A week-long seminar at Poynter costs about $1,000. Most participants say you get your money’s worth. But some journalists just don’t have the money, or the time.
On Monday, you can get an hour with one of Poynter’s best for just 10 bucks.
At 2 p.m. Poynter broadcast group leader Al Tompkins will present “Get Online and Find News Fast,” an hour-long, live webinar. To join in, you’ll need a high-speed Internet connection and a telephone. Click here to register.
The session is a variation on a class Tompkins has taught in person at Poynter (and elsewhere) more than 100 times. But online, it’s available to almost anyone. And at $10, he said, it’s affordable.
“There’s no excuse for not getting training,” he said. “None.”
The session is one of the newest offerings from News University, a Poynter e-learning project co-sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
NewsU, which turned two years old last month, currently offers 40 courses to more than 40,000 registered users; and it’s growing every week. Users enroll in e-learning courses ranging from “The Interview”, which puts the user in a virtual exchange with a friendly “but not entirely forthcoming” source, to “Language of the Image”, which teaches the user about “quality of light, juxtaposition, point of entry, mood, emotion and a sense of place.” The courses, which are produced by NewsU’s eight-person staff and a number of contributing instructors, are interactive, and most are free.
The Tompkins webinar isn’t free, but interactive learning director Howard Finberg said that isn’t an indication that tuition will soon apply to all NewsU courses.
“We’re not going to flip a switch and all of a sudden start charging for things,” he said.
In fact, the Knight grant that helped establish the program specified free, online journalism training. That grant ends in July 2008. Finberg is optimistic that the NewsU crew will find funding for the future.
“NewsU isn’t going anywhere,” he said.
Financial support isn’t the only challenge the program is facing. Despite a large and growing international audience — in 197 countries — NewsU courses are offered only in English so far, and often fail to address all the needs of foreign journalists. The domestic audience is growing, too.
Even though NewsU was created in 2005 to train professional journalists, it has caught on with students and teachers at the high school and college levels as a source of high-quality, low-cost journalism education. Sixteen percent of NewsU users who report their job titles say they’re students. That’s the second-biggest category of users, behind reporters/writers.
NewsU also hopes to serve the public — non-journalists — readers, listeners and viewers.
Of the 100 or so people signed up for the Tompkins webinar, all but a few are professional journalists.
Tompkins will introduce them to a slew of online resources, including Web sites like Guidestar, Farm Subsidy Database and Argali. That last one is an online phonebook, in the same way Switchboard.com and WhitePages.com are. But with the click of button, Argali provides the phone numbers of a person’s neighbors, too.
That’s information anyone can use, whether you’re a professional journalist, a college student or a plumber.
The webinar launches Monday. But there’s lots more coming from NewsU, too. Here are a few upcoming projects.
High School Journalism Adviser Boot Camp
The folks entrusted with educating the youngest journalists often have the least training. NewsU’s “virtual boot camp,” created in partnership with ASNE and Kent State University, will give high school journalism advisers a chance to educate themselves July 9-27. The online course will teach student media law and ethics, management of student publications and reporting/design skills. The course will cost around $100. The application deadline is June 11.
Frontline Editors Assessment Tool
Want to be a fronline editor? If you do, a more important question should follow. How well suited are you to the job?
Before NewsU could help you answer that question, it had to figure out the characteristics that make for a good frontline editor. For that, it enlisted the help of Assessment Technology Group. The industrial/organizational psychologists at ATG gathered a bunch of frontline editors from various newspapers and asked them to classify the traits they felt were essential to their job.
The NewsU assessment, which should launch this summer, will appear in two parts. The first will present a user with an on-the-job situation, require her to select a response to that situation and then, based on that response, tell her which traits she needs to work on acquiring. The second will take an in-depth analysis of a user’s existing traits — similar to those examined by the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator — and compare those with the ideal for frontline editors.
“The point,” said NewsU interactive learning producer Vanessa Goodrum, “is to look at what your strengths are, look at what your weaknesses are, and go in prepared to deal with them.”
Telling Stories With Sound
Among buzzwords in journalism today, “multimedia” is one of the hottest. All over the place, journalists are experimenting with new techniques and equipment, whether or not they have any idea what they’re doing. This course will teach you how to tell stories with sound.
The course covers reporting, editing and finding audio stories. It will teach you how to research a location and pack your gear, select and place mics, mix audio in the studio and do everything in between. The course, which is free, is taught by New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal, and should launch in June.
