Online journalism teaching - the good and the not-so-good

An interesting debate is taking place on Twitter and blogs about the quality of online journalism education. Students are quite rightly critical of courses which don't take online journalism seriously (a particularly shortsighted position as many of our students get online jobs when they graduate). We're working very hard at Kingston to keep our courses up to date and have made a number of significant changes, including junking Online Journalism as an option and making multimedia reporting compulsory for all first and second years. They're assessed on work uploaded onto our internal CMS as well as work done for print. Students are introduced to Twitter, blogs and video journalism and learn how to develop an online brand. Our MA students run their own news website, RiverOnline where they put their multimedia skills into practice.

But all this has only happened after a lot of meetings and arguments (sorry, discussion) about timing and resources. As Marie Kinsey @journotutor, my colleague at Sheffield, points out, university bureaucracy is not set up for instant and regular change. Any changes to assessments have to be agreed by a committee which meets only every couple of months, so introducing assessment of students' Twitter use (one suggestion on the blogs) would have to wait an academic year, unless we could sneak it in under the guise of a "portfolio" of work. The obsession with "quality" means that everything has to have a paper trail. Software changes which need technical support or resources have to be planned and agreed more than a year in advance. Obviously we're not alone - the whole university sector works the same way, as far as I can gather from colleagues at other institutions.

As an NCTJ-accredited institution, we also have to shape our syllabus to a certain extent to the demands of the NCTJ exams. The NCTJ has just announced a massive overhaul of its newswriting syllabus and not a moment too soon. The disjunct between its old-fashioned, local newspaper print journalism exam and our attempts to teach our students the skills to survive in a 21st century newsroom make session-planning a tricky task.

Of course students don't see all this frantic paddling under the surface and they could argue, quite justifiably, that it isn't their problem. But in the interests of fairness (good journalism), this is just to suggest that there are two sides to every story...

Michael Jackson's death - Twitter-style

I'm just back from Prague where the newspapers on Friday led not on the death of Michael Jackson but on the serious floods in the south of the Czech Republic. One newspaper carried a nib about Jackson's death on the front page but otherwise there was nothing. Of course I might have missed something (my Czech isn't what it should be and newspapers there may have earlier deadlines), but the contrast between this and the media hysteria generated by the UK press was quite startling. Like Roy Greenslade, I would use the word "overkill" to describe the acres of newsprint about Jackson which greeted me on my return. I'd say the Czech press had its priorities right.

But from an online journalism research perspective, the interesting thing about coverage of Jackson's death was that it provided yet more evidence of the growing role of Twitter in breaking and passing on news. Unlike Iran or Mumbai, this was not a life or death event (except for Jackson, of course) and Twitterers were sharing links and news rather than acting as eyewitnesses. But again Twitter seized the initial news agenda from the mainstream press. Citizen journalism in action?

Yes, on one level. But as comments left on Robert Niles' blog at the Online Journalism Review suggest, tweeting is still a minority activity, tweets aren't always accurate and it's often the same voices leading the conversation. It still needs the reach of the mainstream media to bring the news to the majority (including the news that the story broke on Twitter and the site crashed).

Of course, the mainstream media may be among those tweeting most loudly. Growing numbers of journalists are using it to share information and source contacts. The jury is still out on whether Twitter is a great piece of technology or a fad but it looks as if it's becoming a virtual telephone, contact book and notebook for a significant minority. And mainstream news sites including Times Online and the Guardian have been using Twitter feeds from reporters on the spot effectively at high profile news events like the G20 demonstrations. As with blogs, journalists are moving into geek territory and appropriating the tools to change the way they do their jobs. Chuck that notebook in the bin. On second thoughts, don't. That's the difference between being a professional journalist and being a member of the public.