For much of my life, Siberia was this cold, distant land where the Soviet Union sent its dissidents to work in gulags. And I presume Russians, if they thought of Iowa at all, thought of our state as a flat place where we grow lots of corn (Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the Roswell Garst farm in Coon Rapids, Iowa, in 1959.)

While both stereotypes are based in truth (Iowa isn’t really flat, but it is compared to Siberia’s mountains), I know from years living in and around Iowa that the stereotype is shallow and incomplete. I’m sure my stereotype of Siberia is similarly shallow and incomplete. I’m looking forward to learning more about Siberia on a trip that starts Sunday.

In September, I went to the University of Kentucky for an ethics seminar that included some visiting journalists from the Press Development Institute-Siberia. I spent an interesting afternoon and evening with the group, speaking through an interpreter, though at least a couple of them were fluent in English.

When we parted, Victor Yukechev, director of the institute, said, “Next time, Siberia.” I smiled and said I would love to visit Siberia. I have said similar things to many visiting foreign journalists, but I still haven’t visited Uganda, Croatia, Colombia, South Africa or Cambodia. I didn’t expect that I would be visiting Siberia. But Victor did.

In early October, I received an email with an invitation from Victor to lead workshops next Wednesday and Thursday in Barnaul, Siberia, 12 time zones away. On Friday, Dec. 4, I will be a guest speaker at a conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the independent press in Siberia.

Even in Siberia, journalists are trying to make the transition from a print past to a digital future and hoping to develop a healthy business model along the way. I will be explaining my Complete Community Connection vision for such a business model.

As time and wireless connections allow, I will blog during and after the trip. My wife, Mimi, will be blogging as well, at Rubyeyedfox. Of course, I will see only one city in a region that’s 90 times the area of Iowa (and 12 times the population). Barnaul is about the population of Omaha, relatively near the borders of Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China. The temperature there is 27 degrees Fahrenheit as I write this, not a bad day for an Iowa winter, just 16 degrees colder than Cedar Rapids. Last week, Barnaul temperatures dropped below zero, so we will be dressing warmly.

We’ll fly to Barnaul by way of Chicago, Amsterdam and Moscow. After five days in Barnaul, we will spend two days each in St. Petersburg and Moscow before returning home Dec. 11.

Along the way, I’ll add some depth to my caricature view of Siberia. And I hope to help my Siberian friends learn more about Iowa.

I can’t keep blogging every time a major newspaper releases fear-driven social media guidelines. But once again, I can’t resist.

The Los Angeles Times is the latest major news organization to apparently tell its staff to beware the dangers of social media. I don’t have time to critique this in the same detail that I did the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post guidelines.

But I count 19 words of mild general encouragement to use social media and more than 600 words of thou-shalt-nots and warnings of the terrors lurking below the water, including subpoenas.

Without looking, I knew that these policies were written by people who don’t use social media much. But I looked. I couldn’t find Editor Russ Stanton, who released the guidelines on either Twitter (tried searching for Russ, Russell and “Rstanton”) or Facebook  (several Russ Stantons there, but none that I could find identifying themselves with the Los Angeles Times in their public profiles).

At first, I couldn’t find Assistant Managing Editor Henry Fuhrmann, who also signed the guidelines, on Twitter. So I tweeted that neither of them used Twitter. Then Chris Krewson tweeted that Andrew Nystrom might have had some input and he’s a regular Twitter user. I messaged Nystrom and he pointed out that Fuhrmann tweets as hfuhrmann (at the time he listed his name that way in his profile, but he spelled it out after I pointed that out to Nystrom). Fuhrmann’s profile identifies him as overseeing the Times copy desk. He has tweeted only 71 times (three this month, four in October), so I think it’s fair to say he’s not a very active Twitter user. Fuhrmann has 491 Facebook friends, so I’ll guess he’s more active there.

Fuhrmann has more social media experience than some editors who have developed misguided policies. But I feel safe in saying that we again have inexperienced, fearful editors telling staffs to be very afraid of social media.

