mattwaite.com

You know journalism is in trouble when you know this: I'm being invited to teach a class at a respected journalism school. The fun part, and not a very surprising part given the state of the industry right now, is that neither they nor I have a really solid idea what the class is going to be. The class will start in the fall of 2010, so we have time to figure it out.

Obviously, given what I do now, they're not asking me to give a seminar on modern American narrative. I'm a journalist who builds web sites. I got into it when I built PolitiFact, the first website to win a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, I've built a few more sites and gone into consulting for media companies on the side. So, I'm just guessing that's what I'm going to be talking about.

But that's an awful broad area. Want to help? If you were going to take a journalism class from a journalist/programmer, what would you want the class to be?

My pitch thus far has been this: The business of the press has been mostly unchanged for hundreds of years, so journalism schools have evolved during that time to teach craft. That's still important. But now that the business is being turned inside out, it's time for entrepreneurship in the journalism school. Not my line, but a good one: The future of journalism belongs to the entrepreneurs.

So I'm thinking a class that's part business, part product development, part programming, part journalism. Ideally, we'd build and launch a product, but that may be hoping for a lot in a single semester, non-required, non-core class. I want to pull people from other colleges in there -- Nebraska has a fine entrepreneurship program at the business college, for example. I've got a million ideas, but I'm more curious what you think. What would you want out of a class like this?

If my comment system breaks for you or you don't want to publicly share your thoughts, I'm at matt (dot) waite (at) gmail (dot) com.

Comments

Christopher Spencer's comment on Nov. 23, 2009 3:58 p.m.

Matt,

If I were designing the course I'd love to have as an online publisher right now, it would include be shoestring publishing.

How could someone get the broad set of skills needed to cobble together their own news site. That includes digital image manipulation, web site design, video editing, audio interviews and of course, best practices for journalism. Also, some 101 in marketing yourself and your site.

That would have been an invaluable course for me.

Congratulations on being asked to teach the course.

Nico Colombant's comment on Nov. 23, 2009 7:15 p.m.

how to go from ideas to realities on a webpage ....

basics of different cmses ....

how to quickly make maps, graphs, with different info ...

how to embed stuff differently ...

journalists are creative and can quickly grasp ins and outs of shooting video, graphic design, writing for web, multi-media but putting it all into a web product, can be very difficult ...

Katie Nieland's comment on Nov. 24, 2009 7:09 p.m.

I am now I'm a journalist/flash programmer in Lincoln, Ne. and flash has allowed me to do some really cool things. I graduated from the school you'll be at and I think a class like this would make an excellent addition. I'd say flash would be a pretty standard program to spend at least a couple of days on. :)

Kristi's comment on Nov. 28, 2009 7:18 p.m.

I'd want to learn about how to pull data from online sources without ripping them off; some examples and guidelines for adding context. And maybe some ideas for sites that focus on local news.

jesse's comment on Nov. 29, 2009 9:54 p.m.

Hey Matt - new to the blog and really liking it, glad to see there's other journalist-programmers out there.

Something that I think would be very useful is an overview of web technologies and when to use them. For instance:

I want to post a package of stories, graphics photos and videos. Should I bundle all that up in one big, bloated flash as2 app or is there a better way?

How does Javascript compare to flash? When should I use which?

What is sql and PHP? How can journalists use these languages? Why should they know them?

What is XML? How can I use it?

Too much of what I see in newsrooms these days is a general lack of understanding of basic web technologies and how to appropriately use them.

Ideally, there would then be a second class that really digs into the meat of using the technologies.

nan's comment on Jan. 9, 2010 11:44 p.m.

check out the work and book of Mindy McAdams @ UF. She teaches this and more.
Beware of the time suck that building a syllabus, project and other homework rubrics and tests/finals/midterms can be. Be sure to see some samples, such as those at the UC Berkley ed school web site.