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.

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.

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.

Can bloggers be journalists? It’s a debate that raged for years in the U.S. (far too long if you ask me), and it can still raise hackles. In Baku, Azerbaijan, it could mean the difference between having a free press or not.

Visiting Baku this week and speaking with different groups of journalists and journalism students, the question whether bloggers can be journalists surfaces time and again. In Baku, where newspapers must be granted a media license from the government to publish, blogging is one of the only outlets for truly independent journalism to reach and audience. It’s so important to emerging democracies like Azerbaijan, formerly a part of the Soviet Union, that President Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act this week, hoping to promote a free press around the world.

Rashad Shirin translates what I had just said for a group of journalists at the American Center, University of Languages, Baku.

“One important thing you should be teaching them is to check facts and to write balanced pieces, not propaganda which can easily be discredited,” advised Onnik Krikorian, an editor for Global Voices Online in the region, by email. “There needs to be some journalistic skills introduced into their blogging to make it more effective, especially when it comes to checking facts or identifying what is speculation, gossip or rumor and what is fact.”

The debate is different than in the U.S., where access to prominent events like the Winter Olympics seems to be the last battlefield for bloggers. Here, bloggers who would like to produce independent journalism are fearful of being misunderstood and silenced by the government. The mainstream newspapers don’t do any blogging on their websites either, so it remains a this-or-that situation, much like we had in the U.S. before about 2006. (In my presentation, I show the NY Times blog page, which has dozens of blogs, and explain how dismissive most American newsrooms were of blogging just five years ago.)

Journalists in the U.S. are concerned for the future. Journalists in Baku are concerned for the present.

I’ll be honest: When I received that first email almost a year ago from Terry Davidson at the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan, expressing interest in translating my book and having me visit the country, my first thought was “where the heck is that?” Azerbaijan is a former Soviet Union country near Georgia, just north of Iran, and Baku is the capital city, perched on the western shore of the Caspian sea.

I’m here this week speaking to various groups of journalists and students. And tonight, I’ll be attending a special “book launch” as the embassy begins distributing copies of Journalism 2.0 that were translated into Azerbaijani. (This is the fourth language for Journalism 2.0. Unfortunately I can still only read one.) Yesterday I spent three hours with a group of about 20 student journalists and another 3 hours with a small group of “A-list bloggers” from Baku.

The students are eager, ambitious and idealistic, just like the students I speak to in the U.S. Unlike their American counterparts, however, they have a much harder career path to travel since there really isn’t an economic model for journalism in Azerbaijan. Advertising isn’t really a factor in the media and the newspapers and TV stations here are tightly controlled by the government, which probably explains their tiny reach. In a city of about 2 million people, the largest newspaper has a circulation of about 3,000 7,000 (correction made 5/23/10).
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This week’s New York Times magazine takes a stab at “What are you really worth” this week and includes a lengthy piece on journalists. I’ll spare you the context of the how the market has devalued traditional journalism while creating new opportunities and simply recommend you read the entire article by Andrew Rice. The money quote:

… for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity. A multitude of younger, nimbler enterprises have popped up, unencumbered by the past and ready to try anything. History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent. But it’s quite possible that the experiments they’re staging are already producing the kind of innovations that make for new, sustainable business models.

For continuing coverage of independent journalism startups, check out the section we developed on Lost Remote to cover this emerging sector.