fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

I had a conversation today with a faculty colleague about what we should be teaching in our reporting classes. “Storytelling” always comes up as a key emphasis and he described a heartbreaking story he saw recently on the local television news about the impact of budget cuts on home care for the disabled.

Research (Iyengar, among others) shows that these types of stories don’t always elicit much response other than short-term emotion. But they do attract attention, humanize an abstract story, highlight the plight of individuals and occasionally result in action on the ground.

Online experience is beginning to show that stories have a number of other limiting factors. While they are the heart and soul of movies, books and magazines, they aren’t necessarily the most effective way to communicate timely, public information.

There’s an ongoing conversation about the basic unit of news *not* being a story, but a fact. A fact in a database can be used in many ways — on a map, in a list, as part of a story. It can be searched, reused, customized, etc. When we bury facts in stories, we can’t find them easily, pull them out, reuse them, etc. This means we should think about how we structure the creation and presentation of news in new ways. Telling stories is an important skill for our students, but it’s not the only way they should be taught to present information. This post summarizes some of the key ideas in this conversation:

The Basic Unit of News is:

When I think about the situation of our students, they are facing the following:

• A news industry that is changing very, very quickly, with the prospect of far fewer traditional jobs (all media)
• A craft that is being reshaped by the emergence of a powerful new medium
• A public that, given a vast array of choices, is consuming much less traditional news via traditional sources
• A public government/infrastructure that is close to crisis

I see great opportunities in the current disruption that will give/force an unprecedented level of creativity, gumption, risk, entrepreneurship, skill in the pursuit of a career in journalism. Given all that, teaching our students to tell text or multimedia stories that evoke empathy and concern is one important skill, but only a fraction of what they will be expected to do, and should do, in a networked environment.

I am teaching an online reporting class that starts in exactly 13 days. What should students know by the time they complete the course?  My current list includes:

Blogging (as in Beat Blogging, as in a new genre, for journalism.)
Video and Audio Storytelling (a la MediaStorm, OnBeing, Travis Fox)
Mapping (as described in MediaShift, Take Control of Your Maps, Mastering Multimedia)
Moderating (Comments and Conversation, Stack Overflow, NewsMixer)
Crowdsourcing (Spot.Us, Networked)
New forms of Storytelling (The Economy, Climate change, Loaves and Fishes)
Data Visualization (Sifting Data, Photostream, Vizster)
Social Media (Facebook, Plaxo, Feedster, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us etc.)
Database Management (Adrian Holovaty, Data Desk)
Computer-assisted Reporting (Public Records, NICAR)

Principles of:
Community Engagement
Interactivity
Entrepreneurship
Networking
Innovation

Commitment to:
Public problem solving
Accuracy, fairness, ethical practice
Principles of Media Creation/Consumption (Dan Gillmor)

These will not all fit in one course, of course. But the days of multiple courses designed to teach students how to write a news story, drilling AP style and producing a portfolio of polished stories that have little chance of being published will not serve them well in this new environment.

What do you think they should learn?