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“The core unifying quality Royal found among the staff wasn’t a specific programming skill or even a set of those skills. It was passion. Curiosity. Enjoyment of the work and openness to new processes and approaches. ” – M. Garber for Nieman Journalism Lab (reviewing Royal’s study)

A recent study released by Cindy Royal, assistant professor of journalism at Texas State University, revealed how the New York Times aims to continue providing enagaging online content to its readers. The idea? Instead of hiring people trained solely in journalism they’re after people who can think like, well … ‘hackers.’ Not ‘hacker’ as in a person who illegally accesses your data, but ‘hacker’ as in a person who engages with technology to the extent that they’ve developed a certain ‘infinite possibilities’ mentality. As more people get used to digital interaction, new opportunities for telling their stories in creative, compelling ways arise. Personally, I think this represents a widening of opportunities for students who display passion, resourcefulness and adaptability. It’s as much about creative prowess as is it technical process.

In an era where everyone is now capable of capturing and transmitting ‘news,’ the Times is figuring out how to make its delivery most appealing by tapping into this mindset. In prioritizing hacking skills over yakking skills, the Old Gray Lady is sending a new message: Getting old doesn’t always mean slowing down. Read about Interactive Newsroom Technologies here

How do you portray the modern college student in a 120-second video? Click here to find out.

As the big hourglass would have it, you’ve been born a journalist in an era of uncertainty. The faltering of some major institutions — from banks to auto companies to mass media organizations — has resulted in a contraction of the workforce and a subsequent scarcity of industry employment. Fortunately, writers and news-gatherers can’t be replaced by machines (yet), and society’s insatiable demand for good journalism will likely never cease. For every Old Gray Lady lurching toward the grave, there are dozens of fresh and eager professional/citizen/student/digital journalists innovating their way to success. Here are some options for recent and soon-to-be journalism grads.

Professional-track

Gathering some clips, polishing your resume and crossing your fingers used to be the primary means of pursuing your goal to become a working journalist. Now, you can take some of that fate into your own hands. Student journalists can make a name for themselves before they finish college by participating, collaborating, curating and creating online. One of our recent grads was recognized at a national conference by a prominent journalism professor because the professor recalled seeing her portrait on Twitter. You never know when the YouTube video you posted of your dog at the beach or the blog post you wrote about the restaurant in your neighborhood might be a crucial icebreaker at the big job interview. Of course, having a contact at the news organization you want to work for helps as does completing an internship there.

Graduate School

Move to another state. Experience a new setting. Make new friends. Hone your skills. Graduate journalism programs give you a chance to really define your area of expertise outside the industry. The diversity of original course offerings at today’s j-schools range from a Mobile Media course taught by two Apple iPhone application engineers at Berkeley to USC’s Internet and High Technology Public Relations to a course at University of Colorado that sounds like it belongs in the science building (Convergence and Hypermedia). Because of the changing nature of news gathering and delivery, grad schools are like experimental laboratories producing some of the most engaging, forward-thinking and technologically-advanced storytelling to date. Since most graduate schools tend to place graduates in jobs closest to home, it’s worth considering where you want to end up working when deciding where to apply.

Entrepreneurial

As the once-mighty Goliaths of traditional journalism wilt, a slew of self-supported, news-hungry startups are rising from the ashes in nearly every small town across the country. Like sports writing? Consider starting your own hyperlocal website that covers nothing but high school athletics in your hometown like these two Santa Barbara natives did with Presidiosports. Like digging up the truth and holding your representatives accountable? Start your own investigative journalism website like one of our own graduates did in 2008. Since it was unveiled, the site (Cal Coast News) has broken several major stories involving local politicians, administrators, law-enforcement agencies, business etc. that the mainstream media missed.

Alternative

Ever heard of a digital information librarian? Newsmastering? Online curation? As people begin to depend more and more on the Internet as their primary source of information for anything affecting their daily lives, the need for organization and info-distillation will increase. Some of the key functions of a Web curator, according to new media pioneer and journalism professor Mindy McAdams, include: selecting the best representative samples of something, providing context for something, organizing the whole, expertise/knowledge of particulars and updating constantly (link). Who could be better equipped to perform these tasks than journalists trained in effective communication, story organization, objectivity and ethics? Members of websites such as Publish2 and Newsvine do a good job of curating the massive amount of news content produced every day, making the everyday task of consuming the news more effective and fruitful.

Whichever direction you decide to go with your newly-minted degree, remember that it’s your communication skills, creativity and resourcefulness that set you apart from the pack. Opportunities to affect the future of a changing industry make journalism an exciting and fulfilling career choice for recent graduates. It’s just a matter of finding what aspect you’re the best at.

The minds behind CoPress, the first organization to offer a viable option for college newspapers looking to go online without corporate control, discuss the announcement that they’ll be halting operations next month. The 37 college newspapers already running CoPress will have the option to keep their sites intact while paying someone else to host them.

“Going forward, we also intend to reopen our list serv as a place for the community to ask and respond to more general support questions. We also hope to put together a list of WordPress consultants you can hire to help with more technical issues or extended projects. Lastly, we’re going to open source our database conversion script which makes it a lot easier to get archives of various form into WordPress.” (from the CoPress blog)

Executive Director and co-founder Daniel Bachhuber started CoPress while working for the Oregon Daily Emerald. He is currently an intern at a collaborative Web journalism site called Publish2.

Team member Andrew Spittle attends Whitman College and is the former Webmaster for the Whitman Pioneer.

Why did you start CoPress?

