Confetti Post of Journalism – Carnival #1

The following posts come from COJ members who don’t have an appropriate blog to publish this content. Others may be added as posts come in.

The Role of Universities

This first post is from Jake Dobkin

I think that historically, universities have been successful as “hubs of journalistic activities” in two basic ways: through their association with college newspapers and magazines and through their journalism schools.

Managing the Hub. What is missing if Universities become hubs of journalism?

By Jason Barnett of The Uptake

I am honored to be part of the Carnival of Journalism, and hope my experience as a journalistic entrepreneur adds something to this conversation.

I am intrigued by the issue of how Universities can play a bigger role in their communities information needs and how they can be hubs of journalistic activity. This topic is close to our work at The UpTake as we sent a proposal to the Knight News Challenge in 2010 titled “Networked Journalism Schools” that went directly at this issue.

We were not successful in getting any funding for it, most likely because the project was very ambitious. We have seen the advantages of these forces teaming up in a real way for a long time now.

The problem is, however, not an easy one to solve and to do it right real ambition and institutional change is needed.

It is no secret that the journalistic industry has been and still is in great flux, nor is it a surprise that the ways people are communicating has dramatically changed in the last few years. The role the internet, and it’s endless force of creation has brought
industries to it’s knees and created new ones out of thin air. Our great-grandchildren will be writing books about how we managed to get through all this, as we surely can’t fully appreciate our current situation.

Universities are not immune to this upheaval. Institutions are slow to accept change and are reflexively resistant to it when it feels forced upon them and/or when they feel technically inferior to their own members. The way students are communicating and
sharing information has been and continues to be so some degree totally foreign to how traditional forms communication and decades of institutional memories and tenure tracks have cemented.

How then are we all to move forward? We need to find the innovators and bring them into positions of power within these institutions, and the institutions need to be prepared for all the change and pain that requires.

If the goal is to have Universities become community hubs of journalism, then they need to embrace the ways their students, people physically in their geographic region and those people who self-identify as community members are experiencing community
now. There will be a unique set of requirements for each institution, but in the general outline, we may find a needed set of key skills.

In my mind, the most overlooked and generally dismissed skill is that of the community organizer. We can talk till we’re blue in the face about how Universities should engage with Journalism, and how journalism can effectively cover a given community or
what new hot online tool we “OMG gotta have now!”, but there is no “hub” without a professional, constantly present, deeply engaged community organizer interacting with the needs of the given institution and it’s community. These roles are regularly put into
an “intern” position, or budgeted at the entry level (i.e. no power), or are attempted to be solved by “crowd sourcing” the job entirely. We even see these roles sometimes shunted off into the “PR” department where we get someone who understands spin and
marketing, but rarely really knows anyone they are marketing to.

The trick of this community organizer, is they also need to be fluent in the traditions of the institutions, the communities, and the needs of journalism. They have to dive physically into the community and be savvy to the ever changing pallet of online tools.
These under appreciated folks don’t need to be journalists, or professors, or University administrators, but they need to understand and work with them all.

Ideally, what the presence of a professional community organizer does, is let everyone do what they are good at. Universities to be leaders in research and teaching, newsrooms to cover news, and those trained and experienced in building thriving relationships in place to pull them together.

I don’t want to give the impression that all we have to do is hire the right person, because even accepting this type of role into the position of influence that is required is a large institutional change. Universities may be more familiar with some of these roles
in their every day student relations, but news rooms, on average, are not. Institutions have to be willing to change, to allow their teachers, administrators, their editors and journalists to engage with their communities with the guidance and leadership
of the community manager. If Universities are to become information hubs for their communities and hubs for journalistic activity, then the institutions have to embrace what it means to actually be an average member of that community and hand over
the leadership to those trained and experienced to managing thriving community relationships.

As some of the other Carnival bloggers have mentioned, there are attempts being made and experiments moving forward. I do feel there is a willingness to attempt big ideas and take on hard tasks. Maybe my opinion and experience running a news organization
that attempts to operate as I spelled out here can add something to this conversation.

Post by Ellyn Angelotti from Poynter.

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Carnival of Journalism Post #1

by Victoria Baranetsky

This month’s Carnival of Journalism (an online jamboree of journalists who respond to a given prompt) directed respondents to reflect on the Knight Commission‘s recommendation that universities should “Increase the[ir] role…as hubs of journalistic activity” and “integrate digital and media literacy….”
As someone who has spent the majority of the past ten years as a student in several departments (including journalism), I think this wonderful recommendation could be achieved if universities promoted all graduate faculties and students to create subject-
specific blogs.

