If you want to follow my recent work, I suggest:

• Follow me on Twitter: @macloo
• Follow my professional page on Facebook: mmjournalist
• Follow me on Medium: @macloo
• Follow me on Github: @macloo
• Check out my recent courses > here. You’ll find links to assignments, tutorials and readings on the Course Schedule page of each syllabus, which is actually a WordPress site.
• More YouTube videos on the new Intro to Web Apps channel.

You can easily find my work email address if you Google me and my place of employment.

If you’re working for one of those spam shops that wants to write posts on this blog, or get me to post a link to your spammy blog posts, please don’t bother.

May 2016 – in Morocco

Like many blogs, this one has been neglected. I put a lot more time into Twitter, Facebook and Medium now. This leaves no time for the blog (insert sad face). There are plenty of posts here from the past that people still use and refer to, though, so of course I will keep them just as they are. If you want to follow my recent work, I suggest:

• Follow me on Twitter: @macloo
• Follow my professional page on Facebook: mmjournalist
• Follow me on Medium: @macloo
• Follow me on Github: @macloo

Check out my recent courses > here. Tip: You’ll find links to assignments, tutorials and readings on the Course Schedule page of each syllabus, which is actually a WordPress site.

If you’re interested in learning how to code, or teaching journalism students to code, check out this syllabus and this playlist of free YouTube videos.

Here are some good Medium posts by me:

• (Re)defining multimedia journalism: New storytelling forms inspire us
• How to be a digital collaborator

To contact me, use this page.

How personal essays conquered journalism

After I read this story, I had to give some thought to the idea that “we lose something important in the rush toward first-person takes” (Eve Fairbanks).

First, the story linked above is “To Siri, With Love: How One Boy With Autism Became B.F.F.’s With Apple’s Siri,” published in The New York Times on Oct. 17. I saw links to the story everywhere. I didn’t feel like reading it until I saw a discussion about it earlier today: 

Everyone cheering on Siri in this touching story should note the boy goes to a $30K a year, no financial aid school. http://t.co/SHt6WXoxww

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) October 19, 2014

@zeynep point taken, but I don’t know. Not sure what beliefs you’re attributing to folks touched by his story.

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) October 19, 2014

Then I wanted to see the context, so I read it. The mother of the 13-year-old gives many examples of replies that Siri (Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant” that responds to spoken questions) gives to the boy. I learned a number of new things as I read the essay (most definitely a personal essay), and so I felt my knowledge and empathy had been expanded. I consider that a very good thing.

The more we learn about others, the more empathy and compassion we have. This is in the public interest, because our empathy and compassion for others who are not like us, or who live in different circumstances, reduces our fear and discomfort. It makes us less judgmental. It decreases hatred. In the immortal words of Yoda (who was doubtless channeling the Buddha when he said this): “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

If that’s not in the public interest, I don’t know what is.

And serving the public interest is Mission No. 1 of journalism.

So, about that essay (not a personal one) by Eve Fairbanks in The Washington Post (Oct. 10): She characterized these as “stories along the formula ‘I Am an X, and Y Happened to Me!'” Under that precise definition, maybe the Siri/autistic boy essay does not qualify. Maybe that’s splitting hairs. Let’s lump it in there, for the sake of argument, because one mother’s story about her own child sure qualifies as first-person personal in my book.

If you start telling all the journalists that because personal essays are “actually faster and easier to produce than reporting,” they contribute to the cheapening of real, serious Journalism with a capital J, you’re ignoring that value — serving the public interest. Just to be clear, I DO NOT MEAN “what the public is interested in” (the classic definition of soft news, as compared to hard news, which is “important”). I mean serving the Public Interest in terms of serving the Common Good and making all of us Better People who are less ignorant and thus better qualified to Self Govern.

Interestingly (and I say that without irony), Fairbanks wrote wrote a post very much in the personal-essay vein in August. It’s nowhere near as effective as Judith Newman’s essay about Siri and her son, because it’s — well, it’s not personal enough. I’ll let you decide if I’m wrong. I did not learn — in ways that expanded my capacity for empathy and compassion — when I read Fairbanks’s essay. When I read Newman’s, I did.

When I did a Google search for first person journalism, I saw a lot of interesting links. Here are three.

In a Gawker essay, Hamilton Nolan says of the first-person essay:

At their very best, they offer some amount of insight learned through experience. Mostly, they offer run of the mill voyeurism tinged with the desperation of attention addiction. For those who own the publications, they’re great — they bring in the clickety-clicks. But for the writers themselves, they are a short-lived and ultimately demeaning game. They are a path that ends in hackdom. (Nolan)

Does this apply to Newman’s essay about Siri and her son? I say no. Most certainly, no.

