MASTERCLASSES

Tuesday 26 May 2009

Who can you learn from?

Journalists: we’re all learning now. If we aren’t, we aren’t going to be working journalists for much longer.

But with so much that is new, how do you keep pace, and how can those who teach journalists ensure they are up to speed with everything that their students need to know?
How much, for instance, can you learn online? Quite a lot, as it happens.

The Online College selects 50 free open courses about writing, reporting, photojournalism, multimedia, and more.
And MatchACollege.com offers what it calls 50 awesome lectures for social media masters about many aspects of creating and managing member-driven social media sites.
One key question is: Where will you find the innovators who are worth following?
Mario Garcia asks that very question in his blog, and sets about answering it with the first of a series of posts that look like becoming required reading. 
He says that “as far as most journalism schools and colleges are concerned, progress and innovation are more likely to come from individual professors who make it a point to use their classrooms as special laboratories for experiments and discussions of the craft.”
He mentions Paul Bradshaw’s new MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University and praises it as one which emphasises enterprise, experimentation, community and creativity.
Incidentially, Paul Bradshaw has also posted a range of very useful classes online
As Garcia says “I am sure many colleges and universities worldwide are developing this type of necessary program, especially at the graduate level. I am impressed by the fact that the program is not limited to journalistic techniques, but also includes business models for online journalism—-something the industry desperately needs."
As a practising journalist and journalism tutor, I wanted to create a resource that brought a guide to multimedia, innovation and how journalists operate today together with a solid grounding in the journalistic essentials.
I felt I needed a pretty substantial textbook, plus a companion website that would offer practical exercises and examples, which could be updated to take in the latest developments, and that would also offer a community for students, and for young and not-so-young journalists who want to develop their skills.
It’ll be launched at the end of the year. Meantime, you can find out more on my page at AdacemiaEd

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