“NewsU” Items

Poynter NewsU Registers 100,000 Users. First Big Milestone

When I wrote the original grant request to the Knight Foundation to create an e-learning program at The Poynter Institute, I put in estimate about how many people would take courses.  It was one of my greatest lapses in predicting success, as I thought we might have 35,000 users by the end of the five-year grant.

After four years, we passed the 100,000 registered user milestone.  In March we launched a marketing campaign thanks to the efforts of Susan Crain of LTV Marketing and Vicki Krueger, my deputy. Part of that campaign involved a press release and a paper called “NewsU Servcs Global E-Learning Audiences.”

We also ran a contest to gather stories about how NewsU change the lives of its users.  My favorite was a reporter at newspaper in the northwest:

“I credit NewsU for helping me do my job better than I could on my own, giving me courage to try new things,” says Sheila Hagar, a reporter for the Walla Walla (Wash.) Union Bulletin. “I don’t feel alone when I take a class.”

One of my goals, not yet realized, was to find a way to create a community around people who took NewsU modules.  I still have hopes that this will happen.

“The idea is to create a sense of community for those who want to share and ask questions of their fellow participants,” says Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. “You could call it a learning network. Your training should be much more than what’s on the screen.”

NewsU Makes the Connection to Educators at AEJMC

The initial plan for News University, the e-learning site created at The Poynter Institute and funded by the Knight Foundation, was to focus on professional.  We didn’t think there we had much of a role to play in helping educators.  That turned out to be wrong.  And by the time I presented NewsU to educators at the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communications [AEJMC], we knew our e-learning would be helpful in training the next generation of journalists.  Here is a tidbit from the AEJMC Reporter, which was the convention newspaper:

hif pyramid of training reach 08_03_2006
The Pyramid of Training Reach at AEJMC 2006

“Initially, NewsU was about professionals, but we wanted to reach out to the academic community,” said NewsU director Howard Finberg during a presentation Wednesday. “We did this for two reasons. First, journalism students become journalists. We want to get them early. Secondly, teachers need help.”

This presentation was one of the first public showing of my “Pyramid of Training Reach,” a device to help explain how different training methods have different audience potential and different intensity of experience.

Poynter’s First E-Learning Course: A Test of Potentials

As Poynter’s Presidential Scholar, one of my tasks was to look at the viability of e-learning.  This fit within my portfolio of exploring the intersection of journalism, technology and training.  To help me [and Poynter] better understand the potential of online modules, I created one.  A chapter from Chip Scanlan’s textbook, “Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century” became the course material.

We adapted the text into a e-learning module that ran on the eCollege platform and asked the Poynter’s summer fellows to take the module and share their reaction.

We had three questions:
1. How does one build an effective e learning course?
2. What would be the commitment by the faculty [and others] to present the course?
3. What would be the reaction of the students to an online teaching experience?

I wrote a long memo to various Poynter folks, including Jim Naughton [president] and Karen Dunlap [dean] and included the results of a survey of the 15 summer program students who took the class.

…almost all [80%] said the course material was either effective or somewhat effective. Only one student had a negative response to the material. The effectiveness of the presentation was rated lower, with 60% of the students saying the course was effective or somewhat effective.

Of course, we didn’t have time to hire a designer, so the presentation was basic.

I believe our first online course was a success.

I believe that Poynter should quickly and confidently move to develop a series of online classes.

… I also want to acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of Chip Scanlan for this project.

 

Poynter NewsU Technology Scope, Version One

With this memo, Robin Sloan and I outlined the technology that would power The Poynter Institute’s ‘s e-learning platform, News University.  NewsU needed to “have a database at its core.”  That was true then; it is still true.

NewsU.org will be the Web portal to journalism training resources and programs. It will have a database at its core—one that will include both static web resources (resources for trainers, self-teaching tools) and date-sensitive seminars, and be able to sort both by category, organization, geographic location, date, and more.

Our second requirement involve search, ideally searching for other e-learning training journalists could take.  Our goal was to build a portal of training.  As NewsU grew, I realized that there was little need for a portal as there were few other e-learning resources available to journalists.

NewsU’s First ‘Public’ Beta

Thanks to the support of the Asian American Journalism Association (AAJA), NewsU was able to create its first online group seminar (OGS).  An OGS is a e-learning module that allows for more interaction between faculty and participants and among the participants themselves. Mae Cheng, one of the more forward looking journalists at the association, saw e-learning as an opportunity to provide additional services to AAJA members.  Mae asked about the possibility of working with Poynter on e-learning even before Poynter had received the Knight grant for the NewsU project.  Here’s her October 2002 email to Paul Pohlman and other members of the faculty.  I was the Institute’s Presidential Scholar and wouldn’t join the faculty until January 2003.

