In between chapters of summer reading (currently Oryx and Crake by Twitter extraordinaire Margaret Atwood), I’m putting together the web building/online journalism training for the ILPC Summer Workshop at UT this weekend.

Whenever there’s time to lose myself in good storytelling like Atwood’s, I get to thinking of the workshop of all workshops I attended a couple of years back on multiplatform journalism at the Poynter Institute. We started the high-tech training with a focus not on the latest web technology or multimedia fad in newsrooms, but on our favorite storytellers, a process led by Chip Scanlan.

At the time, numbed by deadlines and the day-to-day grind of daily deadline writing of articles — not stories — it took me a while to remember the last time I was truly engaged with a piece of journalism. Finally I did come up with one, a Texas journalist who engages me with his stories more than any other: Skip Hollandsworth. I still think about this story and re-read it with students from time to time.

What makes a good story?

Many things, but at its core, I believe a good story needs to be relevant to our lives and the world around us. It should tell the story of a human experience that anyone can relate to through emotion, need or drive. And a good story gives me a reason to read to the end. How many times do we pick up a book or magazine or click on a link, only to be disengaged within a few paragraphs, pages or chapters?

The inverted pyramid is great for web updates, to find out the latest and most important facts by skimming, but it defeats the entire purpose of storytelling by guaranteeing the audience that the information they are getting will only get less important if they continue reading. But a good story keeps the audience around, whether through means of suspense, the sheer importance and draw of the information provided or because it’s just a good ride.

So what does this have to do with online journalism? Everything. What I took away from that training, and what I hope to impart to my students is that storytelling is just as important with a flip cam or audio recorder as it is with words. An online interactive package should still at its essence include good storytelling. The technology is just the means to the end, not the end itself. So we can teach students to edit video, put together slideshows or an interactive graphic, but they need to embrace that they are storytellers above all.

After my first year as a high school journalism adviser, I have to say, it was fun, challenging, frustrating, exhilarating — and I’m glad it’s over.

A year or two ago, I left a “cushy” night cops position at a daily metro to pursue teaching journalism. Much thought went into the change, and the opportunity to work with students to explore new frontiers in online journalism was appealing, as were summers and holidays off to spend with my growing family.

Do I miss reporting? How can you not? Being a journalist is one of the best jobs out there, no matter the frustrations we’re all too familiar with today. You get to call people like the mayor at home, ask inappropriate and nosy questions, argue with the copy desk about commas, eat pizza on election night, calm angry callers with a diatribe on the fundamental purpose of journalism as my mentor former reporter Bob Banta could famously do, hole up in the newsroom opening “gifts” – boxes of open records requests, get paid to go to hot sauce festivals and chili cookoffs, see your name in print everyday (and not because you sent a bunch of bad photos over Twitter and have a funny name.)

As a journalism adviser, some of these things are the same: eating pizza on deadline nights, arguing about commas — just with teenagers, not copy editors, although not too different when you think about it — opening “gifts” in the form of yearbook proofs, going to softball games. Some of the others include encouraging students to have the confidence to do — interview the principal, ask nosy questions of their peers and teachers, get “paid” to spend an entire weekend with the latest Call of Duty game to write a review, meet famous people like Elizabeth Berkley (Jesse from “Saved by the Bell”), whom you should invite to your school to talk, and see their names in print.

Which is better? Which is worse? They both have good and bad points, and having calculated those points in my mind on rough days, I’d say it’s an even trade.

But hey, ask me again next year. Everyone says your first year is the hardest, and I believe it, but if it only gets better from here, it’s quite likely teaching journalism will tip the scale.