It’s the time when many high school newsrooms are reconfiguring roles for next year. Wanting to get a head start, I jotted down some job descriptions for a newly converged newsroom, which I hope will eventually accurately describe the program I will join in the fall. These roles will evolve with student input as the year progresses.

These are based on the following principles/missions/beliefs:

• Some might be more involved with print or more involved with online, but everyone will have some kind of input on and responsibility for the website.
• Neither online or the website will be an after-thought. But for this all to work, web has to come first.
• Journalists today need to learn how to do everything first and specialize later.
• I’m a stickler for style, grammar, clarity and continuity, so it’s key to have a copy chief as in professional newsrooms.

I’d love input on how other schools do this. Here’s one example of a successful program, and JEA Digital Media has a section devoted to structuring and training staff.

Newsroom Roles

Editor-in-chief: Responsible for the overall production of newspaper and website. Oversees editors and ensures all sections and aspects of print and online work together.

Copy/Design Chief: Responsible for working with editors on the design of the print newspaper and website. Writes final headlines and copy edits print and online stories for clarity, grammar and AP Style.

Example of form created with Google Docs for next year's students.

Web editor: Responsible for overseeing the website, including the design, content and technical issues. Works with editors and other staff members to ensure website has up-to-date content, multimedia components and increasing page hits. Teaches editors how to upload content to the web. Keeps up with new trends and technology and teaching these to the staff.

Photo editor: Responsible for overseeing photography in print and online. Assigns photos and works with photographers on editing and choosing photos and to create photo essays in print and galleries online.

Multimedia editor: Responsible for multimedia components of the website. Works with and oversees multimedia journalists and other staff members on multimedia projects. Oversees the official Youtube site. Includes creating multimedia components and keeping up with new trends and technology and teaching these to the staff.

News, feature, entertainment, sports, opinion editors: Responsible for section coverage in print and online. Works with writers and other staff members to assign and create stories and multimedia components for print and online. Edits stories for print and online, including blog entries, and designs print pages.

Social media editor: Responsible for creating the newspaper’s social media strategy and serves as the main voice for the official Twitter and Facebook pages. Oversees and organizes posting on these sites by newspaper students. Facilitates conversation with readers on the website and on the social media pages, including organizing live chats and filtering comments on these pages.

Print/online ad managers: Responsible for all aspects of print/online advertising, including design, placement on website and technical issues (for online). Sells ads and oversees business aspect of newspaper students who sell print/online ads.

Non-editors rotate through the following roles during the first semester then specialize the second semester.

Writers: Responsible for writing articles for print and the website. Includes working with multimedia journalists to come up with ideas for multimedia components to go along with stories.

Photographers: Responsible for shooting and editing photos for the newspaper and website. Writes captions for photos. Includes photo essays for the print edition and photo galleries for the website. Work with multimedia journalists and/or writers to create audio slideshows.

Multimedia journalists: Responsible for producing multimedia components of the website to go along with stories and as stand-alone projects. Includes but not limited to creating podcasts, audio slideshows, videos, interactive databases and maps.

I’d like to add to the conversation from a blog posted yesterday by the Center for Scholastic Journalism calling for the burial of the carcass of scholastic journalism. Yes, you read that correctly. Scholastic journalism is dead, and the system was flawed to begin with.

Even from my inexperienced view, I can see there’s some work to be done catching up with the needs of today’s media.

Media literacy is a must

And I wholeheartedly agree that media literacy should be a required course for all high school (and maybe even younger) students. We make them learn government, economics and health, and I’d love to hear an argument for why learning to decipher media messages is any less important to democracy.

Experience required?

But I take issue with saying part of the problem is with advisers who don’t have journalism experience. After I left the newspaper world in September, I spent last fall in the classroom of one of the best journalism teachers in the state of Texas (and in the country, according to some contests), and she never worked as a professional journalist. And let me tell you, those students could certainly determine story ideas that were relevant and interesting to their audience, and they don’t shy away from meaty subjects. Shout-out to the Liberator staff led by Janet Elbom at the Liberal Arts and Science Academy at LBJ High School in Austin. I’d link to their newspaper website, but they don’t have one, yet.

Rapid change needed

Which brings me to what I think is the biggest problem with journalism education curriculum right now: the need to incorporate more multimedia and technology. Many educators I know are furiously trying to learn as much as they can to pass these skills on to their students. Journalism education organizations are likewise trying to fill the gap to make these classrooms look more like media organizations today. (And hopefully even more advanced.)

A viable model

With the nature of today’s media, I agree publishing breaking news in a paper edition every few weeks is not effective journalism education. Students should learn to manage and update a website with timely news, in addition to creating a print product offering interesting narratives and in-depth analysis printed on a less frequent basis. This is the model used by The Christian Science Monitor, as well as several high school journalism programs across the country that serve as models of where we all ought to be, including HiLite Online, pictured above.

This change needs to happen, and soon. But a bulldozer? I would say a little redecorating would do just fine.

One of the most challenging things for a newspaper transitioning online is overcoming the existence of a working newsroom that’s spent the past few decades producing a print product.

Print journalists have been told to think “web first” and come up with multimedia components to go along with print stories. Obviously it’s important advice, but to a print reporter, it felt like the web was an add-on versus a whole new approach to journalism. Like, we’ll just keep doing exactly what we used to do but with a website, too. That, and there was a huge divide between the print and online sides. Like we had a different mission.

I’ve seen the same skepticism on the faces of high school journalists in print-only programs. They’ve got their hands full putting out a newspaper. You expect us to put all this online, too? And shoot video and blog?

The high school newsroom, with its smaller and (somewhat) more controlled environment, could be the place where we get it right. But how?

I took this question to Paul Kandell, the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s 2009 Teacher of the Year.

The Palo Alto High School journalism program includes two print magazines, a newspaper, a yearbook and a broadcast program, but what I’m most interested in is The Paly Voice, the online news component.

The school has had a digital journalism class since 2002, which runs the website and used to be in charge of putting content from the print publications online. Sounds like what many print newsrooms do: Hire some tech people to upload the journalists’ work to the web. This year though, the program made a significant change: giving the passwords to the print publication staff to upload the content themselves.

This change has resulted in the print journalists taking more of an interest in the website. And it’s freed the digital journalism students to pursue other projects, like building a social media presence (complete with a social media editor) and a citizen journalism project created by the new user-generated content team.

Kandell said that over time, the print publications might become multi-platform brands on their own, which could make the digital journalism class obsolete.

“If everybody is a digital journalist, why do you need a class just for digital journalists?”

It’d be great if all schools had such a healthy journalism program — there are 200 students in Palo Alto High School’s advanced journalism classes — but the classrooms I’ve observed included one or two newspaper classes geared completely toward the print product. This means building the website slowly within the print journalism class.

In that case, equal power between the print and online sides is key.

“When you’re ready to make the switch, you have to go all in,” Kandell said. “You cannot have just the nerdy tech kid in the corner doing all the work.”

Such a setup won’t work, Kandell said. For one, “It’s dull. They have to be connected to the excitement of journalism.”

He pointed to The Feather, the award-winning online publication by Fresno Christian High School, as an example of a program that’s gotten it right.

“They just said, ‘If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to have an online editor and a print editor, and they are going to have equal power in the class.’”

I think the common theme with these setups is that both the online and print operations have a stake in the website and are learning and practicing journalism. There are no tech geeks who are simply told what to do by the print staff, and the “print” staff takes an active role in uploading content and creating multimedia projects. However the program is organized, the line between online journalist and print journalist becomes blurred, so that eventually, they all have the same mission.