Guerrilla Video

Spent last Sunday at the West Hollywood Book Fair helping video poets and writers for the online literary site, Guerrilla Reads (that would be guerrilla as in DIY/indy media – no freedom fighters were involved in the making of this production).

Here’s a nifty write-up of how to pull off a half-day guerrilla performance session.

The photos are of Pamela August Russell (aka The Very Bad Poet), who authored “B is for Bad Poetry,” and Kathy Charles, the Melbourne novelist whose most recent book is “John Belushi is Dead.”

Breaking the Mold: Innovative Ideas for the Future of Journalism

One of the key underlying questions at a number of sessions at today’s start of a  four-day annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Denver was:

How can we save journalism?

The answer from Prof Larry Dailey, multimedia guru at U. of Nevada -Reno speaking on a panel called Breaking the Mold, was simple:

Forget about it.  Instead, think about ways to save the roles journalism has played in democracy.

Dailey, who must be among the first j profs in the country to teach a journalism class in Innovation, touted Harvard prof Clay Christensen’s ideas about disruptive innovation, popularized in The Innovator’s Dilemma, as a lens for considering the journalism industry’s decline.

Successful businesses, driven by stockholder’s demands, stick with routines and the competencies developed to efficiently carry them out, and this inevitably leads to inflexibility and failure as the nimble innovator races between their legs, so to speak.  Think music industry and Napster.

What the journalist of the future needs, then, is an ability to think creatively, to come up with new ideas, to learn to start out with what Dailey dubs “a crappy prototype” that might lead to a real innovation — or might not.

Other panelists included:

Mississippi’s Samir Husni “Mr Magazine” who emphasized creating experiences for audiences, citing examples from magazine covers that ranged from scratch and sniff to 3D to an audience favorite: peel the clothes from a cover boy. (Doesn’t take much to excite a bunch of middle-aged professors.)

Minnesota’s Nora Paul who discussed their Knight News Challenge-funded  project that aimed to create an online game about Ethanol to see if a play format would attract and better inform audiences.  The answer: um, not really.  Er, sounds like idea that ran out of gas?

Ball State’s Jennifer George-Palilonis discussed cross-campus projects pulling together multiple departments and colleges to create innovative online media and mobile apps.

What Can Journalists Learn from Novelists and other Writers?

Los Angeles Times Book Festival Notes:

Rebooting Culture Panel

Journo Nicholas Carr, who penned the viral article, “Is Google making us stupid?”:

• The printed book trained our minds to pay attention but this was “an anomaly in our intellectual history.”
• The human mind is scattered and easily distracted, so the fragments and speed of online information are more reflective of our natural state.  We’re losing our ability to reflect and contemplate.

U of  Washington English prof David Shields, whose new book is a series of fragmented aphorisms, 45% of which are lifted from a range of other authors, some serious, some not:

• The novel  no longer reflects our lives. Its key components such as “setting” no longer are important because we experience space as a much less static phenomenon. Having a “plot” conveys a coherence that doesn’t exist.
• Mashups are the crucial cultural form today.  Linear forms keep artists conservative.
• Copyright and even plagiarism need to be rethought.  His book’s footnotes are printed on pages with a note encouraging readers to tear them out of the book.

Former hacker Anders Monson who wrote a half-print/half e-book memoir, Vanishing Point, which he calls “voice karaoke” whose latest  book is a “collage” of over 100 other people’s memoirs:

• “the self is an inherently unstable thing.”

Panel: New Media Meets Publishing

• writers are rewriting a single narrative for multiple platforms in which the characters or even plot are changed
• involve the audience
• people still willing to donate a few dollars even for free e-books
• give away a preview to draw in an audience
• Wil Wheaton: self publish via epubbooks or Lulu

Was in the stand-by line for the panel on the collapsing US economy but decided it was too depressing, so I  got an espresso instead.   Panel on China as Next Superpower was “sold out.”  Walked out of a panel on science writing because the moderator was annoying and had really bad hair.

Hello Dolly: Test Tube Journalism

This fall I threw out the book on our sophomore-junior level writing class, Journalism 310 Writing, Reporting & Ethics III. Literally.

After months of departmental discussions, major purchases of backpack journalism equipment, a week-long convergence bootcamp, and a university Beck grant, I completely re-imagined what was once a feature writing class.  J310 became a test tube for multimedia journalism unlike anything I’ve taught before.

The results?  Students  shot and edited video, wrote reviews for Yelp, created Google Maps, and even tried their hands at live blogging.   They used WordPress blogs as the sites for the content they produced, and signed up for YouTube accounts to post video.  (This tag cloud gives a sense of what we covered, or you can visit the class site or blog for more specifics. To see what students produced, visit their individual blogs.)

I’ve just gotten back the anonymous student reviews (thank you, J310ers for your many kind comments), and wanted to share some of their critiques:

“I was under the impression this would be an intensive writing class not a Web 2.0 class . . . In fact, the writing we have done seems supplemental to technology.” This is a key issue facing all print journalists — technology is taking away from the basics of reporting and writing.   To what extent should that be happening in student journalism classes as well?

“I needed further explanation on how to use these tools.” While writing skills vary in journo classes, the variation in tech skills seems greater to me, and thus presents a thornier problem.  Some students wanted minimal explanation and then an opportunity to dive in; others wanted more guidance.  Perhaps more emphasis on peer mentoring?

“Would have liked a more solid syllabus that mapped out assignments better.” Because the class was new, I wasn’t entirely sure how much we could cover, so the syllabus was a bit vague.  I revised it as the semester went along but it still needs fleshing out.

Faculty perspectives

The curriculum committee also surveyed faculty this semester about their use of new media and their thoughts about incorporating such tools.

Faculty are teaching:  Soundslides, Garageband, iMovie/Windows Movie Maker, blogging, wikis, Twitter, RSS, Firefox plugin architecture, social bookmarking, website creation, HTML, CSS.  Examples of student work:

Student-produced PR VNR (De Veaux)

J110 News Spotting blog (Charles)

J210 blog (Bowen)

Scene Magazine (Shapiro)

El Nuevo Sol (Benavides)

Faculty comments:

Basic Internet skills need to be taught earlier in the program vs. No online skills until the 300 level (whoa, how do we reconcile those lines of thought?)

Problems include “giving up certain assignments in favor of the multimedia projects.”

Students need to spend extra time learning the tools early in the semester, so they don’t scramble to do so with their final, major assignments.

Inconsistency in departmental software;  mainly Mac labs but mainly PC-owning students.

Taking my J310 students’ comments and those from faculty into account, the issues are the same:

• What’s our emphasis as we incorporate new skills with traditional ones?  How do we keep up-to-date without forgetting our roots?

• When and at which levels do we incorporate new technology skills?
• Professors need to calibrate how much more time will be needed to teach these new forms journalism, and whether traditional ways of explaining still work.

Short attention span lectures

Here is a Powerpoint presentation of recommendations for print journos learning to use video — the slides have been remixed via a website called Animoto.  You upload the slides, they let you select some music and viola — a 30-second music video.  Is this the future or I am just a sucker for glitzy toys?

Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that students watching videos of professors’ lectures are running them at up to twice their normal speed.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3