What do you get when you unleash a horde of college journalism students on a city, armed with cameras and challenged to tell stories in just 60 seconds? A creative new approach to a multimedia boot camp, courtesy of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Incoming master’s students at Syracuse in print, broadcast and public relations students spend their first six weeks on campus in a crash course. This year, that collective effort resulted in a website with some 75 “slices of Syracuse life,” each one a 60-second snippet captured by the students in one day (August 3, 2010). “Secs in the City” – a play on the familiar HBO show/movie title – are one-minute videos, one-minute audio slideshows and short text articles. (Full disclosure: the project was published using Newsgarden, a social mapping platform I helped develop at Serra Media.)

“Essentially, ‘boot camp’  is to give new master’s students a comprehensive news reporting experience, including for many, their first forays into collecting and editing video, audio and photography,” said Syracuse professor Jon Glass, who coordinated construction of the website. “They learned the fundamentals of all three, plus received training with Final Cut, Audacity and Photoshop to produce their video vignettes.”

Professors hoped spreading students out across the city’s five different regions would help the students — especially those who just moved to Syracuse — learn about the community by  visiting the areas and interviewing the people who live and work there.

“This was a deadline-driven assignment with only one hour to shoot and then an afternoon and few hours the next morning to edit, Glass said. “We stressed they should be ’slice of life’ stories rather than full documentaries, and for the most part the students delivered that with their video features and accompanying text stories.”

While the quick turnaround was fairly intense, Glass says the feedback was positive; most students felt it was among the most exciting aspects of the summer.

“While multimedia projects the past two summers were posted online, we wanted to integrate mapping into the final website as a way to introduce geolocation as something today’s journalists should factor into their reporting,” Glass said. “The Newsgarden tool enabled us to offer that functionality, and we’re really happy with the final product.”

Thanks for the endorsement on Newsgarden, Jon. And nice work on a cool project.

You like journalism. You like technology. And you like meeting smart people. So let me recommend you find your way to Washington, DC in October for the Online News Association conference and Austin next March for the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

The ONA conference usually sells out so get your ticket soon. If you don’t want to spend the dollars for the ticket, consider volunteering to help and you’ll get discounted (or free) passes.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know much I like the ONA conference. It’s my favorite conference every year (and I’ve been to a lot of conferences).

SXSW is “spring break for geeks” according to CNN. It’s just a ton of fun, packed with information and thousands of really interesting people.

Last year was my first SXSW and I was blown away by the journalism presence. There were several panels focused on journalism and an impromptu meet-up I helped organize drew about 50 tech-minded journalists to a bar on a Sunday evening.

There are 49 journalism panels proposed. You can vote for your favorites here. I’m proposing a book-reading from my new book, which should be published by then. You can vote for my proposal here. (Many thanks, in advance.) And here’s Poynter’s roundup of 20 panels of interest to journalists.

Did you go to journalism school to become an online community manager? Probably not, but that is one of the hottest jobs on the market these days and you can’t launch a successful digital news business without it.

The era of specialization is dead, but a new class of jobs and roles at new era news businesses offer exciting opportunities for journalists and communicators who are interested in new thinking and new approaches.

In terms of jobs, journalistic occupations are outperforming the overall economy, according to Michael Mandel, former chief economist at BusinessWeek and founder of Visible Economy LLC. That certainly seems counterintuitive to anyone who has heard about, or directly experienced, layoffs at newspapers and TV stations in the past five years. A shift in journalistic employment to nontraditional companies such as Yahoo and AOL, plus an increase in self-employed journalists has created surprising growth.

Drawing from numbers based on the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of roughly 60,000 households conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, Mandel found the overall number of employed journalists increased by 19% from 2007-2010.

Over a comparable time period, Mandel notes, employment in newspaper publishing has fallen 26%; periodical employment is down 16%; and radio and television broadcasting is down 11%.

Journalists are getting jobs. Just not in the traditional industries or at the companies you would expect.

And those traditional news companies that are hiring? They aren’t looking for the same old thing any longer. A spirit of innovation is mandatory, previous experience is not. If you are willing to learn new ways of communicating to – and with – an audience, including inventing some of your own, you’re ready for a job in a new era news business.

Luddites need not apply. New skills can be learned, but those individuals who have shown a previous proclivity toward trying new types of digital communication will separate themselves from the pack.

Indeed, here’s a piece of a job posting from July 30, 2010 on the Tribune website:

The TV revolution is upon us – and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance. We’re recruiting a solid team of anti-establishment producer/editors, “preditors”, to collaborate on a groundbreaking morning news/infotainment format unlike anything ever attempted on local TV. Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass. Or your excellence at writing readable copy for plastic anchorpeople. Not interested.

