(Photo: Katrina Mcnabb)

It’s September and that means us teachers of digital journalism are serving up to students what we hope will be useful offerings: Facebook Live, Thinglink, Videolicious and a few other of the hot tools of the day.
I write “of the day” because this year’s tools aren’t last year’s tools and they probably won’t be next year’s either. That can leave journalism educators feeling a bit baffled as we try to navigate the ever-changing maze that is the digital age.
While the industry’s struggle is well documented, journalism schools face their own challenges in not only trying to keep up, but to forecast what the students of 2016 will need upon graduation if they want to pursue media careers.
This summer, my colleagues and I who teach multimedia courses at Carleton University exchanged dozens of emails about a dizzying number of tools out there. Check out, for example, this catalogue of more than 100 that my colleague (and course coordinator) Mary McGuire tracked down.
In the end, I probably spent a disproportionate amount of time dissecting the pros and cons of gizmos – since I think it is a mistake to dwell too much on the technical aspect of my third-year digital journalism course. At that level, the thrust should not be how to use the latest software, particularly when this year’s wonder could be next year’s chopped liver.
Rather, the main item in the digital literacy toolkit should be the ability to make sound journalistic decisions about when to use a particular piece of software to tell a better story.
While it makes sense to expose students to the latest digital tools, the end goal still has to be about journalism. That may seem obvious, but multimedia instructors could be forgiven for losing sight of it from time to time, given that even the more modest journalism job ads these days typically require familiarity with a list of specific digital tools. At the same time, however, several studies, including this 2014 report from the Florida-based Poynter Institute, suggest that media employers still place more emphasis on core skills and traits such as writing, reporting, critical thinking, verification, solid judgment, curiosity and adaptability. To that end, the following is a decent list of big-picture takeaways for students in a multimedia course (with credit to the aforementioned Mary McGuire):
• Be an early adopter. Nobody is going to show you how to use the tools out there, so you have to figure it out yourself. I left daily journalism five years ago – which is a lifetime ago given the frantic pace of industry change. I am figuring it out as I go – and that is what journalists do.
• Digital journalism is about teamwork. It takes a village to pull together a polished multimedia package – and there are few journalists who excel at everything. If you look at the credits on multimedia projects, they are seldom the work of one person.
• Be adaptable because the digital landscape is ever-changing.
• Be creative. There are journalism skills out there that didn’t exist a decade ago. Try to imagine new ways of doing things.
• Remember that the digital tools are a means to an end – and that end is journalism: solid reporting, synthesizing, communication, verification, and accuracy.

I should note that these goals wouldn’t apply, necessarily, to all multimedia courses in journalism schools. Carleton, for instance, is in the midst of changing the way digital journalism is taught. Until this year, we did not have a dedicated digital course until third year, and it was designed to teach tools and have students use their technical skills to tell stories. There is now a two-step approach. Tool familiarization is taught in second year, while third-year students in coming years will focus on applying their second-year skills by developing solid multimedia journalism.

The phone is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges for today’s journalism teachers. And I’m not referring—for once—to the student obsession with smartphones. That is a post for another time.

In the three years I have been teaching I find that many students, who grew up communicating via text, email and social media, have a phobia of talking on the phone, especially to people they do not know. It’s not that they avoid the most difficult phone calls—it’s that they don’t like to make phone calls at all. The best assignments, some students say, are the ones where they don’t have to talk to people.

That is an obvious problem, because being a journalist means talking to strangers on the phone, all the time. It can never be replaced by email and interviews via Facebook. I am not saying email interviews are all bad. They are better than nothing, and sometimes, especially for technical subject matters, it benefits everyone to have a thorough and deliberate answer rather than one given on the fly. Email is also useful for making initial contact, setting up interviews and checking information after an interview. But email interviews are a problem, because they allow the interviewee to control the interview, rather than the journalist.

Phone interviews are superior because they are conversations. One question leads to another. Interviewees have a harder time dodging the tough questions. And a journalist can sometimes get several other story ideas out of one phone call, in a matter of 15 minutes or so.

So, how should journalism teachers cope with phone avoidance? Here are a few thoughts:

1. First of all, I don’t make light of phone phobia. I tell students the story of how terrified I was to make my first interview call from my mother’s red rotary dial when I was a journalism student in the 1980s. I still remember sitting in her kitchen, thinking I did not have the right to ask anybody about anything. And I grew up on the phone—I used to spend hours every night talking to my friends when I was a teenager.

2. I don’t let students conduct interviews via email, unless they have already fulfilled the assigned quota for interviews in person, on the phone or via Skype. If they are writing a story that requires three interviews, only the fourth interview can be done via email or Facebook.

3. I try to give assignments in which making the phone call is the end goal, rather than a means to an end. Last year, I assigned a phone survey to my first-year journalism students at Concordia University, which required them to try to contact all 75 Quebec MPs via phone to ask them their opinion on doctor-assisted suicide. The survey was a bit of a bust, because students were frustrated by the lack of responses. But at least they got to experience what it is like to make repeated calls, talk to assistants, and try to arrange interviews. It is an assignment that I would try again.

4. Some students feel crushing anxiety at the thought of making cold calls to strangers because they fear rejection and have not built any confidence as a journalist. I suggest that they compartmentalize: to think not of themselves as young persons with no right to ask questions of often much older subjects, but as a detached reporters whose job gives them permission to probe. If they face rejection, it is simply not personal.

I should add that not all journalism teachers oppose email interviews, and some believe they are fine. As I acknowledged earlier, they do have some value. While electronic communication can help a journalist do his or her job, there is nothing like hearing somebody’s voice and measuring their tone. And the only way to get over a phone phobia is to pick it up and make the calls over and over again. Like anything, the more one does it, the easier it gets.

