Teaching Online Journalism

Videos to help explain new online tools to students

The website below contains links to a library of simple, short videos that teachers may find useful to introduce lessons about a wide range of new online tools. Common Craft Productions produces videos in what it calls "Plain English" about such things as blogs, RSS, social bookmarking and wikis. They are all only a few minutes long.

A recipe for new media training from Columbia U

A basic primer about new digital media tools and practices

If you feel as though you have fallen behind and need to catch up quickly on all the new tools and practices being used by journalists online these days, you may find this introductory guide useful. It may also help those students who are not on the cutting edge and feel intimidated by those who are. The book, Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive, is written by Mark Briggs, Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive News at The News Tribune. It covers new reporting methods such as crowdsourcing, new tools such as tags and social bookmarking, and new practices such as audio and video reporting for print journalists. The guide is available for download online as a PDF at the link below or for purchase from The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the same link.

Five steps to multimedia reporting

This site offers a series of tutorials for journalists who want to learn how to produce stories in the field using audio, video, photos and web design tools. The detailed instruction about shooting and editing video and audio make this site useful for broadcast instructors, too. This site is sponsored by The Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism program, which offers workshops to mid-career journalists to enhance their expertise and multimedia skills

New ideas about how to produce online information packages

News21 is a project sponsored by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations in the U.S. in which specially-selected journalism graduates were challenged to produce a journalistic package about Faith in America in ways that push the boundaries of how online journalism is produced. For anyone looking for new ideas about what's possible online, this site may provide some inspiration.

Producing breaking news online

A training module from the Gannet Corporation, a leading newspaper company in the U.S. designed to help newsrooms understand how and why they need to change their ways and put online news first. It includes tips on writing like a wire reporter and videos from editors about why online news matters to the future of newspapers.

Flash journalism

An interactive website rich with tips, advice and resources for educators and others interested in learning how to use Flash to create intereactive, multimedia content for news websites.

Online journalism seminar syllabus

It's a challenging course for graduate students at UC Berkley's School of Journalism about the new practices that are redefining journalism. Students are told they will learn about major new trends in online journalism; become fluent in a variety of digital media forms, creating blogs, as well as database-driven news “mashups; and work on a collaborative online news site. It is taught by two instructors with impressive new media experience whose course outline includes their weekly plan for classes and links to online readings and resources that anyone teaching online journalism is certain to find useful.

Online journalism awards

Each year the Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School for Communication issue awards in a wide range of categories honoring excellence in digital journalism. The link above provides a list of links to the the most recent finalists and winners. Elsewhere on the page, find links to the winners in previous years.

When blogs produce good journalism

If you are teaching a journalism course about blogs, or using blogs, you may find this list by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU helpful. It is an initital list of blog postings (with links) that have revealed information that served the public good before the information appeared in the mainstream media. He has invited others to send in other examples to make the list more complete. It is all part of his response to a column in the LATimes about how blogs are useless and unrealiable.

Interactive narratives

A database full of creative interactive narratives, which the site defines as "informational and storytelling experiences designed and produced for the web." They leverage great design, visual journalism and rich-media content.

Video tutorials about new online tools

This website includes links to a few short, effective tutorials about such things as using RSS readers, DIGG basics, blogging and alerts that online journalism students are bound to find useful as part of any lesson on new online tools. They are produced by an online marketing firm and public relations firm, but don't let that stop you from watching them. Check out the site for other links to useful tools for journalists, too.

Video tutorial for Google Reader

If you are trying to teach or encourage your students to use RSS feeds, specifically through Google Reader, you may find this online video tutorial helpful as a teaching aid or additional link to any course materials you post on course websites. It's a clear 10 minute guide with lots of screen captures and simple instructions. Be warned, it takes more than a few seconds to load.

Resources for teaching online journalism

The Online Journalism Review published a list of resources for teaching online journalism in 2004, which includes a links to course syllabi, including Canadian ones.

Lessons learned from teaching a first course in online journalism

An instructor who took on the challenge of teaching a senior workshop in online journalism at a university in Texas outlines how he tried to ensure the focus remained on journalism and not skills training and reflects on the lessons he learned.

Writing and using effective links in online stories

Poynter's Chip Scanlan has started a new series called the ABC's of Online Journalism. In this, his first column, he describes his views about when and how links should be used in online news stories.

Online storytelling forms

A great list of the variety of ways in which news can be presented online, taking advantage of the unique features of the Internet from Jonathan Dube, the editor of CBC.ca and the publisher of Cyberjournalist.net.

Launching online journalism courses

More from the Online Journalism Review about launching online journalism courses at the university level, which includes interviews with Canadian as well as American instructors.

Online news terms

A helpful glossary of definitions from the Online Journalism Review about the common jargon used in Web journalism.

Ethics in multimedia storytelling

An interesting blog discussion about what guidelines should be used to ensure fairness and accuracy when gathering and producing audio material to accompany multimedia stories online.

Don't forget the value of hyperlinking

"Hyperlinks not only can help provide informative context to information within a story, they also can help keep a story alive long after its original publication," says Robert Niles at OJR.org. Here he outlines how newsrooms can make better use of this old-school web tool.

Website construction how-to

This tutorial on setting up a website's information architecture (IA) still holds up as a great reference for site construction. It was created by John Shiple, a web consultant in California who specializes in information architecture, collaborative system strategies and advanced user interfaces for Internet-based content.

How soccer helped train a Danish online journalism class

Kristian Strøbech, an Associate Professor at the Danish School of Journalism and the instructor of "Online Journalism & Multimedia Storytelling," gives an in-depth account of her class's project on reader interactivity. The project -- setting up a website to cover the hometown soccer team -- revealed how a live audience dialogue can be a great motivator in a training excercise as well as a useful source of inspiration and knowledge.

Online journalism wikis

The Annenberg Online Journalism Review has posted these articles on online journalism and how to write for the Web. The articles include tips for writers, tools and glossaries for the terms used in online journalism. If you are a registered user in OJR.org, you can also add to and edit the articles.