Friday, August 11, 2006

Students Cover the Faculty Before I forget, students at San Francisco State did a great job of covering last week's Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication national convention with a daily paper and its Web counterpart, the AEJMC Reporter. I'm still catching up on convention sessions I missed and the Reporter is helping a lot. There were events going on in parallel to make me consider being cloned. When I went to a newspaper division session, I'd miss a photography session; when I sat in on one friend's session about weblogs, I missed another friend's panel on new visual media. And so on. Here are some of the events the student paper featured: AEJMC's Best of the Web awards go to North Carolina State, Arizona State, UNC Chapel Hill and others (with links to the award sites, of course). A multimedia report with narration of images from photography prize-winner Dennis Chamberlin's Screen Culture. Story with audio of Larry Lessig's keynote speech on read-write and read-only culture, what he called "remix" culture versus Digital Rights Management controls. NPPA Announces Campaign to Protest Jailed Reporter -- breaking news about a freelance journalist who refused to turn over unaired video to a grand jury. Finding Citizen Journalism's Place -- including blogs and Wikis, a panel at which I "met" a fellow professor who I've known for 10 years, but only online... illustrating one of the points the panel was making about online community. Women Reporters Often Thrive in Danger Zones -- a panel by the organization's Commission on the Status of Women. Other stories covered Pulitzer Prize-winners, a study of Jon Stewart and TV news, optimistic news about the journalism job market, lessons on teaching sports journalism, a research award for one of my favorite professors... and many more. Altogether a fine job of putting together a special-event daily publication on deadline, complete with a few glitches to learn from (convention goers even got to see a few paragraphs of "lorem ipsum" in print)... but all the more impressive for being a "summer vacation" activity for the students involved. Built on SFSU's [X]Press Online J-school publication, the AEJMC Reporter online edition's multimedia touches were a great addition, including broadcast-news-style interviews done in a narrated slideshow from the event's opening gala. (I would have expected someone so close to Chinatown to know lion dancers from dragons, but I love the reporter's understated and very-San-Francisco comment that "the reception helped many miss the 4.4 magnitude earthquake that evening...") 9:13:22 PM    comment []

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