Agenda for a NewsU Steering Committee Meeting, December 2004
An interoffice memo from December 15, 2004, setting the agenda for the Interactive Learning Steering Committee meeting at The Poynter Institute. I sent it to Karen Dunlap, Keith Woods, Paul Pohlman, Bill Mitchell, Leslie Pelley and Chip Scanlan, with copies to Paige West, Casey Frechette, Vicki Krueger and Elizabeth Ferris. The meeting was set for 2 p.m. in the Baldwin Conference Room.
The agenda covers the project overview — registration, course development, the third phase of the NewsU technology, the transition to NewsU servers, the fee payment system and a site redesign — plus launch plans, staffing and an “on deck” list of courses in development. Among the internal challenges noted:
Update on internal challenges with self-exploration
Half of faculty has registered
Launch plans pointed to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, with marketing work already underway, including a slogan:
Slogan: It’s All About U
Courses on deck included Drinking Water Quality (SEJ), Beat Basics and Beyond (Steve Buttry), Clean Copy v2 (Vicki Krueger/ACES), Sound Storytelling (Andrew DeVigal), Understanding Numbers (Debbie Wolfe), Plagiarism (Kelly McBride), Revisions (Chip Scanlan), Video Story Telling Ethics (Al Tompkins), Better Listening (Jill Geisler) and Writers Toolbox (Roy Clark). Outreach partners listed AAJA, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Education Writers Association, the American Copy Editors Society, the Dart Center, REZ Net and the Kaiser Foundation.
Attached to the agenda were enrollment and user reports as of noon that day. The ONA Training Project led with 410 students, followed by Language of the Image (260), The Interview (249), The Lead Lab (158), Handling Horrible Images (110), Color in News Design (78), Same-Sex Marriage: A Conversation About Coverage (49) and Crafting a Course: Developing eLearning for NewsU (13). Users came from the United States, Portugal, the Philippines, India, Canada, Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Afghanistan, Albania, Nigeria, China, Poland, Romania, Chile and Ireland. By medium: print 55.45 percent, online 43.79 percent, television 13.4 percent, radio 9.06 percent. The most common way people heard about NewsU was the Poynter Online Web site.