For Samford Crimson journalists

Jeff Jarvis is on faculty at CUNY and is one of the bright minds and loud voices of progressive journalism. He’s in the blogroll here and I wanted to share with you a few of his recent entries of interest.

Here are his notes from the opening session of his interactive journalism class this semester. They’re worth a quick read.

And you’ll also want to read Jarvis on this idea

The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public.

[...]

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed.

[...]

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

This is the way to cover stories and life.

Disclosure: Jarvis was once the president of Advance Internet, the parent company of al.com, my previous employer.

This didn’t work so well in the auditorium, but you can see several examples and tips from our photography workshop here.

There are good and bad shots there and you will learn a great deal from studying the photography of others, but you’ll always learn more by going out and shooting!

Remember:

• rule of thirds
• focus
• f-stop and shutter speeds
• faces, faces, faces
• take adventurous shots of conventional settings
• your photos tell an important story!
• so does your cutline, you’re also a reporter, get good info from your subjects

And don’t forget to shoot a lot of photos so we can make galleries for the site!

Working on your lede? Here are a few helpful tips.