here is what folks at the ONA had to say in a series of video interviews I made with my Nokia N95 cell phone

YouTube Takes Another Shot at Journalism

Via Mashable

YouTube has announced a contest for aspiring documentarians and journalists to take home $10,000 for creating a series of journalistic pieces to go towards beefing up their “reporter” content selection. This isn’t the first thing they’ve done to emphasize their efforts to grow this sector of the service. A quick catalog of the recent posts to the YouTube company blog shows that almost exactly half of the last 20 posts concern something to do with citizen journalism on YouTube.

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Embedded at UBC::Journalism School Students Get Fewer Textbooks, Collaborate More

Via Mediashift – by Alfred Hermida

With students flooding back into classrooms in universities across North America, the key to getting through this demanding first week of term is simple — planning, planning and more planning. In practice, this means an August that becomes a hectic month of preparation, getting syllabi in order, ordering textbooks from the bookstore and making sure the technical gear and software is ready to go.

In the past, most courses have several expensive textbooks that are required purchases. We are taking a slightly different approach and cutting back the required textbooks. Students are told to purchase “Reporting and Writing the News” by Gerald Lanson and Mitchell Stephens, which covers the basics, as well as a collection of readings compiled as a coursepack. We also recommend the students get hold of Mark Briggs’ Journalism 2.0, available as a free download.

Because we cut back on the number of textbooks, we added one more required item — a good quality digital audio recorder. Taking the advice of online journalism professor Mindy McAdams, we recommended the Zoom H2, an affordable option for students. In any case, most students end up buying a digital recorder for interviews so they should get good use out of the device, even if they don’t use it for multimedia reporting.

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