(This post originally appeared on j-source.ca)

*Image courtesy of parkland online.com

Graphic from Course Hero

This is a cautionary tale about how journalism course slides, meant for student eyes only, can end up for sale online.

This happened to me, without my permission or knowledge. Several of my PowerPoint presentations and assignment instructions for courses I teach at Concordia University were sold to Course Hero, a U.S. note-sharing site for university students.

My concern is not so much that one or more students sold my work when it was not theirs to sell. Rather, it sent a shiver down my spine, thinking about how liberally I borrowed material from a variety of sources while putting together my PowerPoint presentations, never imagining—perhaps naively—that they would be published online.

The first time I heard of Course Hero was this spring, when I woke up one morning to this CBC radio story about McGill and Concordia raising concerns about the crowdsourcing site, which boasts millions of documents, including student notes, slides, syllabi, practice exams and study guides. CBC Montreal, which did a cursory check of the nine-year-old site, reported that it found 35 chapters lifted from textbooks and 56 professors’ presentations.

One of the motivations for students is that those who upload 40 documents get free access to the site for one month. Also, they can download other documents in exchange for their offerings.

On Course Hero, I found my slides on introductory feature writing, covering meetings, and covering courts. There were also instructions for several class assignments. I had posted all of these on Concordia’s learning management system, Moodle, only accessible to students registered in the given course.

The biggest concern among academics seems to be about copyright; students posting their professors’ work without permission, and Course Hero profiting from it. Another complaint is that so-called “study buddy” sites breed student plagiarism and inhibit learning by making notes, exams, and papers readily available.

While I don’t like the idea of material being posted without my permission, my more pressing personal worry is that I created my slides with the intention they would not be widely shared. As a journalist, one knows to always credit all sources in published stories. But I admit I have taken a more cavalier approach for course slides. While I have credited most of the sources I use for my presentations, I don’t acknowledge all of them – particularly the required textbook in a given course.

The Course Hero incident triggered a memory of a faculty lunch I attended a couple of years ago, when I was a sessional instructor at Carleton University. The conversation drifted toward the perils of posting slides on the university’s online course management system. Somewhere in the U.S., as the story went, a professor was accused of plagiarism after students ran his slides through an online plagiarism site. The moral of the story, according to seasoned faculty, is to be very careful about what you post or even refrain from doing so and advise students to take good notes instead.

But I don’t want to stop posting my slides—students ask for them and I would rather they pay attention in class than concentrate on detailed note taking. Course Hero takes down material if it receives a complaint of copyright violation. I filed a request, and my material was promptly removed from the site, in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In the meantime, the incident was a warning for me to review all my slides to make sure I always give credit where it is due. Not doing so is wrong, regardless of whether the mate In the meantime, the incident was a warning for me to review all my slides to make sure I always give credit where it is due. Not doing so is wrong, regardless of whether the material will be published.

A few months ago, when I accompanied my second-year journalism students at Concordia University to the Luka Magnotta murder trial, a courthouse security guard wanted to know why I picked THIS, of all cases.

It was a good question, which got me thinking whether I had made a questionable choice. Until then, I had barely given a second thought to our “field trip” into the news lab of Montreal to give students practice in writing court stories.

What better way could there be to engage students in the legal system, I thought? I also believed the trial would provide some relief in a research-methods course that can be a tough slog, with segments on statistics, access-to-information requests, data journalism, and business reporting.

What I didn’t consider – and didn’t even realize, in fact – is that universities are increasingly requiring students to sign waivers when heading out on group trips.

And this trial – which was potentially upsetting even on its relatively mild days –could conceivably be the sort of event that risk-management folks are targetting.

Concordia, as far as I can ascertain from an online search, only has waiver requirements for field trips outside the province. But many other Canadian universities, including Carleton University, which also has a journalism school, have guidelines suggesting students sign waivers and/or informed consent forms before heading into the field with their teacher.

Now, in journalism, going out into the field is both routine and expected. Accompanying students is helpful in advising them how to write their stories and assessing their work. I have been on seven field trips in this academic year alone. I am new to teaching and even though I often sign forms for my 11-year-old daughter’s out trips from elementary school, it never crossed my mind that there could be paper work to fill out for university students. I wonder, now, whether these sorts of risk-management policies, which seem to be relatively new, will eventually become entrenched.

I did, on my own, take a few precautions.

I let students know that they could opt out of the Magnotta assignment if they felt uncomfortable. At the same time, however, I set the discomfort bar high, speculating that if they worked for news organizations, disturbing assignments would sometimes part of the territory, unless they are so potentially upsetting that they are life disrupting in some way.

A week before we went to the Palais de Justice for the trial, some students were worried that a notoriously gory video of Magnotta dismembering his victim would be shown when we were there. If that happened, I told them, we would probably have a bit of a heads up and we could talk about switching days. As it turned out, the jury was shown the video the day after we attended the trial.

Another mitigating factor in deciding to cover Magnotta is that all of my students were 18 or older — not legally children. Also, I knew well in advance that the only available seating would be in a spillover room, since the tiny courtroom could not accommodate even the working media. A couple of students said this bit of distance made them feel at ease, while others were itching to get into the actual courtroom to get a taste of “being there.”

At a debrief a week after the trial, some students maintained that they found it “exciting,” while others said it was slow-paced and nothing like the sort of courtroom drama they saw on TV shows. None of the students reported being uncomfortable about the assignment, and they later described it as the highlight of the course. Furthermore, the stories they produced were among the best of the term. So, in the end, if I were to bump into the security guard who questioned my judgment, I think I would tell him that I would do it again, while taking care to gauge class sentiment and endeavor to make sound decisions every step of the way, both before and after the event.

Before long, I might have to ask them to sign waivers as well.