Steve Buttry addressed the value of first-person essays in a post about journalist Jeff Edelstein’s account of falling asleep at the wheel with his son in the car.

I hope other journalists with powerful personal stories to tell don’t let our reticence about first-person journalism keep them from telling the stories. And when they tell them, I hope our editors have the good sense to publish them. (Buttry)

In February, 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelley Benham gave a talk about writing in the first person, at the Indiana University j-school.

Writing a story in the first person was a challenge, but Benham acknowledged that she had insider access that would have taken years for another reporter to find. Still, she interviewed people just as she would have for any other story. (Megan Jula/Indiana U.)

In Benham’s case, the story she told was about her experience of having a very premature baby (23 weeks, six days).

… starting the reporting process was daunting. There were 7,000 pages of [the baby’s] medical records to dig through, and more than 200 people involved during her hospital stay. (Megan Jula/Indiana U.)

So let’s not lump all the first-person true stories together. Sure, there ARE cheesy “This happened to me!” stories. I think that’s not even new. There are also mind-blowingly wonderful first-person accounts that expand our small worlds and enlarge our understanding.

This is not a lot (especially not when you look at others like Jay Rosen, who has the coveted blue check mark), but it’s nice.

The last time the odometer rolled over was in June 2013 (8,000 followers).

Recently I switched from HootSuite to TweetDeck. Liking it a lot.

5,000 milestone: 2011

3,000 milestone: 2010

1,000 milestone: 2009

Joined Twitter: March 2007

I asked several reporters, editors, and scholars what journalists should do to get ready for the next wave of firings. There were three strong consensus answers: first, get good at understanding and presenting data. Second, understand how social media can work as a newsroom tool. Third, get whatever newsroom experience you can working in teams, and in launching new things.

That’s from Clay Shirky, writing in Last Call: The end of the printed newspaper. He goes on to explain those three bits of advice, a little way below the halfway mark in his post. 

There was one other common reaction among the people I spoke with about the coming changes: almost to a person, they noted that journalists can no longer rely on their employers to provide the opportunities to learn new skills. … If you’re a journalist working inside a newspaper and you want to train for your next job, you’re largely on your own.

This should be important to journalism educators! Why? It’s imperative for us to give students more opportunities to teach themselves — to prime them for lifetime learning. Otherwise, they’ll never succeed in journalism.

.

You can also allow multiple authors, editors, or a mix of roles on a free WordPress.com blog, whether it is private or public.

Here’s what I learned by setting up a private blog that gave editing privileges to several users: 

1. It was easy to make it private: Dashboard > Settings > Reading — find and tick “I would like my site to be private, visible only to users I choose.”
2. It was easy to add new users and assign “roles” to them: Dashboard > Users > Invite New — but you need to get either their correct WP username or the correct email they used when they signed up for WordPress!
3. It can be hard to get people to send their correct WP username to the person who is trying to add new users. (They send what they think is their username, but it is not.)
4. Sometimes people do not know which email address they used to sign up for WordPress, and as a result, they never receive the invitation email (because it is sent to that email account, which they are not checking).
5. If a person goes to a private WP blog’s URL and submits an email request to “view the blog,” that process DOES NOT add the person as a user, and the blog administrator then cannot assign a role (such as “editor”) to that person.
6. If someone else is in the midst of editing a post, and you attempt to edit it, WordPress gives you a warning. Depending on your user role, you might be able to override and edit anyway.

What are WordPress user roles? For example, a “contributor” cannot publish or upload, but she can write and save posts, and post comments. There a few different options.

At first you’ll have only one all-powerful Administrator on the blog. That person can assign the Administrator role to others.

This would all be very easy to do as part of a course, but it might be best to do the role-assigning and user-inviting while students are all together in a room, maybe a computer lab, so issues with usernames can be resolved quickly and in person.

He began by reminding the audience that journalism and the media environment today are vastly different from what they were in the previous century. I’d say the decline began in 1995 and became undeniably apparent around 2008, when job losses in the newspaper industry first spiked.

Of course, you know this. But probably you take it for granted. Probably, like most journalism educators, you have not really stared into the eyes of a reality where children under the age of 10 have a powerful tiny computer in their pocket that is connected to a global 24/7 cornucopia of news, information and entertainment.

It changes everything. 

