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.

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.

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.