Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century 2013 | Page 10

Page 10 Volume 2, 2013 Honorable mention, full-time faculty division (tie) Storify and Twitter for reporting and curating a meeting story By Michael Fuhlhage Auburn University Types of courses the idea could be used in: reporting Target level: sophomores, juniors, seniors, graduate students in a professional program Michael Fuhlhage is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University, where he teaches multimedia journalism, media history and mass communication theory. He has 17 years of experience in news, sports, and feature editing, design, and writing, including work at the Santa Fe New Mexican, Des Moines Register, Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, Palm Springs (Calif.) Desert Sun, and St. Cloud (Minn.) Times. He taught newspaper editing, news design, and general semantics for five years while serving as a professional practice assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. There, he was a news editor at the Columbia Missourian and taught in MU’s Dow Jones Center for Editing Excellence. What is the goal of the assignment or exercise? This assignment helps students learn to write an SEO headline, use Twitter to cover a newsworthy event as it happens, and use Storify, a free and easy-to-use platform for curating social media and online content such as infographics, photos, maps, diagrams and links to text and multimedia content. Students sign up to use Storify at www.storify.com. How does the assignment or exercise work? The assignment presumes students have written a conventional news story about a previous city council meeting. It also presumes the professor has introduced students to the use of Twitter as a reporting tool for sharing information and finding human sources. We devote a class to examining good journalistic uses of Storify by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and learning how to use it to curate social media and other online material. Before the meeting, the professor leads students through the council agenda and supporting documents that the city posted online before the meeting. Potentially controversial and newsworthy agenda items are discussed, including how to identify newsworthy information. Students are reminded of tweeting conventions and the importance of accuracy. At the meeting, students use a predetermined hashtag with each tweet to make it easy to find tweets for curation. I provide feedback on Twitter as I sit in on the meeting with them. I leave it to the students to decide what to tweet but drop hints along the way, e.g., “See if you can link to a map of the 5k the city’s closing streets for this weekend.” Students then create narratives of the meeting using one another’s tweets in Storify. How is the assignment innovative? What makes this idea good for teaching in the 21stcentury or preparing 21st century journalists? Storify is being used by leaders in online news such as the CBC and the New York Times. Recruiters now list curation as a desired skill, yet journalism texts omit it. This assignment pushes students beyond Twitter basics toward construction of narratives. Using Storify helps students master organization of like material with like material and helps recognize where to place transitions. It encourages them to think about all the possible online materials they could use to help readers understand the story. And it helps us, as educators, to meet students on their own digital turf where they are most comfortable. How do you overcome pitfalls? We have to face the reality that not all students can afford smartphones, so we must offer workarounds to the problems some students face in completing the assignment. Just about everybody has a phone that can be used to send tweets and texts, and we can assume nearly every student has a wifi-capable laptop and a digital camera, but not everybody has camera phones. So we need to suggest that students use these tools separately, and then upload images after the event is over and they have time to transfer photos from the camera to the laptop for uploading. What is the impact of the assignment or exercise? Many students complain covering City Council is boring. Many have confessed confusion about identifying the most newsworthy aspects. By crowdsourcing information gathering, students get a chance to see whether their news judgment conforms with that of their peers. When they see they are not alone in their decisions about newsworthiness, their confidence increases. Students tell me they actually had fun doing this assignment. Before they did it, they didn’t realize city government could actually be interesting. As a bonus, students aren’t distracted by their smartphones because they’re too busy using their smartphones productively to complete the task.