Cramming everything students need to know about new media into a few days of training is tough. There’s so much to choose from. So many programs to learn. So many cool web projects to create.

Here’s a tentative plan for a new media training I’ll be doing in Austin in August for TAJE and ILPC. I’d love feedback on topics I should include or leave out. These are lessons I also plan to cover in the first couple of months of school as my students at Dripping Springs High School get their website up and running.

Intro to online journalism

Important elements: multimedia, interactivity, connectivity and immediacy

These should be used as a guide for any web projects and the site as a whole. I have students come up with ideas for how they will address these areas after analyzing scholastic and professional news sites.

What makes a good website?

This is where I fit in the importance of finding a balance of content-aggregation and content-creation.

How does this fit in with the existing program?

This is where I get kind of philosophical. Incorporating online journalism into a scholastic journalism program (or a professional newsroom for that matter) is more than just adding a website and putting the print stuff online. I don’t like to gloss over the massive change required to give students the most realistic experience. The web must come first. Print must now give readers a different experience: longer stories written in a narrative structure and fewer stories that give weeks-old news in inverted pyramid form. The web and print must be equal, which includes the amount of pull the staff for both publications have over content.

How does a website work?

We don’t all need to be writing code, but we can’t rely on the techie in the corner to do everything. Knowing how websites work is an important tool for everyone to have, and knowledge is of course power. Giving up that kind of power isn’t good for journalism — or a scholastic journalism program in the long run as kids with that knowledge graduate.

What are my website options?

First you have to decide between a static versus dynamic site. Once you go with a dynamic site, you pick a content-management system. There are also a couple of choices for programs that don’t want to set it up, which are great options for the first couple of years to get the hang of posting to the web. You’ll pay in flexibility or cost though.

Set up a site using WordPress as a content-management system

WordPress is the most widely used and the easiest to work with without knowing too much code, so I would go with this one. But no matter which one you choose, going the route of a content-management system (the dynamic site) is the best choice because students should be familiar with the concept and have experience uploading to the web. Which brings us to…

Designing and posting

Web design

Usability, accessibility and good old-fashioned design come into play here.

Writing for the web

It’s different, as are headlines. I also like to cover blogging in this portion.

Photos for the web

Copyright, quick editing and creating photo galleries and stories.

Making the site mobile

Oh-so-important for teens. Anyone out there creating iPhone and iPad apps?

Putting the print edition online

Issuu.com is the big one.

User-generated content

Staffers can’t be everywhere. Make use of students who are — and their photos.

Multimedia

Storyboarding

An important part of multimedia is planning. Make sure you do this and you’ll never see a video package that makes you wonder if all this fancy stuff is taking away from the actual journalism.

Podcasts, audio slideshows and video

These are the big three. People ask what programs students should know. Audacity is a free, easy-to-learn audio editing program. I like Soundslides, which was developed by a journalist for meshing audio with photos in a super-easy format. For video, iMovie is just as good for students who don’t have the time or interest to take a more-intensive video training to learn Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Free web-based multimedia tools

From map mashups to multimedia tools like vuvox.com and dipity.com, there’s no shortage of free tools out there to create cool multimedia projects.

Managing a site

Staff organization

This is a biggie. I’ve yet to see two programs organized exactly the same way for print, broadcast or convergence. Here’s how I plan to set up staff, and here’s how other schools do it.

Legal and ethical issues, advertising and marketing

Social media is a becoming a large part of marketing a site and newsgathering, which increases the need for social media ethics policies.

Putting it all together

Gotta have a plan. Who will post what when? Who manages the Twitter feed? What is breaking news? How will you handle posting breaking news to the site? What topics would work with a live chat? Where are we? Is this real life? Why are we doing all of this?

Oh yeah, because it’s important for students to learn these skills, and for the future of journalism.

Last week, high school journalism advisers and students spent four days at the Texas Interscholastic League Press Conference at the University of Texas at Austin talking about two of my favorite topics: yearbook and newspaper.

This year for the first time, the summer workshop offered a convergence option, which I had the pleasure of instructing. Over the four days, we went over options for having a news website and the basics of online journalism, and participants created websites with WordPress as the content-management system and learned how to edit audio in Audacity and create audio slideshows in Soundslides.We also talked about staff management, multimedia storyboarding and writing for the web.

Whew.

By the end, heads were spinning, but I hope the five students and several advisers who braved the course took away a better understanding of how websites work and some ideas for what to put on them.

Here’s one website-in-progress started by co-editor-in-chief Kira Witkin of the Episcopal School of Dallas.

Here’s another by the adviser Laura Negri of the Kerronicle at Alief Kerr High School in Houston, who found a couple of important WordPress plugins for staff work flow:

The editorial calendar plugin sets up a calendar where the web editor(s) can schedule posts for particular days and easily rearrange posts by dragging them onto another day. I’ve already installed it on mine, even though it’s just me. The edit flow plugin is even more essential for high school newsrooms because it adds more possible statuses to unpublished posts. Instead of just “draft” or “published” options as come standard in WordPress, edit flow adds “assigned,” “pending review,” pitch,” and “waiting for feedback,” which allows for multiple edits and reviews before publication.

In August, ILPC is putting on another convergence workshop in Austin with the Texas Association of Journalism Educators, which I’m revising to include legal issues, a better web host option (although many advisers recommended Go Daddy, the company must have been having a bad weekend) and other tweaks based on the first run-through of the training.

Once the training is tweaked, I’ll post more of the lessons on this site. In the meantime, my next month is about preparing for the fall and helping my students start their own website later this month.

I admit – I almost replied to a (mostly positive) listserv discussion among Missouri alums about the wisdom of now offering 25 instead of six specializations for undergraduate journalism students. I kept quiet because I didn’t want to criticize my alma mater – as did most others; the discussion quickly fizzled.

But catching the end of the weekly wjchat on Twitter, I saw that some experienced journalism professors weren’t on board with the change. Hopefully, we’ll hear more in the coming weeks about what they think.

With the changes, students can specialize in either Convergence Photojournalism or Photojournalism. They can be multi-platform designers, magazine designers or news designers. There looks to be some new media skills required for all disciplines. For example, the old-fashioned Photo-J-only students will still have to learn multimedia skills.

So I’m a little confused.

Why give students the choice to not specialize in convergence? Shouldn’t “convergence” now simply be called journalism? Are we still separating the print folks from the online?

Those other disciplines aren’t useless; I specialized in Magazine Writing as a master’s student at Mizzou because I loved to write. Those classes have helped in my career, so I’m not knocking the choice. But had I been more forward-thinking, I would have taken more than two hours in multimedia training and learned more about photography, design and the web. (Just five years ago, only one of those credit hours was required.)

Obviously a lot of thought from people more experienced and intelligent than me went into this change, so I am eager to hear more about the rationale and job prospects for these new grads. I had always understood that journalism students who specialize in a particular subject, like business or science, would have better job prospects. I don’t know if the same is true for someone specializing only in news editing or writing, or even convergence disciplines.

In high school, non-specialization is essential. I’m surprised that even now, there are high school journalism students who want to just write or just take photos and don’t want anything to do with multimedia or websites. I hope I don’t lose students in my program by requiring them to branch out to at least try other areas. But it would be irresponsible not to.

In keeping with the idea that journalists must learn technology and not rely on tech people without journalism training, I’d like to highlight a good resource to teach students computer-assisted reporting skills. Who knows, it could spark a student’s interest in becoming a programmer like these journalists that Texas State University Professor Cindy Royal wrote about in a paper she presented at the International Symposium in Online Journalism.