Ryan Thornburg
After extolling the virtues in post after post of UNC’s computer based training as a wonderful resource that’s free to every student, the University announced today that it would be shutting the site down on Feb. 28.
The move was done “in order to achieve the level of budget cuts currently mandated.”
The full announcement and address to send letters after the jump.
Our Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class is transitioning from the first to second phase of the semester, and I’ve blogged about it a bit more over at https://www.ibiblio.org/newsdesk/apples/sp09/blogs/ryan-thornburg
In the first phase, we’ve been cramming on learning more about the topic of dropouts in North Carolina and also cramming on learning the tools and techniques of online journalism. We’re now starting to think about some of our initial content creation.
In two blog posts, I summarize our critiques of other online news projects as well as our initial brainstorm of story ideas.
The other class I’m teaching this semester is “Newsdesk,” a capstone convergence lab class for journalism students at UNC. Here’s the syllabus.
The idea of creating an online newsroom from the ground-up has been a bit of a tough sell. I have four takers this semester.
I’m most excited about the possibility of collaborating with other classes and other local media. There is also one national partnership I’m looking forward to announcing here soon.
We kicked things off today with a discussion of how people read news online and how it is different from the way they consume news in print. I’ll be blogging more about it over the next three months. You can follow along here.
Starting an online newsroom at a journalism school isn’t exactly the same as starting one in the world outside those friendly confines. First, the staff tends to pay us to work there. Second, there’s usually a pretty substantial technical infrastructure already in place.
That said, there are still technical hurdles to overcome before we can start doing good journalism. Let me give a brief rundown of where we stand on technology on this third day of classes.
The new semester kicked off this at 9:30 this morning in CA 132 with “Public Affairs Reporting for New Media,” a new APPLES service-learning class I’m teaching.
The goal: Partner with N.C. news organizations to create a set of multimedia, interactive news reports about the state’s high school dropout rate. And since part of the class’s mission is to be a public service, I’ll be blogging from now until May 2 about the lessons we learn.
Here’s the syllabus and here’s how the first day went …
Continue reading “Public Affairs Reporting for New Media: Day 1”
With the start of the new semester at UNC today, it’s a good time for a “What did you do over vacation?” post. For journalism students who have a sincere interest in online, they probably spent the break teaching themselves new technology.
Exhibit A: Greg Linch, editor for online and multimedia at The Miami Hurricane.
Collegerag.net is a site launched yesterday by two UNC-Chapel Hill journalism students, Sara Gregory and Andrew Dunn.