Nystrom tells me in an email (responding to my mocking of the subpoena fear), “our legal folks do take the potential implications of social media very seriously.”  I should note that I misread this fear in one of my mocking tweets, after reading a story about the policy and before I had read the full policy. Still, throwing in subpoenas does add to the “reefer madness” tone of the whole policy. I have been subpoenaed frivolously, long before social media were part of journalism, so I don’t take subpoenas lightly. Journalists should always be careful and social media don’t change that.

The Times policy warns: “Your interactions could be subject to a third-party subpoena. The social media network has access to and control over everything you have disclosed to or on that site. For instance, any information might be turned over to law enforcement without your consent or even your knowledge.” Yes, and so could information you publish on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. With the exception of personal messages, social media content is public anyway. Some good judgment in use of personal messages is advisable. But so is some perspective.

Some of the issues raised are valid and some of the advice is good. But the tone of fear, the failure to give more than passing lip service to the importance of social media and the unwillingness to trust journalists’ judgment reflect the same cluelessness we saw from the Journal and the Post.

For wise policies in social media, check out NPR or the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

As I’ve said before, newsrooms need lots of conversations about the wise use of social media. And those conversations should stress the opportunities and the value of social media. But first we need more editors to learn about the opportunities and the value.

I haven’t spent this much time talking to journalism professors and students since I graduated from Texas Christian University (let’s just say some time ago).

I visited TCU last week to present seminars on the Complete Community Connection and journalism ethics in the digital age. And since I was sticking around for some memory-lane time, the curriculum committee at TCU’s Schieffer School of Journalism asked me to meet with them and tell them what I think journalism schools should be teaching about our swiftly changing field.

I shared my views with them and will share them with you here shortly. The TCU meetings continued a heavy fall schedule of consultations with journalism faculty and students on a variety of related topics:

• In late August, I was a panelist for the Accreditation Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, sharing my views on how journalism schools should be teaching today and what sort of standards the council should require. Afterward, I shared some resources for journalism educators on this blog.
• In mid-September, I met with University of Missouri faculty to advise on plans for digital-only coverage of the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in St. Louis.
• Later in September, I presented an ethics seminar at the University of Kentucky. The visit included an informal discussion over pizza with students about what editors are seeking in interns and journalism graduates. I developed a post of career advice for journalism students and called their attention to an earlier post on the importance of your digital profile.
• The next week, I met with faculty advisers and editors of the Iowa State Daily, who came to Cedar Rapids to brainstorm issues such as digital coverage, C3 and organizational changes we’ve made at Gazette Communications.
• In November, I led another ethics seminar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and critiqued the senior portfolios of three UNL seniors (part of the UNL accreditation process, as well as providing advice to the seniors).
• Before visiting TCU, I returned to the University of Missouri for an American Society of News Editors/Reynolds Journalism Institute Ethics and Values Forum. Participants included journalism faculty from four other universities, in addition to Missouri. After dinner one night, we had an interesting discussion with several Missouri students, many of whom are already looking for jobs.
• I have had frequent discussions with David Perlmutter, new director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, including plans to team-teach a course with Jim Cremer on creating an iPhone application.

In various ways in formal events and private conversations, similar concerns about how to teach journalism today came up again and again. If I could summarize the concerns (admitting that I am drawing conclusions that weren’t always stated explicitly), I would say this: Lots of journalism educators worry how they can and should teach to prepare students for a world that has changed vastly since professors practiced and/or earned graduate degrees and is changing so swiftly that even if professors were current in all respects, their lessons may be outdated by the time their students graduate. While journalism school enrollment is stronger than the businesses that support journalism, educators are keenly aware that they need to update their curriculum and knowledge or they could face the same sort of crash that news media companies are experiencing.

My response focuses heavily on what journalism schools should be doing to address new needs and challenges. I have not looked at closely at what they should not be doing. But I would suggest that in the current environment, every requirement and every course needs to be re-examined and face demanding questions:

• Does the course need to be updated?
• Should the course be dropped?
• Should the course be taught less frequently?
• Should the course be combined with another?
• Should a required course become an elective?

Journalism schools also need to examine their tracks, sequences and structures. If your school offers a “print sequence,” you might as well call it an “outdated sequence.” While newspapers still command large audiences and generate large revenues, newspaper companies are diversifying and journalism schools need to be educating multi-platform journalists, not print journalists.

