RSJ News
Busy bloggin' freshmen
09-03-2009
One student's blog, after completing a tutorial that involved adding video and audio to a site.
By Tammy Krikorian
In their first week of class, freshmen journalism students built a Web site – while learning the basic elements of hard news and writing leads. They quickly moved on to editing audio. Within weeks, they’ll be shooting photos, writing stories, adding audio and video elements and publishing their work online.
The plan: Get freshmen journalism students at the Reynolds School of Journalism working on multimedia storytelling from the very beginning of their coursework.
Journalism students used to start in Journalism 102, News Reporting and Writing. They moved then to 203 – Writing Across Media – where they would write an in-depth story for print, then move on to writing for online, broadcast, public relations and marketing. In another class, 204, journalism majors would learn production skills like audio and video editing.
The problem, said Professor Saundra Keyes, was that in the earlier courses, students were using hypothetical online and multimedia elements for a story, rather than actually producing them.
Additionally, assignments in 203 were distinct from assignments in 204, said Associate Professor Howard Goldbaum.
“We relatively quickly saw that the separation of production from writing and reporting wasn’t the best way,” said Assistant Professor Bob Felten.
“In this new world of journalism, we couldn’t keep them alienated,” Goldbaum said.
So, two years ago, Goldbaum and Felten did an experiment, collaborating on their 203 and 204 classes so that the multimedia work students did in 204 would complement their writing assignments in 203.
“(It was) successful,” Goldbaum said. “The students claimed to have learned more.”
Felten said they also seemed to be learning more quickly.
“They are better prepared to excel their last two years (in the program),” Felten said.
The experiment was the “proving ground” for two courses being offered for the first time this semester – Journalism 107, Multimedia News Reporting & Writing I, and 108, Media Production I.
Students will create a WordPress blog to post their assignments, which will include photo, audio and video assignments in 108 that correspond to writing assignments in 107. Assignments will be graded by instructors in both courses.
Junior Vanessa Browne, 20, said she thinks the new course structure will be helpful.
“It’s cool that both of them kind of intermingle with each other,” she said. “It’s cool you can do a project with both classes.”
The new structure of the courses does two things, Goldbaum said.
“No. 1 – this immediately gets our sophomores thinking that reporting is not just writing,” he said. “No. 2 – it eliminates the problem with people learning skills and, because they didn’t have the opportunity to use them for a year, forgetting them.”
As students progress through the journalism school, journalism faculty expect that projects for future classes will incorporate all kinds of media.
“It’s pretty exciting, I think, because from the (first) day students are learning to report, they’re not just thinking about ways to present, they’re doing it,” Keyes said. “It’s enlarging the pool of choices a journalist has to tell a story properly.”
Follow the progress on one class here.