Sell us on this:

-Your personal relationship with the internet, blogs, video-sharing, iPads, Droids, Blackberries, Blueteeth, Facebook & Twitter, and all things Modern Culture

-You’re in sync with the pulse of the streets, not the PC, Capital “J” journalism world

It’s a new era, whether you’re looking for work in journalism at a traditional company or ready to explore the emerging world of journalism outside newspapers and TV stations. The career path is no longer well-defined, however. In addition to new skills, you will need a new adaptability to find your way. Just know that, if you have an open mind and an innovative spirit, the possibilities are out there.

Among the many differences between running your own independent news operation and working at a corporate news job, ethical dilemmas rank high. As Poynter’s Kelly McBride says, there is a generally agreed upon set of principles among journalists in the Fourth Estate. When you’re talking about the Fifth Estate – her term for independent new media news startups – all bets are off and values and principles can vary from one site to another.

McBride led a session at a Poynter seminar I’m helping to lead this week called Bottom Line News: Creating Sustainable Journalism Startups. She took the group of 20 aspiring journo-entrepreneurs through case studies and exercises to help them define the values and principles that will guide them in the future.

McBride started with a list of “ethical pressure points” that news entities can expect to feel at some point:

1. Content you create
2. Content others create, often these others will not get a paycheck from you
3. Technology can undermine you
4. Conflicts between mission and revenue
5. Rapid growth
6. Failure

The biggest, she says, are conflicts between mission and revenue. “Money itself isn’t tainted, but it comes with stipulations always. There’s no clean money.”

She referenced the widespread controversy over “mommybloggers” accepting free stuff in return for positive reviews and discussed the recent controversy stirred up by ScienceBlogs with its Pepsi sponsorship (aka Pepsigate). In the new media era, journalists are forced to deal with issues that were the province of other departments at a news company.

“You’re responsible for upholding the standards and worrying about the bottom line,” McBride says. “You get to wear both those hats.”

The best way to guide your mission, your new venture, is to define both the values that you stand for and the principles that will support those values. “Principles are action statements,” McBride says. “Truth may be a value, but telling the truth is a principle. Principles are not a code of ethics. They are the infrastructure that can support a code of ethics.”

Fleshing out the values and principles that you will stand for as a news entrepreneur will help you make tough decisions down the road. You’ll have a document to refer to, and one that you should probably post on your website (especially if one of your values is transparency).

(Full disclosure: I was recently named as a Ford Fellow for Entrepreneurial Journalism at Poynter so realize that anything I write about Poynter could be considered somewhat self-promotional.)

By Jake Batsell

When I landed my first full-time reporting gig at The Seattle Times in the 1990s, the Times was still an afternoon paper. A big part of my entry-level GA job was chasing stories that already had appeared in the competition, the morning Post-Intelligencer. Many of my mornings began with an uneasy scan of the P-I, followed by waking up sources with pre-dawn phone calls and hitting the pavement to confirm details the P-I already had.

While I had plenty of friends from the cross-town rival and respected its journalists, as a whole I considered the P-I to be my personal nemesis. If I caught a glimpse of its rotating globe while walking around my neighborhood, I would sometimes reach out and pretend to crush it as I clenched my fist. And whenever I scooped the P-I, it brought a special spring to my step.

Thriving on competition, of course, was part of the fun in a two-newspaper town. And while those storied days are over in most cities, the cutthroat instinct still necessarily prevails in newsrooms paddling to survive in an ever-rising sea of news providers.

But over the course of the past nine months, as I charted the early days of The Texas Tribune for Columbia Journalism Review, I became a believer in cross-newsroom collaboration.

The Tribune, a nonprofit news startup, launched in November with an initial fundraising haul of about $4 million. It freely offers its content to any news outlet that cares to run it, and more than 250 websites and publications have pounced on the offer.

The state’s largest newspapers, however, have been slow to warm to the Tribune, even at a time when shrinking resources are forcing competing papers to share coverage. As I explain in the CJR story, The Dallas Morning News and Austin American-Statesman initially resisted publishing Tribune stories – partly, I suspect, out of pride, but also because editors felt the Tribune’s early content fell short of must-read status.

That perception began to change last month, when the Houston Chronicle teamed with the Tribune on a joint investigation revealing that disabled girls were pitted against each other in a “fight club” at a state-contracted facility. The Statesman and Morning News ran the story in their Sunday print editions, and both papers’ editors have since told me they can envision joining forces with the Tribune down the road. On certain hard-to-get stories, “two news organizations are certainly better than one in pursuing the truth,” said Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen. “We each bring passionate, enterprising reporters to a subject, and the beneficiaries are the voiceless of Texas.”

Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, needs no convincing. He sent the Tribune a check as a founding member last summer and recently told me he hopes to team with the site in time for the November elections and January legislative session. “From the very beginning, I saw them as a partner and not as a competitive threat,” Rivard said. “We haven’t realized the potential of that collaboration yet … Some of the very best journalism being done out in the country these days is being done on a new model. It’s a model that we should embrace.”

As Rivard notes, Pulitzer jurors sent the news industry a clear message in April when awarding a prize to a masterful team project by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. California Watch has had notable early success collaborating with the state’s newspapers, and dot-org pioneer Voice of San Diego partners with the local NBC affiliate on a fact-check feature.

National Public Radio is getting in the act, too. “To increase our impact we at NPR have had to learn to get over ourselves, and to approach collaborations in a new way,” CEO Vivian Schiller told journalists at the IRE conference last month. (Also see: NPR CEO: We want to partner with journalism startups.) And the Seattle Times is among five news organizations joining forces with hyperlocal sites as part of J-Lab’s Networked Journalism Project.

During this new era of collaboration, news outlets also are partnering with universities – the New York Times and New York University are launching a local blog covering the East Village, and the Cronkite News Service at Arizona State University distributes student work all over the state. The student news site I advise at Southern Methodist University shares content with Pegasus News and the Morning News, and we’re talking with the independent student paper about combining operations.

I’m not sure what the business model of the future is, but having competing journalists duplicate each other’s coverage isn’t part of it. Yes, competition can be a motivating force, but teaming up to produce good journalism is an even better incentive.

Jake Batsell is an assistant professor in journalism at Southern Methodist University and faculty adviser to the Daily Mustang. You can read more from Jake on his blog and follow him on Twitter at @jbatsell.

The story of the newspaper industry in the U.S., for anyone who has been part of it, is one of drama, heroes, villains, triumph and tragedy. But is it worthy of a feature-length documentary film? Adam Chadwick thinks so.

Chadwick, a New York Times veteran, is helping produce a decade-by-decade look at the major events in technology, unions, advertising and corporatization which has led to the demise of many papers. “Fit to Print – A Documentary Film on the U.S. Newspaper Industry” is currently in production, but you can see a trailer of it here.

I asked Chadwick how the project got started and what are the plans for marketing and distribution. Here is what he told me via email:

I was working at the NYT for over 3 years and began to sit down with various staffers and reporters who were all expressing their concerns regarding two things: A) the trouble facing the industry B) how it is almost impossible for them to speak to anyone outside of the institution in expressing their opinions and concerns. A deep concern wrapped over with red-tape essentially. The NYT staffers still choose to speak out (as well as various reporters from other national newspapers including the Washington Post, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, USA Today, Rocky Mountain News, Seattle P.I. and many others). So I began to collect their interviews over the course of the year, and from there it began to escalate and the story of the U.S. newspaper industry took full shape.

I don’t want to give too much away, but we are focusing on the historical perspective of the newspaper industry in turmoil dating back to the decline in the afternoon dailies and transition from hot to cold typesetting. Decade-by-decade, we will detail major events with technology, unions, advertising and corporatization which led to the demise of many papers. We are also embedded with investigative reporters, showing what is taking place out in the field right now in real time.

The marketing and distribution plan is still up in the air. We are still looking for funding and sponsorship to help us complete the film and get it out to the public. Ideally, this film is meant for film festivals and broadcast television. We just hope that an institute or organization will help us complete the travel and editing we need to get this done in order to make this a great film.

I think one of the challenges Chadwick faces is making a film that comes off as something more substantial than a bunch of newspaper journalists lamenting the changes in technology and society that have weakened their industry. I hope he will reflect some of the responsibility that newspaper publishers, editors and yes, journalists, should bear for the current state of the newspaper industry. Many of the wounds have been self-inflicted, after all.

We all know how important newspapers have been in the U.S. and we’d love to see them return to strength. I hope Chadwick gets the funding he needs to finish the film. It is an important story that needs to be told.

I’ve grown accustomed to answering questions about the future of journalism, the life expectancy of printed newspapers and the financial prospects of online journalism. I have my opinions, of course. But the skepticism I’m used to hearing from journalists in the U.S. pales in comparison to some of the comments heard at a panel discussion I took part in last night in Dubai.

And with good reason.

Turns out, the Gulf Region still likes their print. In fact, arguably the region’s best newspaper launched just three years ago. In the U.S. we have the Huffington Post overtaking the Washington Post in online audience, but in the UAE it’s the upstart National shaking up the region – in print.