As I go through topics that journalism schools might not be covering adequately, I would argue that many of these issues don’t need to be addressed in a standalone class, required or elective. Rather, they should be integrated throughout the curriculum. For instance, if you offer an elective course in Twitter but don’t teach students in your basic reporting course how reporters should use Twitter, you aren’t teaching what you need to teach. I would advise requiring students in their first media writing course to spend at least a couple weeks taking their class notes in Twitter, so they get an early practical exposure and see it as a tool for journalism from the start. And each course should decide the appropriate way to use Twitter in that course.

In other cases, a required or elective course – or perhaps a course combining a few of these topics – might be exactly what a journalism curriculum needs. I will make specific recommendations about how digital skills should be infused throughout the curriculum and about specific courses a journalism school should consider. But as curriculum committees and J-school leaders consider these issues, they will need to consider other factors. As j-schools weigh such factors as course loads, total hours students can take and so on, I would usually err on the side of incorporating digital skills throughout the curriculum, rather than addressing them in specific courses.

These are the topics I think journalism schools need to address:

Social media. Journalism schools today need to educate students about how social media are changing professional media and society. Twitter is the social platform that needs the most attention right now, but professors need to stay abreast of how society and journalists are using social tools and update their courses appropriately. If Twitter goes the way of MySpace, you need to adjust swiftly to address the next hot social tool. Students are already active in using Facebook, so Facebook is less urgent. Professors also should consider how to use Facebook in courses, such as using a fan page for assignments and exchanges about a course. My primary recommendation here is that social media need to be incorporated throughout the curriculum: Twitter in media writing, reporting, ethics, specialized reporting courses, appropriate strategic communication courses, etc.; visual journalism courses should cover such social tools as YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic and Qik. Ethics courses certainly need to incorporate social media, including Facebook. I also would recommend an advanced course on social media strategy. This would focus on how media organizations need to use social tools to engage the community and serve business customers. This course also would cover potential uses of emerging social tools. This should be an advanced or graduate-level course, serving journalism and strategic communication sequences.

Interactive databases and computer-assisted reporting. I have been critical before of the use of the term computer-assisted reporting. You might as well refer to notebook-assisted reporting or telephone-assisted reporting. This is 2009 and computers have been an essential tool for reporters for a couple decades now. Journalism schools should take the lead in breaking down the data ghettos that have emerged in our profession. Basic reporting courses should cover use of basic spreadsheet, database and mapping programs. These are essential journalism tools and skills and their use should start in basic courses and be required throughout the curriculum. An advanced course should cover development of interactive databases using such tools as Caspio, Django and Ruby on Rails. Again, these skills are as valuable to strategic communication students as to journalism majors.

Programming. As I mentioned to the TCU curriculum committee, I encourage working with a computer science department to develop cross-disciplinary courses such as my iPhone app course at Iowa. I also encourage working with the computer science department to develop double-major or major-minor combos to help “hacker journalists” get the appropriate education in journalism and programming. (I’m delighted that two students in the iPhone class will be double majors in journalism and informatics.

Mobile journalism. Basic reporting courses should introduce students to the multitasking skills and demands of mobile journalism. The University of Missouri is requiring journalism students to buy iPhones. I don’t know how important it is to specify a brand (I do use an iPhone), but I think requiring students to use smart phones as journalism tools is an excellent idea. If I were teaching a reporting or multimedia course now, I would require that some specific assignments be carried out entirely with a mobile device. This would require writing on the phone, shooting still photos and video and providing geocoding metadata. An advanced course(s) could focus specifically on mobile journalism, such as developing mobile applications or a mobile-first strategy.

The business of journalism. Journalism students need a more thorough introduction to the business of journalism than I received as a student (almost none) or than students receive today. They need to learn about traditional business models for print and broadcast. They should understand the disruption that is causing the collapse of the business models. They should understand why and how some organizations are seeking to try paid-content digital models (and they should understand how paid content has been tried before and that it hasn’t worked). They should examine and understand efforts to develop new business models (such as my own Complete Community Connection model). They should learn about product development and entrepreneurial journalism. They should understand how the advertising model is collapsing on all platforms and study efforts to develop new revenue streams. Tim McGuire’s Business and Future of Journalism course at Arizona State University provides a good model. While some coverage of business models would be good in lower-level courses, an upper-level course is a good idea and I would encourage requiring it for all students or for some particular majors. The lack of business literacy is a huge problem among journalists and tunnel vision on business issues is a huge problem for people in advertising and executive offices.