Daniel: “I was working for the Oregon Daily Emerald as a freelance Web developer. I spent five minutes with College Publisher and decided that ‘I’m not working with this,’” says Bachhuber. “For student newspapers, the solution isn’t College Publisher. It’s too restrictive, poorly developed, and proprietary, locking innovative students to a platform that limits creativity. Page load times are atrocious because of far too much Javascript, and if they go out of business, your website goes down. The answer, instead, is open source,” wrote Bachhuber in a blog post from fall, 2008. Bachhuber set his sights on creating a “better technological ecosystem for college newspapers.” “It’s about a network,” he says, “I wanted to be able to set up something so that people all across the nation could collaborate with one another. Any news organization that wants to succeed must innovate and come up with new business models. You just can’t do that with College Publisher.”

Andrew: I actually wasn’t one of the original team members but I can answer why I started working for CoPress. While I was working as the Web Manager for the Whitman Pioneer during the Spring of 2009 I became aware of what CoPress was doing. I started taking part in discussions on the forum and wrote a couple guest posts on the blog. I didn’t start officially working for CoPress until sometime in the early summer but was drawn toward doing so because I shared many of CoPress’ goals. It was refreshing to find a group of people as frustrated with the current state of affairs and who were working toward enacting real change. (via email)

Why is CoPress shutting down?

Daniel: “On a daily basis, we had maxed-out the number of support requests we could handle while still doing other things. The introductory hosting plans that we offered were extremely competitive because we didn’t want price to be limiting factor. However, it’s always difficult for any business to raise its prices and we’ve had to do that twice in the past year.”

What’s next for you?

Daniel: “I’m currently working for Publish2.”

Andrew: I graduate from Whitman in May and at that point a full-time job becomes a necessity because of student loans. While college journalism remains a passion the reality is that the business side of CoPress just doesn’t scale to what it would need to in order to support a full-time staff. To be honest I’m not entirely sure at this point. There are a lot of opportunities out there right now. I would love to stay connected to journalism, whether that means working at a news organization or getting involved with a undergrad or graduate program. For now I still have a senior thesis to finish and once that’s done plan to start thinking about what’s next more seriously. (via email)

What are the biggest challenges that college media face right now?

Daniel: “Proprietary content management systems are a drawback. So is hosting, as Bryan Murley from the Center for Innovation in College Media mentioned early on. Having a staff that knows Web stuff is pretty important — we need people who want to experiment. The culture of the newsroom should be more experimental, especially when it comes to using new tools for reporting. Newsrooms should be more open, participatory and collaborative.”

Andrew: The single biggest challenge I think is the development of in house talent for web production. Each news organization has staff members who have mastered the requirements for print production. Skill in InDesign or an equivalent program is seen as a necessity for the news organization. For college media to really progress online the web side of things needs to be taken as seriously as print. Speaking from my experience at Whitman the print side of production out-staffed the web side by 2 or 3 times. That needs to change. For college news organizations to get over the hurdles that are presently facing professional publications they will have to dedicate themselves toward making the web the focus of their operations. (via email)

What would you recommend for those folks who were about to switch to CoPress?

Andrew: Don’t stop, go for it. We’re open sourcing our conversion script for archive transfers and are building a network of WordPress consultants to help with larger projects. On top of all that there is already a tremendous community around WordPress and its associated themes and plugins. Even though CoPress is closing there are still active communities to help with WordPress-related questions. The whole process can seem incredibly intimidating at first but with some hard work and trust in the software it can be done. Furthermore the huge benefits outweigh the short-term uncertainty and hard work. Switching to an open source platform may mean a couple rocky months at the beginning but in the end you’ll have a professional-level publishing platform that you are in complete control of and which will be developed for many years to come. (via email)

What’s the future of journalism look like in your opinion?

Daniel: “Yelp, Google, Twitter etc. There’s tremendous potential for niche local news and niche advertising but the technology is behind. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ‘big data’ — mining articles for their specific data and structuring it so it’s easy to reference and access. I like Jay Rosen’s idea of putting question boxes at the end of articles so that readers can ask for clarifications on things they didn’t understand.”

Andrew: See the blog post Andrew published today on this topic.

What will you always remember about this experience?

Daniel: “It was a great learning opportunity. I learned a lot about starting and running a business — accounting, invoicing, logistics and management. I also learned to keep in mind the ‘big picture’ — the vision of what you want to do. Our success was a qualified success because we were never able to pay people for all the hours they spent.”

Andrew: The people. The entire CoPress team provided for incredible experiences and conversations. Furthermore, talking to all of the people at the various schools we worked with provided great perspective on where college news organizations are at in their process of adjusting to the web. There’s something about getting a small group of people with shared goals together to work on a project that I think is unique to running a startup. It’s something that I wish were true of college but I’m glad that I got the experience with CoPress. (via email)

The race is on to fill the void that the shuttering of CoPress will create. Large players such as Alloy Marketing and Crystal Tech have reportedly been in contact with Bachhuber with one hosting service offering a 60% discount on data migration for those who still want live technical support.

Please click this link to open the editor’s blog.

This course is designed to familiarize students with the concepts and technologies associated with bringing film, video and still images and audio online.  You will gain familiarity with the process – from inception to publishing – through which Web-based audio and video is created and disseminated most effectively. Click here to see the class blog. Click here to watch some mini-documentaries produced in J303.

Contemporary photojournalism no longer requires complex bulky equipment and chemical-laden developing labs. By taking advantage of affordable and user-friendly technology, producing quality images that are able to stand alone and tell a story requires only application and practice.

This class will offer both. You will gain an understanding of basic camera functions, photography techniques, covering news with a camera, photo essays and judging photos for publication as well as important lessons in working with other media platforms to enhance the depth and quality of the final news product.

Click here to access the class Web site.