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.

After several weeks of reviewing high school news websites, I am even more excited about the future of journalism. There are some high school sites out there that rival the professional news sites in their respective towns, and some that could stand up against the best metro newspaper and news start-up sites. These high school journalists really get the importance of design, fresh content, interactivity and multimedia.

My attention was focused on sites in one state, but recently, winners and finalists in national contests were announced by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. Would-be online student (and even professional) journalists could learn a lot from perusing the winning sites.

I learned even more from looking at  sites-in-progress that were almost there but had a little bit of work to do in some key areas.

Here are seven ways to improve a high school site:

1. Captions, captions, captions.

Every photo needs a caption. Even those in galleries and slideshows. Need a free gallery editor that allows captions? The Online Journalism Review has you covered with a review of several free apps. While we’re on the subject of photos, post more, and allow readers to upload their own, too.

2. Write headlines for online.

Writing good newspaper headlines is a unique and important skill, but unlike in print, the online reader doesn’t have the  subhead, photo and lead of the story in view to give the necessary context to decide whether to read further. Be specific. Learn more here and here.

3. Break up text.

Please, please, please don’t subject readers to an intimidating screen of text. Break up stories with subheads, photos, graphics, maps, video. I’m not sure if this interesting model of storytelling will catch on, but if we want readers to read the stories writers work so hard on, shouldn’t the text be as easy to read as possible?

4. Keep readers coming back with frequent updates.

Putting out a scholastic newspaper is tough. And adding a website on top of that? Needless to say, journalism advisers’ salaries would be on par with football coaches if paid by the hour. But if you’re going to do a website, really do the website. None of this uploading the print newspaper stories every six weeks. To have a working, relevant site, there’s got to be fresh content. (But don’t get rid of the print edition if you don’t have to.)

5. Add more multimedia features.

Become an expert in multimedia by reading this free guide then practicing consitantly. Online journalism guru Mindy McAdams keeps more stellar tips on the Journalists’ Toolkit site, and a recent Twitter chat about multimedia tools brought up some great points and introduced some cool tools.

6. Be more social.

Live chats, tweets, Facebook pages and other social media tools are excellent tools to bring readers to the site, find sources and facilitate a community conversation. Can’t do much better than reading these 32 posts about social media from JEA Digital Media.

7. Move beyond my.hsj.org.

This might be controversial. I think ASNE’s free web service for scholastic journalism is so necessary and awesome, but once staffers get the hang of posting content regularly to the newspaper’s my.hsj.org site,  it wouldn’t hurt to experiment with content-management systems and build a site through WordPress or Joomla. It’s becoming more and more important for journalists to have experience with content-management systems and web design, and building a site gives students a head-start developing these skills. Here’s a great resource on building a site, and a story sharing one school’s experience evaluating online options.

If you’re lucky enough to have the students, time and resources to devote an entire class to online journalism, what should you teach?

Course standards

In Texas, we don’t have standards yet for an online class, although I’ve come up with a proposal for what those official standards could look like: onlinestandards.doc (Following the online news course in the document, I have included how I would change the existing standards for current journalism courses.)

Curriculum

Writing a curriculum is challenging because journalism is changing so much that course work needs revision each year. What follows is a perpetually changing plan for an introductory online journalism course based on six six-week grading periods over two semesters. I organized the plan to expose students to a broad range of areas in web journalism. The weekly topics could be amended to spend more or less time on certain subjects, depending on the course and students. I’d love your feedback on things to add or subtract: curriculumonlineclass.xls

Resources

For textbooks, Journalism Next by Mark Briggs and the newly published Digital Journalist’s Handbook by Mark S. Luckie would do just fine, in addition to web resources. To create lesson plans and assignments, Mindy McAdams’ compilation of resources is endlessly useful.

Depending on one’s general disposition (or mood on a particular day), studying journalism right now is either an important, exciting endeavor or a big, costly mistake.

The beginning

For me, journalism is all I’ve ever wanted to do. What’s been happening the past couple of years has broken my heart and caused me at my lowest moments to wonder why I didn’t study something practical, like accounting.

After completing the master’s program at the Missouri School of Journalism, I was lucky enough to be included in what turned out to be the last round of hires at a daily metro newspaper.

I’m hired, now what?

It was my dream job. I felt like I was part of something important, even though only a small sector of the public cared about the rural and suburban town issues I wrote about. I felt hopeful that I’d eventually move up the ranks of beats, as reporters always had, and maybe even snag a coveted features writing position. Other journalists at a similar point in their careers when it all hit the fan can relate to what happened next.

Uh-oh

Money for travel and training dried up. Positions went unfilled as people left, mostly for jobs outside newspapers. Beats merged, and reporters who had been at the paper for years had to go back to covering government meetings. Morale plunged. And this was at a relatively stable newspaper without layoffs.

Then there was this newfangled Internet thing. Surprisingly enough, even though I left j-school in 2005, I had been required to take only one credit hour on multimedia journalism. I had no idea what was to come.

Techno-what?

I’m a words person. I love writing and editing and grammar and all of those other topics that make me a fun date. In my other life I was probably a copy editor or English teacher. So imagine my surprise when, during a training for multimedia journalism at The Poynter Institute, I learned that I also liked producing videos, audio slideshows and other multimedia components. And I wasn’t bad at it.

I began to see journalists as storytellers, no matter the medium. I felt hope. Back at the paper, I created a blog, shot and edited videos to go along with print stories and eagerly looked for ways to get more involved with multimedia.

The old print vs. online

But my new priorities as a multimedia storyteller conflicted with my duties as a print reporter. Over time, my interest waned.

I accepted the possibility that change in the industry might not come from established media corporations that are cutting journalists in favor of tech people.

Why can’t we be both? This idea isn’t new, and there are plenty of multimedia journalists out there who are both and will lead us through these times.

Finding a new path

After much soul-searching, I decided I’d do more good for journalism by sharing my passion for the craft and interest in online journalism with the next generation. This change has made me hopeful for journalism again.

Friends in (and out of) the journalism world questioned the ethics of encouraging young people to go into a dying profession, only to get laid off and end up in nursing school to learn something practical.

A hopeful future

After observing enthusiastic high school journalists who care about ethics, want nothing more than to tell stories and know how to communicate through technology better than I ever will, I’m convinced that journalism will survive. I believe j-school students studying media history in 2050 will be writing term papers about how we came out of all this. Chances are, they will be writing about major players who today are still in school and have yet to decide to go into journalism.

To make sure this happens, journalism educators are working hard to keep up as high school newsrooms transition as well. I don’t have all the answers of how this will happen, but by giving students the right tools, listening to their ideas and keeping an open mind, we’ll make this transition successful.

This blog will be a place to compile resources and lessons for journalism teachers and students and to share examples of good work coming out of professional and scholastic journalism.

And I promise to try to stay in the mode of thinking that studying journalism is an exciting pursuit rather than a mistake. But if I begin to question it, I’ll share that, too. Happy storytelling.