Community engagement. Interaction is a significant part of the future of journalism, from crowdsourcing of stories (investigative, events, features, reviews) to engaging comments on blogs to aggregating the work of community bloggers and citizen journalists. This could certainly be a full course.

Digital content in specialized courses. A question raised in an email about TCU’s curriculum asked how much digital content should be integrated into advanced courses on journalism specialties, such as public affairs reporting and sports reporting. My answer is that the courses should have as much digital emphasis as the specialties have now, and that’s a lot. For instance, even TCU sportswriting legend Dan Jenkins, became a Twitter icon this year at age 79. Blogging, liveblogging and video are essential parts of sportswriting now, and the traditional game story is declining in importance to the point that sports writers are debating whether it’s dying. Any course on a specialty should reflect the current state and projected direction of that specialty.

Visual journalism. Photojournalism and graphic arts, as narrowly defined for much of my career, are outdated journalism specialties. While those skills remain important, visual journalists need to master (and be taught) a range of digital skills: video, audio, animation, multimedia graphics using programs such as Flash. And, of course, visual journalists need to learn ethical standards for using all these new tools and skills. Journalism students learning graphic arts should certainly learn how to make print graphics, but they also should learn to develop interactive multimedia, including simulations and games.

Live coverage. Increasingly, journalists need to provide live, unedited coverage of events. Whether in a reporting course, a visual journalism course, a live-coverage course or all three, students should learn how to liveblog, stream live video and aggregate real-time public content from social media.

Managing digital content. Digital journalism and strategic communication both will require a range of digital skills that are rapidly developing. The specific content of such a course and the balance of topics covered would change by semester, but someone should stay abreast of issues such as search-engine optimization, analytics, tagging, curation, aggregation, archiving, content-management systems and semantic technology. Some of these topics need to be introduced in lower-level courses, but they easily could be an upper-level course.

Design. Print design is fading in importance as newspapers cut newsholes and resources and require more regional design and use of templates. But web design and mobile design are areas of growing importance. Design courses should be adjusted accordingly.

Blogging. I don’t see a need for a course specifically in blogging (though I wouldn’t object either). Blogging should be part of nearly every writing course. In many courses, students should be required to keep a course blog. I evaluated portfolio blogs for seniors at the University of Nebraska, and I would encourage any journalism school to require students to maintain portfolio blogs.

Link journalism. Students need to learn how to use links, which are the footnotes of the digital world. This certainly should be part of reporting and editing courses.

Law and Ethics. As I address in my Upholding and Updating Ethical Standards seminars, ethics education needs to address a wide range of digital issues. Of course, digital journalism presents many legal issues as well. In fact, many (I suspect most) editors and journalism professors continue to follow outdated advice on court interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

First Amendment. The American Press Institute, where I worked for three years, collaborates with the First Amendment Center and the Freedom Forum to take our seminars to programs on the First Amendment. These programs gave me both a deep appreciation of our First Amendment freedoms and a keen realization that professional journalists don’t know enough about the history and current status of the First Amendment and the freedoms it guarantees. A First Amendment course could be a cross-disciplinary course with credit in journalism, religion and political science. With TCU’s international communication major, this course should include units on restrictions on our key freedoms in other nations.

TCU’s curriculum committee asked me whether I thought professionals would be interested in a certificate program in digital journalism for professionals needing to update their skills. While ability to pay might be impaired by staff reductions and fears about job security, I think interest in such programs would be high. I encourage journalism schools to offer such programs in person and/or online, and to either develop financial aid support for such courses or to cut down the university overhead in determining tuition, since professionals would not draw as heavily as younger students on university resources. Such a certificate program should allow considerable flexibility for professionals to fill the gaps in their own skills.

