Alma Matters is a Poynter newsletter designed to provide ideas, news and insight to those in the journalism education community. Subscribe here to get Alma Matters delivered to you.

Good stuff, free!

Have you ever uttered the phrase, “I never win anything!”?

Well, first off, good for you for not wasting money on a lottery ticket or slot machines (my personal Vegas guilty pleasure). Today I’m here to tell you that you’re a winner in my book — though I hope you already knew that — and that we are giving you a chance to access some really great fact-checking resources for free. After all, empowering your students to spot misinformation online means everybody wins.

Your first option is to bring a live fact-checking workshop to your classroom via our Campus Correspondents. Our trained college students appear virtually in your classroom to deploy our Poynter- and MediaWise-approved fact-checking workshop. What better way for your students to internalize fact-checking materials than when they are delivered by one of their peers?

We have a set number of spots remaining for this semester, so if you are interested in booking a session, simply email ballen@poynter.org and I will send you to our enrollment portal.

The sessions take about an hour and we have 10 different correspondents available to deliver training, so it’s likely there’s a spot that will fit your class time.

Alternatively, if your semester is set and there’s no room for an hourlong presentation, consider showing our 18-minute video, “Media literacy masterclass with MediaWise Campus Correspondents,” or assigning it as homework. It’s a distilled, fast-moving version of the same fact-checking workshop you’d get in a live presentation by our Campus Correspondents.

Here’s a teaser video to inspire you to get excited about this incredibly helpful content.

We also like to remind folks that you and your students can follow us on social media at our Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, where you can amass a number of fact-checking skills for the low, low price of absolutely nothing.

We also offer “Hands-on Fact-checking: A Short Course” for $14.95 and the MediaWise Voter Project Fact-Checking Certificate f0r $99.95 (and remember that students at campuses with Follett bookstores can charge this content to their bursar accounts).

As mis- and disinformation continues to negatively impact our democracy, we are committed to bringing you relevant and effective ways to help your students tell fact from fiction online.

More on Teachapalooza

I heard from many of you this week who wanted more details on the content for Teachapalooza, and I’m happy to report that we are close to releasing a schedule.

Here are some highlights of what you can expect (subject to change):

• Five ways to prove to your students and yourselves that journalism is vital
• How to teach your students to freelance for a living
• Practical ways to infuse diversity, equity and inclusion into your curriculum
• How to handle fact-checking and the midterm election
• Considerations before creating news/academic partnerships
• How to use partner videos, lesson plans and other First Amendment resources
• Helping students deal with stress, trauma and burnout.

Register here for this rejuvenating and hands-on in-person and virtual course. As a reminder, if you apply for the preconference Diversity Across the Curriculum and get accepted, you’ll get $100 off your Teacha tuition.

Employing the rule of three

I saw three notable “what I learned” pieces surface last week.

In “What I Learned in 25 Years of Writing for Slate,” author William Saletan offered a passage that I thought was particularly salient for you all: “When you’re young, and you’re lucky enough to get a platform — in my case, a writing job at an opinion magazine — it’s natural to think you’re there to churn out opinions. You have your issues, your passions, your takes. Then, gradually, you begin to understand how little you know and how wrong you often are. You become aware of your biases, your weaknesses, your tiresome rants.” Preach it, William. Please?

Then there was “Four Lessons from Two Decades of Newsroom Lawyering,” from Richard J. Tofel, a former in-house attorney at The Wall Street Journal and founding general manager of ProPublica. There were some great takeaways from that piece, including this gem: “One of the very first lessons I learned in reviewing stories prior to publication is that press lawyers are at the mercy of reporters. Quite simply, the attorney must assume that the facts in a story are accurately reported … behind all of the best press lawyers stand great reporters.”

And then I decided to lump this one into the “what I learned pile,” because it’s hilarious: “Becoming Wordle Man.” See? “I like to tell young journalists about how disorienting it can be when people finally start reading your work. If you settle on a career in the media, you will likely churn out a mountain of content that reaches an audience of precisely nobody until one fateful day where a piece strikes a furtive nerve lingering deep within the cryptic framework of virality. Without warning, the algorithm draws your name out of a hat. Ideally, that moment occurs when you have written something deservedly transcendent, but far more often you will be suddenly shunted above water, into the overwhelming daylight of attention, because your byline is attached to a piece that has melded with whatever transient, disposable trend is eating up the bandwidth.”

