I am pleased to see more student media converting to a digital-first approach. While the digital future is clear for all media, the audience for student media is even more intensely digital focused.
Both to serve their current audiences and to prepare students for success in journalism, student media need a strong digital focus. I am leading two days of digital-first training for the Shorthorn, the student media news staff at the University of Texas-Arlington.
I blogged last spring about my advice that student media need to take a digital-first approach. The Shorthorn was already planning a digital-first conversion for this fall that includes changing from daily to weekly print publication. The University of Oregon and the University of Georgia have made similar changes in print frequency to emphasize their digital-first approach.
My alma mater, Texas Christian University, is continuing the Daily Skiff as a daily newspaper Tuesday through Friday, but it will create content first for digital platforms and is reorganizing student media to focus on digital content first. I will be leading a day of workshops for TCU’s student media Thursday.
Links I will be recommending to the students for additional reading:
How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work
Digital First Journalists: What we value
10 ways to think like a Digital First journalist
Leading a Digital First newsroom
How Digital First succeeds at making money
What does community engagement mean?
Engagement editors: an emerging, important job
What does an engagement editor do?
Finding and developing story ideas
We won’t spend a lot of time in these workshops talking about job-hunting, but because these journalists will soon be seeking jobs, I also am sharing some links on branding and job-hunting:
Use digital tools to showcase your career and your work
Confessions (strategies) of a branded journalist (or a journalist with a reputation, if you prefer)
Tips for finding your next job in digital journalism
Job-hunting advice for journalists selling skills in the digital market
Here are slides for today’s and yesterday’s workshops for the Shorthorn:
Here are links I used during the workshops as various examples (I might forget to include a few links, so I invite students to remind me of any you don’t see here that you’d like to check out). I will be adding to these links later, but I wanted to get them posted before today’s workshops:
The Virginia Tech massacre liveblog from the Collegiate Times
Jay Westcott’s time-lapse photo project on a Cowboys-Redskins game and Jay’s How-I-did-it explainer
Maryjo Webster’s Making maps with Google Fusion tables
Last Chance interactive project on Louisiana’s vanishing coastline
Ivan Lajara’s How to make a slideshow with Pinterest with Storify
Celebration outside the White House
[…] I elaborated on the points I made earlier this year about student media after doing some consulting for Texas Christian University and the University of Oregon and after teaching some digital-first workshops for TCU and the University of Texas at Arlington. […]
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[…] Digital-first workshops for student media at the University of Texas-Arlington […]
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