—–Original Message—–
From: Mae.Cheng@newsday.com [mailto:Mae.Cheng@newsday.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 11:46 AM
To: paulp@poynter.org
Cc: Evelyn Hsu; Howard Finberg; Chip Scanlan; Al Tompkins
Subject: aaja

Hi Paul,
I hope this finds you well.
Just wanted to check back with you on two fronts:
The first is that our convention co-chairs and I have gone through your 2003 course offerings, and the following list are the sessions that most intrigue us. Do you think there’s any way we can get a couple of these sessions to San Diego for our convention in August?
1. Poynter leadership for mid-level editors
2. tough choices: doing ethics
3. advanced power reporting for reporters/photojournalists
4. collaboration conference: storytelling partnerships
5. enterprise and investigative reporting for broadcast
6. reporting on race relations.

The second thing I wanted to ask you is if there’s been any further
thought at Poynter about partnering with us to offer an online training program. [Bold added –Hif]

Thanks.

Mae

Title slide from a 2011 Poynter NewsU presentation on e-learning and journalism education, noting the partnership with the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication

E-Learning’s Impact on Journalism Education

These are the slides I used for a presentation about e-learning, given on August 8, 2011. The session was run under the NewsU banner and, as the title slide notes, was done in partnership with the journalism education association:

This session is in partnership with the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication

I wasn’t alone on the platform. The presenters slide lists:

Howard Finberg, Poynter Institute
Mark Biggs, Missouri State University
Susan Reilly, Florida Atlantic University
Tony Fellow, Cal State, Fullerton

The first half of the deck is about the J101 Project — an attempt to take NewsU‘s self-directed modules and online group seminars and build them into a semester-long introduction to journalism course taught in partnership with universities. The background slide describes the idea as leveraging self-directed modules plus online group seminars, working with schools on journalism education quality, intersecting with Carnegie Corporation interests, and running as a pilot program grant.

What made J101 different was the weekly rhythm. The “How it works” slide lays it out:

Read two essays • Self-directed course(s) and other Virtual Textbook materials • Tuesday Live Lecture or the replay • Study Group Work assignment • Study Group discussion • Thursday Live Chat • Weekly quiz

Several slides show the course itself — a 16-week virtual textbook running from “Who Is News?” and “Intro to Reporting” through interviewing, alternative story forms, dealing with diversity, style, rewriting, libel and privacy, news-gathering legality, and the business of journalism. There are pre- and post-assessments, weekly assessments drawn from a randomized pool of questions taken from the NewsU modules, the live lecture and the weekly readings, and a 50-question final exam scheduled for December.

The instructor dashboard got its own pair of slides, and for good reason. We were tracking logins and time spent in both the main course and each related self-directed module, weekly assessment scores, class participation and discussion posts, attendance at the weekly Live Lecture and Live Chat, and the final exam score. As the slide says plainly:

We are tracking lots of data

Our goals slide was less about the mechanics and more about the ambition — a unique educational experience leveraging the expertise of Poynter, closer relationships with universities, and a marriage of online group seminars, webinars and self-directed training. The second goals slide is the one I’d still stand behind:

Create lifelong learners • Increase the understanding of the role of journalism – No matter what students choose as their profession • Work more closely with universities

Partners for the pilot were Florida Atlantic University, Missouri State University and California State University, Fullerton, and we used the session to recruit partners for Spring and Fall 2012.

The second half of the deck is the NewsU stakeholders report. At our core was self-directed training, with more than 70 modules. New courses launched or launching that August included Sports Reporting: Beat Basics, Producing for TV & Web, Sourcing & Verification, Journalism Fundamentals, Introduction to Reporting and Covering Islam. We had just done our 100th webinar, ran a 10-session Writing Webinar Series in 2011, offered certificate programs in journalism basics, reporting and writing basics and multimedia basics, and were piloting a “Course Pack” with USF reporting classes — five modules with assessments worth 15% of a student’s grade. The Syllabus Exchange had drawn 200+ uploads and 900+ downloads.

And then the number, as of 6 a.m. the morning of the talk:

186,667 registered users

We were counting to 200,000, with a “Make Your Story Count” contest asking users to tell us how NewsU had helped them do better journalism. The deck closes with the next frontier: NewsU International, in partnership with ICFJ, launching in Persian and Russian, with 15% of NewsU users already outside North America.

AEJMC News article page from November 2007 featuring educator testimonials on what e-learning can do through Poynter's News University

Beyond the Hype: What E-Learning Can Do for You

This is a piece that ran in the November 2007 issue of AEJMC News, built around testimonials the News University team collected from NewsU users at AEJMC’s 2007 conference. The idea was simple: rather than tell journalism educators that e-learning worked, let their peers say it.