Prep work

The Ida B. Wells Society is offering three virtual internship prep sessions with advice from the experts on how to stand out when applying to any journalism internship. They are scheduled for Monday, Feb. 7 from 5:30-7 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 8 from 10-11:30 a.m. and Wednesday, Feb. 16 from 10-11:30 a.m. (all times Eastern).

(Speaking of interns, our team at MediaWise is looking for an audience engagement specialist this semester).

Diversifying your visuals

If — like me — you’re a fan of Wonder Tools from CUNY’s Jeremy Caplan, then you saw his “Diversify your visuals” newsletter last week. If you’re not yet familiar, this is just one example of the great content he provides. If nothing else, it’s worth a forward to your student media team for more diverse stock images. Bonus: A ton of them are free.

Headlines about higher ed

• Florida Bill May Shield University Presidential Searches From the Public (Chronicle for Higher Education)
• University of Utah suspends fraternity and sorority activities after 2nd sexual assault report (Salt Lake Tribune)
• ‘This Is Not New’: Unsettled by Threats, HBCUs Reflect on a Long History of Racist Intimidation (Chronicle for Higher Education)

Great journalism to share with your students

• What Scares the World’s Most Daring Olympians (New York Times)
• Polar bears move into abandoned Arctic weather station – photo essay (The Guardian)
• Editorial: UCLA puts lives in danger through failure to communicate timely amid threats (UCLA Daily Bruin)
• Florida renters scramble for shelter as affordable housing erode (Tampa Bay Times)
• Opinion: This is gerrymandering at its worst. It doesn’t have to be this way. (Washington Post)
• He Spent 25 Years Infiltrating Nazis, the Klan, and Biker Gangs (Rolling Stone)
• Deplorable conditions, unclear mission: Texas National Guard troops call Abbott’s rushed border operation a disaster (Texas Tribune with Military Times)
• Who Writes the Rules for Cops? (Esquire)

Diversity, equity and inclusion

• How white power changed Herbie Husker (Flatwater Free Press)
• Journalism can’t keep losing mothers and other family caregivers (Poynter)
• ‘A community deserves options’: Why these Black journalists launched their own publication (Washington Post)

Internship Database

This week, we’re featuring Chalkbeat’s community listening and engagement intern. From the listing: “At Chalkbeat, engagement means reporting with and for communities, not on or about them. Engagement is baked into the core of Chalkbeat’s mission to provide essential reporting on schools across America, and our engagement team works with Chalkbeat’s eight local bureaus to ensure we’re listening to our communities and responding to their information needs.”

You can find this and many other internship opportunities in our database.

Lessons learned

This week’s lesson is from Stephan Malick, an adviser and instructor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He writes:

“A simple and effective way for advisers and instructors to encourage professional development is to have all your students create and maintain a portfolio of their work. Many portfolios seem to center around a specific project or are representative of only senior year work. This isn’t just for graduating seniors preparing for the workplace, but a practice students should incorporate the moment they enter any journalism, or program.

Incorporating portfolios serves multiple purposes for students and advisers:

• Portfolios are an easy way to track clips for students to curate, and for instructors and advisers to grade.
• Portfolios are an effective way for students to promote their work via their personal and institutional social media to build professional habits and practice.
• Portfolios are an effective way to encourage additional readership to student media when students share and link their individual efforts.

I’m not platform specific. I encourage students to use a free WordPress site (tons of free resources, how-to’s and an awesome developer community); however Weebly, Wix and others work fine, too.”

Here are some examples of his students’ portfolios.

(Have a lesson, tip or guidance you think would be helpful to your fellow journalism educators? Please email me at ballen@poynter.org. Be prepared to send a blurb, a photo and pertinent links if you have them!)

The Lead

I got a ton out of “What 8 young sports journalists want students to know about starting their careers.”

Subscribe to The Lead, Poynter’s weekly newsletter for student journalists, and encourage your students to do the same.

This week’s Professor’s Press Pass

Get ready to talk about air space. In this week’s Professor’s Press Pass, a Washington, D.C.,-area news team flies over the stadium and discovers what appears to be the team’s new name. What — if any — are the ethical issues to consider before airing the footage?

One last thing

Well, I learned some new words last week. (This one probably isn’t family friendly. At least not when you solve it.)

Resources for educators

• Covering COVID-19 with Al Tompkins (Daily briefing) — Poynter
• Language, Math and News Literacy Certificate (Self-directed course) Start anytime
• Teachapalooza: Front-Edge Teaching Tools for College Educators (In-person or Online Seminar) — June 10-12, Apply now