Journalism students at the University of Montana practice shooting video for a multimedia class. The students here are using a Sony XD camera. (Eric Oravsky)

U.S. journalism schools teach multimedia reporting skills

by Ashley Klein

Everyone’s talking about it. It’s like a nasty infection spreading through journalism schools around the nation. It’s past the point of whispers. That fear, the one of uncertainty — the unknown — is festering in the minds of students, raising stress levels almost to the point of breaking. All around the world, budding journalists and veterans can be heard screaming, “Is multimedia the new frontier?”

Simply put: Yes. It’s 2010, and multimedia is here to stay. Now the question is: how do we teach it?

Sree Sreenivasan, dean of Student Affairs at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, said the day has come when the students know as much about emerging media as the professors. Sreenivasan, one of the most followed professors on Twitter according to the “Top 100 Twitterers in Academia” by OnlineSchools.org, admits he didn’t even start “tweeting” until a student mentioned the social networking site to him.

The self-proclaimed technology evangelist and skeptic created a course in social media in fall 2009 at Columbia. He teaches at the school’s digital journalism program with classes like “Smarter Surfing: Better Use of Your Web Time,” and “Figuring Out Blogs & Whatever’s Next.”

He said it is important that both professors and students stay open-minded because the future of journalism is full of possibilities, and no one knows exactly what to expect.

Newsrooms around the country are cutting costs. Staffs are being trimmed and budgets for large, in-depth pieces are nearly non-existent. The days of reading the morning paper during breakfast are becoming a thing of the past. Online journalism is now, and at the center of it all is multimedia.

So what do students need to know? Should budding journalists dabble in a little bit of everything, including traditional writing and editing, as well as shooting and editing video? Or should they pick one trade and have it mastered?

One collaboration thinks it has the answer.

News21 is a 10-week investigative reporting program supported by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. Five schools — the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Harvard University, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California — started the project in 2006. In 2008, seven more schools were added: Arizona State, Maryland, North Carolina, Syracuse, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas.

Jody Brannon, professor of practice at ASU and national director of News21, explained the program as basically constructing a newsroom with the end goal of engaging readers in ways they never have before.

Though each school, or “incubator,” has its own project to work on, the program has one overlying theme. For the first three years, the project themes stayed fairly narrow. By the fourth year, the general umbrella theme loosened to a generic “Changing America” idea that has stuck since then.

According to the website, Harvard, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas are “associate schools” rather than “participating schools,” meaning that they don’t actually create incubators. Instead they send one or two students to the participating universities.

For 2010, incubators chose topics ranging from homelessness in America to energy issues, the 2010 census and the elderly population across the nation.

Each incubator has 10-12 fellows, or students, who produce the project, and at least one project coordinator, who is usually a professor at the school. Each team does its project a little differently.

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has three coordinators for News21 and 12 fellows. The “Powering a Nation” team is also composed of “coaches” who act as guides to the fellows.

This is the second year that the UNC team is focusing its project on energy. The team decided to carry over the theme from 2009 because it felt like it had more of the story to tell.

The teams only have half a year to produce the project. During the spring they brainstorm, and then during the summer fellowship they gather and create their stories. The project has to be done by the end of the summer fellowship. UNC plans to expand on what students learned about energy use in 2009 and add more to it in 2010.

In 2009, 94 students, ranging from college juniors to doctoral students, participated in News21. Brannon said each school chooses participants differently, but all of the students are the “cream of the crop and leaders in journalism education circles.”

Don Wittekind, professor of journalism at UNC and coordinator for News 21 at the school said, “News21 is an experience you will never get again. It’s unique at this time. The resources are unbelievable.”

News21 received a $7.5 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The grant allows fellows in the teams a stipend of more than $2,000 each.

While investigative reporting suffers at larger media outlets, the fellows are granted almost unrestricted access to their reporting. They use state-of-the art equipment, travel without restraint and are taught by some of the most knowledgeable professors in their field — all of which is covered by the grant.

The program starts during the spring semester before the 10-week summer program. Students meet and discuss what they will be doing over the summer. The spring seminars allow students to meet one another and learn as much about their topic as possible.