Many journalism schools will be hard-pressed to update their curricula as I’ve described (though some certainly are already doing some of these things). They will need to hire more faculty with digital skills, use adjunct faculty with digital skills and require faculty to update their own skills and knowledge.

I’m glad journalism schools are considering these issues and I hope they move decisively and swiftly to update.

Martin Langeveld tweeted that my previous theme was difficult to read, so I changed themes. If you have problems reading this one, please let me know. I explained my choice of the Bryce Canyon photo earlier.

News organizations are belatedly, reluctantly and often awkwardly pursuing “web-first” strategies. As we fight these web battles, I am increasingly coming to believe that “web first” is what the military would call fighting the last war. News organizations need a mobile-first strategy.

“Web first” was a tremendously difficult concept for journalists and newspaper companies.

Publishers and editors worried about “scooping ourselves” and “cannibalizing” our core product. Editors and reporters thought “web first” meant posting our newspaper stories online before the press rolled (but often after the late newscast). Advertising staffs thought web strategies meant upselling print customers into annoying pop-up ads or ineffective banners.

We wasted energy and time fretting over whether and how to move online and then went about it wrong, as the world move ever swifter to the web and got more things right than we did and learned more lessons than we did from mistakes.

Even today, one of the primary reasons news executives cite for favoring paid content is that they want to protect the print edition.

Newspaper companies are so thoroughly rooted in print and so devoted to ink and paper that we missed opportunities and held back as digital technology revolutionized communication, leaving us behind.

We can’t waste that much time in mastering the mobile market. We need to start thinking mobile first. Now. The world is moving swiftly to smart phones and we can’t afford to be as far behind this time (in truth, it’s too late to be ahead, but not too late to pursue opportunities that can lead us to a prosperous future). We need to make mobile innovation the top priority and the first thing we think of when we plan change in our organizations.

(I should note that web-first meant content would be published online before in the print edition, and that the organization should start thinking first about the web, though most didn’t, regardless of what they were saying. When I say we must shift to a mobile-first strategy, I’m not talking about where content appears when, but about the priorities of the organization: what you place first in your thinking and acting.)

I heard someone recently cite figures on the low (in his view) percentage of people who actually own iPhones (I won’t cite the figure he gave because it’s out of date and the relevant numbers are those about growth of iPhone sales and apps). Actually, the penetration percentage is a great reason to get moving swiftly into iPhone opportunities. If we wait until nearly everyone has some sort of smart phone, someone else will be filling the roles that we can and should fill.

“Mobile first” needs to change how we think and act throughout our organizations. Reporters, editors and visual journalists need to think first about how to package and deliver news for mobile devices. Information technology staffs need to work first on development of mobile applications for popular devices. Sales staffs need to make it a top priority to guide business customers in using our mobile apps and platforms to reach customers with advertising and direct-sales opportunities. Designers need to present content that is clear and easy to read on the small screen (even if this means spending less staff resources on design of print or web products). Executives need to redirect resources and set priorities so that we pursue mobile opportunities as aggressively as we pursue the most important news stories in our communities.

We try to make one size fit all in many aspects of our business, but that will not work in a mobile-first world. We need to become the mobile news, information and commerce connection for people with the latest iPhone, BlackBerry or Droid (and whatever comes next), but also for people with simpler phones that handle only phone calls and text messages and for non-phone devices such as iPods.

We need to figure the best ways to deliver news and conduct commerce effectively on mobile devices: text messages, email, mobile applications, tweets, easy-to-use mobile web sites, podcasts, location-based news and commercial information.

Whatever your role in your media organization, consider how you would change your work, your priorities and your thinking to support a mobile-first strategy. This will either be our future or our next squandered opportunity.

I have blogged three times recently about the questions about whether and how storytelling will survive and thrive as journalism grows more digital (I say yes).

Katharine Hansen has joined that conversation with an interesting take (linking to one of my earlier posts on the topic) that I call to your attention:

Blogs … are wonderful venues for storytelling, providing a storied outlet for both writers and readers that didn’t exist 15 years ago. And while storytelling on Facebook may be flawed, millions more people are telling and reading stories than did before the age of social media.

Andrew Chavez will be liveblogging again today during my ethics seminar, Upholding and Updating Ethical Standards, at Texas Christian University.

