Innovation in College Media on the Line

Where will I be 8-11 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 22? I plan to be in a chat about college media. It will be at www.collegejourn.com

The invitation was wrapped around a brick and thrown through the window on my laptop. Well, not quite. But is was titled, "Professors: Catch up, or we're all left behind."

Uh, I guess that would be me holding everyone back. Hence, the brick.

Since leaving the Free Press in August and becoming a visiting prof at the Michigan State University School of Journalism, I have learned a lot. I hope my students have been as lucky. I've had to buy two video cameras and a podcasting mic so that we could make video slide shows and I have learned about Tumblr as we started blogging. (I have four blogs on TypePad, but wanted to try a new platform.)

I have met some cool profs at MSU: Flashinista Darcy Greene, information graphics guru Gude (Karl) and Bob Gould, late of WZZM-TV, who with his posse has been setting up regular newscasts, covering the Obama rally on campus live. (My class fed quotes and cellphone photos to the Lansing State Journal's Web site.) Just last Friday, Gould made his students, in five hours, report, write, shoot, create multimedia content and post it on the class blog by 2 p.m. Gould had help from Shawn Smith of MLive, who team taught with him. Their blog is on Wordpress at http://michiganstatenews.wordpress.com/

So, I will join the chat, eager to learn. Although I am proud of some of the things we do and sometimes find it is the professors, not the students, who are leading the charge. I am learning from those students who are already posting, scripting and shooting, but I impatient with myself and want to learn and do more. A few people here have been working hard to overhaul a curriculum so that everyone walking out of this J-school has experience with an array of tools and the foundation to use them well journalistically. We're building it a brick at a time.

But the world is changing so fast! We need to step it up. Big time. This is one of the feelings that propelled me out of a newspaper that I love to do new things. So, I don't mind an occasional brick.

I'll be on the call. Join us: www.collegejourn.com

How Many Internships?

Many students ask how many internships they should get.

Decent programs make an internship a requirement.

Better programs require more than one.

And the best require more than one and help their students line them up.

But even the best programs might discourage you from taking "too many" internships. They do that for two reasons. One is that they have a hard time getting multiple internships for all their students, so they may try to tamp down the demand so that junior and seniors are not crowded by competition from talented forst- and second-year students.

Another reason is that some programs have legitimate reservations about how well new students will perform and whether that will hurt the school's reputation.

Students, not their schools, should be in charge of careers.

Erin Hill, director of the high school journalism program at the Detroit Free Press, advises  her students to get seven internships during college. How in the world could they do that?

She advises them to focus on their studies the first year and to then get one after each year of college. That's four. She also recommends that they get part-time school year internships with local media companies. That makes seven.

The most I've ever seen? A public relations student at Wayne State University who graduated with 10.

Columbia School of Journalism's Job Fair

Last I heard, The Columbia School of Journalism was slammed for this Saturday's job fair, They were expecting 110 companies -- the most ever -- and 205 job-seekers.

That's a record for recruiting companies.

I don't know how they do it in this economy.

A key characteristic of a good career services department at a J-school is how many companies come on campus to recruit its students.

Can anyone else boast this many?

MediaStorm at Missouri

MediaStorm creator Brian Storm, returned to his old J-school at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and took the campus by -- no, I am not going to say that.

Let's just say he was water to a room full of students, thirsting for long-form, storytelling journalism in the digital future.

On its Facebook page, MediaStorm, founded in 2005, says its "principal aim is to usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media."

Storm has built a platform-agnostic company that builds substantive stories that attract audience and sponsors. He time shifts by looking for an aggregation of readers over time and not all at the launch. In fact, he often finds that viewership starts slow until buzz causes it to spike on the Web and it then settles in at a new, higher plateau.

Here are some of Storm's nuggets. They are not in chronological order:

"The place that I hope we're moving to is a far more collaborative place."

"There is no magic bullet."