The idea is for universities to endorse, organize, and fund department-specific blogs, providing a forum for graduate students and their faculty to write about new research and developments in their respective fields. This not only creates a university-wide introduction to journalism but also integrates digital and media literacy, fulfilling the two-prongs of the Knight Commission’s recommendation.

Even more important than satisfying these prongs, however, this tactic puts the intellectual aims of the profession first. First, blogging provides academics with an opportunity to share their field-specific research and ideas quickly with a broad audience
of academics within their own profession and the wider public.

“I’m very pleased at being able to [blog]…but being a scholar is about a lot more than just publicizing to the public,” one blogging professor stated. “It’s about coming up with new ideas. But I think part of what scholars ought to do is they ought to try to spread their views to the public at large.”

Simultaneously, blogs provides young burgeoning academics an ideal setting to develop their own writing craft and try out budding ideas in what might be seen as a virtual seminar.

“Blogging began as a way for us to lightly discuss summer research or daily politics,” said a Harvard History Ph.D. blogger, Kristen Loveland about her co-authored blog Ph.D. Octopus, “but [it] has become a really important place where we can test out ideas like
the relationship between ethnic particularism and universalism or the application of space theory to the crises of capitalism and so on, and then get challenges or suggestions from co-bloggers and readers.”

Additionally, it would teach graduate students how to tailor their writing to non-academic audience and reach a broader audience, further helping to break down the seemingly impermeable boundaries between the ivory tower and the wider public. As Loveland
stated, “it is also a great way to say hello to a world beyond our departmental walls.”

“What we want to be able to do is make sure that the teaching is driving technology,” said Katie Vale, Director of the Academic Technology Group at Harvard, reported to the Harvard Gazette. “We want to be able to solve educational problems through the use of technology and encourage faculty to try new and different pedagogical methods, such as using clickers for active learning.”

In essence, the blogs would simply be a new pedagogical method that not only benefits journalism, as the Knight Commission intended, but first and foremost focuses on satisfying the educational aims of each field. This latter factor is what would ensure this
project’s lasting success.

The main impediment to this suggestion is that for far too long, academics have long deemed their blogging counterparts to be inferior, ridiculing bloggers as the pajama-media (despite the fact that many professors’ dress is similarly unkempt), making the
task an unappealing endeavor. Instead of publishing on blogs, academics and future academics reserve their writing for the more esteemed peer-review or student-run journals. However, times have changed.

Despite the initial gag reflex with which many academics responded to the Internet, a number have recently turned a new leaf and entered the brave new world of blogging (See a list of professors who blog here). For some, academics like Professor of History
Claire B. Potter, at Wesleyan University who writes often on her blog Tenured Radical, this turn to the Internet has been transformative, as she explained in one of her blog entries.

For others, the shift has also proven to be widely successful. For example, blogs like TaxProf Blog and FemaleScienceProfessor have accrued a substantial following. Other blogs, like the The Volokh Conspiracy, have even awarded professors like Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, online celebrity with traffic of over 25,000 unique visitors each weekday.

In conjunction with their new-found respect for blogging, many professors have also abandoned student-run journals, because of the cumbersome requirements they make on faculty submissions and their often-criticized bias and inability to select worthy articles. Most of these professors have begun publishing on online databases like the Social Science Research Network. Such databases are a sign that blogging is becoming normalized within the profession.

However this growing trend with individual professors has been slow to catch on institutionally. Many universities have not officially endorsed or organized such sites. And universities are especially slow to support graduate student blogs.

Instead, students and departments have been left to develop blogs on their own time, rather than incorporating the practice within their educational programs. That is not to say that there haven’t been some student-blog successes despite the lack of institutional
support.

For example, a group of graduate students from the History Ph.D. programs at Brandeis, Harvard, and New York University created the blog, PhD Octopus, which has gotten much attention recently. In fact, PhD Octopus received this year’s “Best New Blog”
award from the Cliopatra Awards List for History Blogging, run by a group of historians.

As one PhD Octopus contributor Kristen Loveland explained, the blog’s ease in getting started, was likely influenced by the fact that blogging has become a norm within the community of history academics, as evidenced by the Cliopatra Awards.

Despite their success, Loveland agrees that institutionally there is little to no support in the universities for this activity. All of the work is done in the student’s free time and without any tie back to their work in the classroom.

Similarly, Ms.JD.com a non-profit dedicated to helping women in law succeed, has created a blog updated by articles from group they call Writers in Residence, composed of law student and lawyers (the author of this post is included in the group). Similarly,
this model, a blog for persons with a shared academic interest, would be quite easy for a university to pick up.

However, PhD Octopus, Writers in Residence, and other blogs like it are in the minority. Therefore, universities should begin to accept the power of pajama-writing and get in bed with the blogosphere.

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