The American Press Institute seminar is supported by a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. We will have four 90 minute sessions, starting at 10 a.m., addressing ethics in social networks, breaking news, digital visual journalism ethics and generating revenue with integrity.

Andrew Chavez will be liveblogging my seminar on the Complete Community connection today at Texas Christian University, my alma mater. Follow along if you’re interested. Or check out the slides.

I hope you can help me with a course I am team-teaching next semester at the University of Iowa on creating iPhone applications.

Before I ask for your help, I should note that I know nothing about the technical side of the class. Jim Cremer, chair of the Computer Science Department, will handle that aspect of the course.

We will have students from journalism, computer science and informatics in the class, working in teams to create iPhone applications providing useful community information. I will use my Newspaper Next experience to teach the students about spotting opportunities by identifying jobs to be done for consumers or businesses. I’ll handle the aspects relating to gathering the information needed to do the job. We hope to develop a class that will help students with computer backgrounds learn about development for the iPhone, help students from journalism learn about product development and help students from both backgrounds learn something about the other field and about working across disciplines in a project.

So here’s what I’d like to know from you, especially if you’re an iPhone user, though I’d welcome help from other smart phones: BlackBerry, Droid, Pre, whatever. What are your favorite applications? How do you find them useful? What are your favorite features of the applications? What jobs do these applications do for you? How did you get those jobs done before you found this app?

I noted in an earlier post that I view mobile opportunities as an urgent opportunity for local media companies. I strongly believe that people will spend more and more time using mobile devices (you can hardly call them phones any more). We will get increasing information from phones and do increasing business on phones. Media companies that master the mobile world will have healthier futures, I am certain, than companies that are slow in moving into that world. Journalists who find their niches in the mobile world will have more prosperous careers, I am certain, than journalists who wait for someone else to find these answers.

I am excited about this course, and I hope you will share some of your experiences with the students and me. Tell me about your favorite apps and what you like about them.

I was unable last week to watch the unfolding coverage through Twitter and media web sites of the Fort Hood shooting.

I was traveling Thursday and teaching Friday, and simply couldn’t follow all the developments as the “facts” of the story kept changing. While I’d love to comment on the story and the coverage, I don’t like writing unless I am better informed. So I’ll just call your attention to some commentary I read on the the shootings and the coverage:

• Dan Gillmor noted how confusing and inaccurate the breaking coverage was and wished for some slow-news coverage.
• Newsosaur Alan Mutter criticized the “ugly ethnic profiling” of some of the coverage.
• Glenn Greenwald lamented the “media orgy of rumors, speculation and falsehoods.”
• Greg Marx in CJR noted that the confusion surrounding the tragedy did not prevent pundits of all stripes from claiming that it validated their opinions.

As John Robinson noted in a Twitter exchange yesterday, being right is better than being first. Journalists should hustle to be first with important developments in breaking news stories, but we should not sacrifice verification (and we should understand that sometimes we seek verification from official sources who have their facts wrong).

Other interesting things I’ve read the last day or so:

Mobile advertising. I have noted before that mobile revenue streams are an essential part of the future of media, and that news companies need to do more to develop the audience, the technology and the revenue streams. A post by Dan Butcher on Mobile Marketing reports that mobile advertising is three to five times more effective than online advertising.

Hyperlocal journalism. Mark Coddington of the Grand Island Independent wrote a thoughtful blog post on the challenge of hyperlocal journalism in rural areas.

Doing “more with less.” Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, correctly called out one of the big lies of today’s workplace, particularly today’s newsrooms. As reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab, Keller told his staff that you can’t do more with less, though lots of people making cuts will tell you that you can.

To do more with less, you have to change what you’re doing, usually by using technology smarter. Computer-assisted reporting let us do more with less. Pagination let us do more with less. Perhaps crowdsourcing and community engagement will help us do more with less, though I think we’re way too early in our experience with them to know that.

But when you just cut staff (and I’ve been involved before in making cuts), you’re going to do less with less. I’m pleased to see that Keller is having no part of this lie that too many bosses have told too many times. “What you can do with less, is less,” Keller told the Times staff.