This time in journalism "is like being at the beginning of the industrial revolution."

"Storytelling is not new. It's that the tools are so affordable."

"If you're a journalist and you're not doing a long-term project, you're cheating yourself."

"I would love to see newspapers stay connected to the high end ... we have to do what we're best at, which is telling important stories."

"The gatekeeper role of ABC and CBS is coming to a close."

"Every time yo break to a chapter (in a video), you're begging me to go to Facebook."

"I'm a big believer in if yo build it they will come."

"It would make sense to have a business class inside the journalism school."

"I was at a photo service for a few years and I really missed publishing. Now I have a press (the Web)."

"The next hire we're goingto make is a composer because music is so important to what we do."

"I don't care if you watch it on an iPhone, but this is really cool to be here and do this with all of you in front of a 12-foot screen. This is a communal experience."

Journalists and Burnout

Ball State University professor Scott Reinardy has posted his study of burnout among newspaper journalists.

It is worth noting that he was once a newspaper reporter and editor.

From his conclusions:

"Copy editors/page designers report higher rates of cynicism than executive/managing editors, and news editors and executive/managing editors report higher levels of efficacy than reporters. Journalists at small newspapers reported higher levels of exhaustion than those in the largest group, and younger journalists reported higher levels of exhaustion than older journalists. Additionally, journalists expressing intentions to leave the profession had significantly higher rates of burnout than those not intending to leave."

Lightening Students' Bookbags

Certainly, college students are burdened with a lot of reading and not much can be done about that. But do they need to be overloaded with so many books?

I am attending the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City this week. The new tools are all about book publishing, an industry that is feeling some of the same pressures as the news media and music industry.

Neera Khosla, a board member at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, Calif., was describing the work of the K-12 Foundation in creating "Flexbooks" and used a child's backpack, filled with books, to illustrate her point.

Ebooks and devices like Kindle are one of the subjects under discussion here. While they might not lighten the reading load, they can certainly lighten some backpacks. The day is coming when all of your school books will fit into a digital tablet.

I'm not betting that the workload will go down -- or the price -- but at least students will be able to stand up straight.

Breaking Down Walls

A new twist for me today: I met with a bunch of advertising students at Michigan State University's State News.

Some sharp people there, who seem to prefer the face-to-face sales and client solutions that newspapers do so much better than highly automated things like Google and CareerBuilder.

As much as things are changing, though, it seems they aren't changing.

One of the ad-sales students joked lamely that they don't know many people who work in the newsroom because they "aren't allowed in there."

C'mon, people! Journalists need to maintain their autonomy and independence, but we can pick up a lot of leads from ad sales people who are beating the streets every day -- WITHOUT succumbing to advertorials.

Paper or Plastic?

I asked my journalism students to write about their media habits. These are answers from two poles-apart perspectives.

Prefers the Web: "There's something about the font and the paper quality that makes me dizzy. There is just so much information and clutter that it is difficult to comprehend."

Prefers paper: "I couldn't read a whole newspaper's worth of material on a computer screen without getting a splitting headache."

Not all college students think alike. But all get headaches.

Wordy Women

In "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes", Mark J. Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne note the preponderance of women in journalism schools, law schools, public relations and marketing.

Lead author Penn is the chief adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign. In fact, he mentions her in the "Wordy Women" chapter.

It says that the wordy professions are a place where women could compete on an even basis with men and that  women can supply missing perspectives. The book describes a tipping point of sorts that saw most men leave teaching to women and says that the same thing may be happening now in public relations and TB journalism.

Hut, Hut, On --30--

The University of Missouri-Columbia is better known for journalism than football -- until quite recently.

With the football team riding high and in position to play for the national title, 1968 Missouri J-school grad and ESPN Executive Editor John A. Walsh told the New York Times that the football team's No. 1 ranking is just "a publicity stunt to help the journalism school to draw attention to its 100th anniversary next fall."