The concept of speaking truth to power presumes that journalists know what is true, that power listens, and that journalists don’t have power and aren’t part of the power system. Those are highly debatable assumptions. (Picard)

Journalists aren’t going to like what Picard said in Toronto, and neither are most journalism educators. But not liking it doesn’t make it any less true.

Today, other functional forms of communication have emerged and these are every bit as important to speaking truth and holding power to account as journalism. While journalists continue to cling to the old conceptualization, society is moving past it. (Picard)

No newspaper or radio station or TV network has a monopoly anymore. No one with Internet access is held captive by a media corporation that tells people what to think about. This alone means that the power of the media is not what it was. There’s still power. But it’s shifted.

Today many journalistic functions have been stripped from the news media. Social media are the primary carriers of breaking news. Online news sites, blogs, and social media are far more often willing to publicly shame elites than legacy media. The locations of opinion and debate have moved to digital media. All of these reduce the necessity for and influence of news organizations. (Picard)

When Picard turned his attention to journalism education, he pointed out that other faculties in the university sometimes snub their noses at the journalism schools. “They are not completely wrong in doing so,” he added.

In the 150 years since journalism education entered universities, it has not developed a fundamental knowledge base, widely agreed upon journalistic practices, or unambiguous professional standards. Large numbers of journalism educators have failed to make even rudimentary contributions toward understanding the impact of journalism and media on society. Some of the reasons for these failures are philosophical. Some are because we have tended to separate journalism education from media studies. Many of the deficiencies exist because journalism is closer to craft than a profession. (Picard)

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! But … is Picard completely wrong?

Before you angrily close this window, know that Picard then confronts a vital question about the future of journalism education: Are we training students for jobs that no longer exist — or jobs that soon will cease to exist?

Higher education isn’t about ensuring employment. It is about shaping and sharpening students’ abilities to think and about giving them skills to can use in a variety of types of activity in future years. It is about helping them understand the past, how people and societies work, what forces affect the human condition, how to deal with the inevitable changes they will encounter in their lives, and how to find their own paths to success. (Picard)

Professional programs in other fields, including business, engineering, and the biomedical sciences, “help students learn how to discover, interpret, and navigate their ways through” the future, however uncertain it might be, Picard said.

I love that: discover, interpret, navigate.

And I agree with Picard: we’re not doing a great job of that in our j-schools. Somewhere in our efforts to cope with students’ abysmal lack of skill in punctuation and to teach them how to use cameras and code, many journalism educators and institutions have lost sight of the big picture.

Picard said those other professional programs focus on:

• Fundamental knowledge and practices
• The means for discovering new knowledge and practices
• How to innovatively use changing technologies and practices as means for achieving goals

And journalism programs … don’t. They:

… teach students to communicate well, but without having anything to communicate and with little rationale for communicating. Minimal effort is expended on teaching students how to think and critically analyze social developments. Journalists who can’t think effectively will be even more worthless in the future than they are now.  (Picard)

Journalism programs focus on training students to do jobs that already exist in media companies.

Are we doing it wrong?

Journalism programmes need to teach students how to become more self-sufficient journalists, provide much more training is specialized forms of journalism, and teach how to cover local communities and topics such as climate, energy, defence, and social policy. These are where value is truly created, and they all require interdisciplinary programs with tight relations with other disciplines in the university — something few journalism programmes have developed.  …

We need to be teaching about how to write and produce content for multiple digital platforms for which audiences have different requirements. We need to teach how to understand audiences and use the avalanche of user data that is overwhelming news organisations. We need to help them prepare their work and lives for new types of journalistic employment. We need to teach them to be digital developers and how to be problem solvers. (Picard)

Picard skewered a few popular ideas that have been floating in the journalism education waters for a while — like the “teaching hospital” notion, and courses about “entrepreneurial journalism” taught by people who have never been entrepreneurs.

Few are teaching [students] what is necessary to establish and operate successful small news enterprises in the 21st century. (Picard)

Picard concluded his talk with recommendations where journalism education needs to go in the next decade. Since I’ve quoted so much of his address already, I’ll invite you to go to his site to read his conclusion.

Of course he says we need to break down the silos. Everybody at every journalism school I’ve ever visited agrees on that — but how many j-schools actually do it? Most take timid, tiny measures that result in essentially no difference at all.

It is not a matter of thinking outside the box, because the box no longer exists. (Picard)

You can read the full text of Picard’s address at his website.

Other points about improving journalism education were noted as well. (The conference apparently has no homepage.)