There are a number of English-language newspapers here, all printed in full broadsheet and full color (yes, on every page!) They are full of ads, too. Online media has a role for the traditional media companies, but it’s limited, compared to the U.S. and other cities in the West. And social media, especially Twitter, have been slow to gain critical mass. (Although apparently Facebook is doing quite well.)

Pia Heikkila answers a question from the audience.

Still, the future of journalism in the Middle East was apparent from the panelists assembled, and were representative of panel discussions I often do in the States. Pia Heikkila represented “big brand media.” As a freelancer, she sells her work to the BBC, Guardian and Al Jazeera (where she used to work). She flew in from Kabul where she is currently doing an assignment as a one-woman video journalist (5 months pregnant, to boot).

“Digital journalism is in its infancy, but has unlimited of potential. If the old dinosaurs don’t embrace the new world, they will die. The new world is already here. We need to change the way we think,” Heikkila said.

Also on the panel were a couple of new media success stories from the Gulf region. Ali Al Saloom is a self-described and well-known “brand” for his Ask Ali column in newspapers and corresponding website. He has also published a book and produces videos.

“Print is king,” Saloom said. “I know the cultures are different in the UK and in America, but print is still king here.”

Nabila Usman disagreed. Usman is a reporter/writer/blogger for Newzglobe.com, which just launched in the UAE and is already seeing impressive traffic. She described the content as “quirky” and “edgy” and apparently stirred up quite a controversy recently when she tried to attend a media forum at a bar while wearing her hajib (which is not allowed under UAE law). She and a few others were turned away, which she reported, and caused quite an uproar judging from the comments.

Usman predicted print newspapers going away in the next 10 years and envisioned taking her children to see copies of them in a museum. (Nice touch.)

While I’m confident that newspapers will still be available in print in the Gulf in 10 years, I’m also confident that online news will command a much bigger piece of the audience – and revenue – than today. The region might be a few years behind the U.S. in terms of technology and startup news projects, but this is a place that knows how to bigger/faster/better as well as anywhere. I won’t be surprised if we, in the U.S., are looking to the UAE for online news innovation by 2020.

Thanks to Richard Dean of Dubai Eye radio station for having me on his show yesterday. We covered a lot of ground – from citizen journalism to jobs to the business prospects for media’s big boys – in less than 20 minutes. If you’re interested, you can listen to the interview here.

Azerbaijan has had the world’s fastest growing economy for the past five years. That growth hasn’t extended to the media sector, however, as the spread of news remains limited to a few pro-government newspapers and some underground anti-government publications.

During my four days in Baku, the nation’s capital city, I met with dozens of journalists. Some had jobs at newspapers or TV stations, some were writing on their own and many were just starting out as students. But they all had the same passion for journalism that brought you and I to this profession. (Rashad Shirin, right, served as my interpreter for four days in Baku, making it possible for me to discuss journalism with Azeri journalists.)

In Azerbaijan, however, there are far more hurdles to clear. News outlets must receive a special license from the government, which means there is no investigative reporting. (The government doesn’t tolerate criticism.) Independent news sources, mostly online, apparently operate with a single-minded focus on complaining about the government, so the idea of journalistic objectivity and fairness are a “work in progress,” to put it mildly.

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While few, if any, of you will be able to attend, I still thought you’d be interested in knowing about an event I’ll be participating in tomorrow. I hope to send updates via Twitter, but I’m afraid of AT&T’s data roaming charges on my iPhone so probably won’t do any live-tweeting unless there is wifi.

From the press release:

On May 24th, SAE Institute Dubai will launch its inaugural Digital Journalism program with a Tweet-up and panel at Shelter Dubai, kicking off at 7 pm.

New media has changed how news is reported and experienced. Who are these new journalists? What are their tools? Can the ‘old’ media survive? And what do audiences gain from ‘Journalism 2.0?’

Speakers for the event are:

Mark Briggs–blogger, journalist and author of Journalism 2.0 (2007), Journalism Next (2009) and CEO and co-founder of Serra Media.
Pia Heikkila–documentarian, producer, and backpack journalist filing stories her laptop around the Middle East.
Nabila Usman–writer and journalist, business development executive at Newzglobe.com, an online news portal.
Khaled Khalifa – Head of Office, United Nations – Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) Middle East and Asia Bureau.

The discussion will be moderated by Reg Athwal, Co-Founder and Chairman of online television platform onetvo.com.

Learn more about SAE Dubai’s Digital Journalism program on our website.
Click here to see Shelter Dubai map.
Follow DiJoDubai on twitter to learn more.