News21, like the curriculum enrichment program funded by Carnegie-Knight, works with students to do interdisciplinary work. Many spring seminars feature speakers from other departments at the universities.

“We like to think of it as making learning fun,” Brannon said.

At UNC, the group splits into teams. Each team is in charge of one story and usually consists of a reporter, photographer, videographer and programmer. The team works together to come up with ideas for the story. Zach Ferriola-Bruckenstein, a 2009 graduate of UNC and member of the 2009 News21 staff, said his internship at National Geographic “didn’t compare with coming up with ideas and doing them from start to finish.” He said that during the course of his internship he didn’t have one thing published. At News21, he was able to start and finish the entire project and see the work on the Web.

All of the past incubators’ projects can be viewed at the News21 website, News21.com. Each incubator created its own multimedia package, including written stories, photos, videos and interactive graphics.

Brannon said multimedia offers more to storytelling.

“You can construct a very complex project,” she said. “There are more layers than just with an inverted pyramid.”

“It’s real world,” Wittekind said. “You may or may not get experience at an internship. The team environment is key.”

For the most part, each student was accepted into the program because of a special skill set. Ferriola-Bruckenstein took the role of programmer.

Wittekind said he prefers that students pick a specialty on which to focus, like designing, writing or videography, because “you can’t be an expert in everything.”

“It’s that fine line,” Wittekind said, “between being a jack of all trades and a master of none.”

He said that it is good that students are competent in many media aspects in a team environment, because they are usually able to work better together if they have some knowledge of the others’ work.

“Most great projects are a team of specialists who really respect one another,” Wittekind said.

Brannon doesn’t necessarily agree with Wittekind. She said adaptability is key in the new media world.

“I need them to be able to adapt to everything,” Brannon said. “It’s more valuable than any particular tool.”

She said smart students should take advantage of their education. She said a journalism degree is a good start, but pairing it with a business entrepreneurial degree or something of the sort will really give a student an advantage in the job market.

She said the News21 team model seems to work well.

Brannon said 80 percent of journalism students involved with News21 get a job in the media field within six months of graduation. Brannon said that from 2006 to 2010, students got hired at a 10 percent higher rate than non-News21 students.

Wittekind said he hopes other schools are starting to teach team projects like News21.

The School of Journalism at the University of Montana–Missoula teaches some classes like News21, though not on as large a scale.

Native News has been an honors class at the journalism school since 1992. Eight pairs of students are each assigned to one of the seven Indian reservations in Montana, with one pair covering the “urban” Native Americans. As at News21, the teams work collaboratively to produce a package story, including a story and photos.

According to Carol Van Valkenburg, adviser of Native News and head of the print department at UM, the idea behind the project was to get students working on more in-depth stories involving the under-reported Native American tribes spread across Montana.

Both the photographer and writer work for the story. Native News is one of the few classes that UM’s journalism school offers in which students work as equal partners on one story.

“I think it’s extraordinarily valuable,” Van Valkenburg said, and students “learn to respect other points of view and see things that they may not otherwise.”

More recently, the project launched a website to supplement the printed magazine, and it is filled with multimedia.

Van Valkenburg said the multimedia on the website “does not tell the same story, but tells another story” than the one that is written or photographed.

“It adds another dimension,” Van Valkenburg said.

Though Van Valkenburg is supportive of multimedia and collaborative works for the class, she is conservative about its future in teaching journalism. She said joint projects between print, radio/television and photo students have been tried in the past, but “all it served to do was make them hyper-competitive.”

Multimedia has staked its claim in the media world. Its presence will continually challenge professors to teach students how to report on important stories in an interesting, and perhaps interactive, way.

Though limited to just a few journalism schools, the News21 model has been proven to work. Smaller schools could, as UM is doing, teach a similar approach with classes like Native News. Will this type of learning prove to be the best way for the ever-changing multimedia world?

For that there is no answer. But Van Valkenburg said that budding journalists “all have to have the basics.”

Let’s hope that never changes.