If you need a reference: “There is no spoon.“

Journalism education

A journalism degree here can take three years or four. A student must apply to be accepted for a fourth year. Others go straight into newsrooms after the third year.

The academic year begins in February, after the long summer break (December and January). They have four terms, with two terms constituting a semester. At the end of a semester, the students take exams in all their subjects.

First-year students take four subjects — the same four throughout the year — one of which is journalism. In their journalism class, the first-years meet in a lecture of about 200 students four times a week. They also have smaller tutorial meetings, in groups of about 20. As there are not many graduate students, many of the tutors are third- or fourth year undergrads. 

The journalism classes after first year are smaller, mostly about 25 students (I think), but I haven’t figured all that out yet.

There’s something called a post-graduate diploma, which falls in between a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. Rhodes JMS has one in Media Management, for example. It’s a one-year, full-time, residential program. The students are a combination of recent graduates and people who have been working for a while — not always in journalism.

The (several) computer labs in the j-school are excellent. The Internet is good; the Windows computers have current, licensed software installed; the machines appear to be virus-free. There is a rather large IT staff for the j-school, and they’re been very helpful to me.

I haven’t been to the university library yet, but I see new books with library stickers on the spine in almost every lecturer’s office I go into — good, current theory books as well as recently published textbooks in the communication field. Some lecturers have a stack of them. In other words, the library apparently does a good job of buying the current texts in the field, and the lecturers are consulting those books.

English is the language of instruction at Rhodes University, so the students are fluent in English. However, English is not the first language of many. I was told the most common first language in Grahamstown and the surrounding area is Xhosa, followed by Afrikaans, with English third. Xhosa is the dominant African language in the Eastern Cape — the state that Grahamstown is in. When I go into shops, though, English is spoken.

Daily life

My “cottage” is a generous space, all on one floor, with a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath. The Internet is excellent, and free, because the cottage is on campus. It’s a 5-min. walk to the Africa Media Matrix, home of the j-school. It’s about half a mile (1 km) to the shopping center and the center of town.

Although the Internet is free, I have to pay for the metered electricity. I buy a voucher card at a university office, take it home, scratch off a number, and then send a text message with that number to the power company. Soon I get a text back with another number, which I then key into the meter in my kitchen. I get 180 kWh for 100 rands (about $10).

There’s a (small) TV with excellent reception of the four South African channels. That’s it. Four. The local programs at night are mostly soap-opera-like dramas. The actors speak in multiple languages, and there are English subtitles. English-language news is on at 7 p.m.

The nearest supermarket is large and modern. The town is small, but there are several good options for meals and for coffee (so important!). There is no movie theater (there was one; it is closed). I have seen two video rental shops, which seem to do a good business. Lots of people walk, which includes me, as I have no vehicle. Car rentals are comparable to U.S. prices, but only if you rent a manual; automatic transmissions are almost twice the cost.

The weather has been lovely — sunny at mid-80s (Farenheit) in the afternoon, cool in the mornings. It will be getting colder through July, and the cottage is heated only by two stand-alone electric heaters. Nights right now are in the mid-50s, and some have dipped into the high 40s. I love the clean air, low humidity, and gorgeous blue sky!

Medium has this nice graph with options to see how many people viewed my post, or how many people READ my post. (I don’t have that option in WordPress.) I also get to see how many people recommended my post (and who they are), and the percentage of readers out of viewers. 

I feel good that 992 people read my post, but not so good that only 37 percent who viewed it actually read it.

Using WordPress stats, I can discover that my most-viewed post of all time on this blog is How to shoot video interviews (20,573 views), but who knows how many people just clicked and closed it. Same issue with my most-viewed post in the past 365 days, 10 Rules for Visual Storytelling (3,187 views).

Will I get more reads (or more pageviews) in the long term by having published on Medium? I don’t know. In 10 days the number of pageviews on Medium had exceeded those of my most-viewed post for the past 30 days here, What journalism students need to learn now (1,294 views), and I have to assume more people have in fact read the Medium post.

(If you’re wondering about the big spike on Medium on April 14 — 727 views, 272 reads — that’s the day when someone at Medium added it to the Editor’s Picks collection.)

Oh, one more cool feature for publishing on Medium: I also get to see a list of referrers for each post I’ve made. As of today,  (Re)defining multimedia journalism has 890 from email, IM, and direct (the highest), and 757 from Twitter.

Only 181 referrers from Facebook.

Referrers from Medium itself are split into the mobile app (306) and Web (160), with separate breakouts for referrers coming from specific collections, such as Editor’s Picks, 40, and Changing Journalism, 37.