Ryan Thornburg
Things were a little out of rhythm all day today, with a weird snow storm that couldn’t decide whether it did or did not want to close down UNC today.
The bad news is that I didn’t get a chance to have MDC’s Richard Hart host a discussion about the N.C. dropout rate. The good news is that I had a chance to run two good live experiments in online journalism.
Continue reading “Online Class Discussions and Twittering Breaking News”
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”