The examples range from filling classroom gaps to sharpening the instructors’ own skills. A few that stood out:

“What I’m sensing is that they [students] want to engage with the content. That’s what makes NewsU so effective. They can be involved with it. They can interact with the content as opposed to sitting back and reading it.” —Charlotte-Anne, Assistant Professor, Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, University of Nevada

“The NewsU module in color use and color theory has demystified this difficult to manage and often abused aspect of design. My students revel about the application of “simultaneous contrast” and other concepts that are often left unexplained in many key texts.” —Lulu Rodriguez, Associate Professor, Iowa State University

“I am, without a doubt, a 25 to 30 percent better teacher because of NewsU. In teaching about everything from Web journalism to news writing to contemporary mass media, NewsU’s lessons and examples are absolutely essential.” —Richard Craig, Associate Professor, San Jose State University

One comment came from Jun Oguro, an associate professor at Ryukoku University in Japan, who noted that “In Japan there are FEW journalism schools for many reasons,” and that he was using News University’s programs to teach writing and editing.

The sidebar captures where NewsU stood at that point:

News University (www.newsu.org) is the e-learning home for [more] than 51,000 journalists, educators and students in 157 countries around the world. NewsU offers more than 50 focused, interactive courses that appeal to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media. Many courses take just an hour or two to complete and most are free. NewsU is a project of The Poynter Institute funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Fifty courses and 51,000 registered users was a milestone worth bragging about in 2007. By the time I left Poynter, both numbers had grown well beyond that. What strikes me reading this now, nearly two decades later, is how much of the skepticism we were answering — can online learning really teach anything? — has simply evaporated. That argument was settled by circumstance, not persuasion.

March 2006 awards write-up page describing the News University "It's All About U" starter kit campaign, with objective, tactics and results

Silver Award for the NewsU “It’s All About U” Starter Kit

An awards write-up from March 2006 recognizing the promotional campaign built to launch News University, Poynter’s web-based e-learning site. The Silver award went to distributor Atlanta Promotional Products, LLC, with News University as the client. Credit for the campaign goes to Susan Crain, our NewsU marketing consultant.

The objective, as stated in the entry:

To help launch News University and generate awareness of the web based e-learning site.

The tactic was a request card handed out at a 2005 newspaper industry convention, with cards dropped in an on-site box or mailed back to us. Everyone who asked got a starter kit — and “kit” was not an overstatement:

Starter Kits, mailed to those requesting them, contained a cover letter and NewsU flyer, an overview brochure, a Flash movie and printable Adobe® PDFs (on CD-ROM) describing NewsU, posters for the workplace, imprinted sticky pads, polybags containing an imprinted carabineer highlighter, mini-brochures, and an imprinted magnetic memo stand. In short, the starter kit was loaded! Every piece worked nicely in concert with the others, each one supporting the theme, “NewsU: It’s All About U.”

The results section reports the campaign beat its goal:

120 starter kits were requested, representing 40% of the total conference audience. (The goal was to receive 70 requests.) 2. To date, NewsU has registered 5,175 journalists!

Reading this in 2026, the mechanics are the artifact. To market an online learning site, we mailed physical objects — a CD-ROM with a Flash movie, a poster, a magnetic memo stand — because that was how you reached working journalists in a newsroom. Today the entire funnel would be a link, an email sequence and a social post, and nobody would be counting drop-box cards at a convention.

What hasn’t aged is the underlying problem. In the early days of NewsU, the hard part was never building the courses; it was convincing journalists that online training was worth their time and that a self-paced course could be as good as sitting in a seminar room in St. Petersburg. That first 5,175 registrations was the beginning of a number that grew into the hundreds of thousands over the years that followed — but every one of them started with someone deciding to take a chance on learning at a screen.

Typed interoffice memo dated December 15, 2004 with the agenda for the Interactive Learning Steering Committee meeting at The Poynter Institute

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.

NewsU development staff Elizabeth Ferris, Howard Finberg, J. Paige West and Casey Frechette, pictured in the Knight Foundation report feature on the Knight Chairs in Journalism

‘A World Full of Connections’ — Knight Foundation Report Feature on NewsU

A journalism feature from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation annual report, looking at how the foundation’s endowed Knight Chairs in Journalism had begun collaborating with each other and with other Knight journalism partners — including The Poynter Institute‘s News University. The piece opens in St. Petersburg and traces the Knight Chair program back to 1990, when then-foundation president Creed Black announced its creation, saying it would strengthen the quality of American journalism education:

“by bolstering core curricular values and encouraging innovation.”

The story lists examples of that collaboration — Rosental Alves in Latin America, Jim Detjen at Michigan State, Charlotte Grimes at Syracuse, Melinda McAdams at Florida, Jacqui Banaszynski at Missouri, and Haynes Johnson’s work on the Knight-funded study Newsroom Training: Where’s the Investment? — before turning to what the report calls the largest gathering ever of Knight Chairs, who traveled to Poynter in 2004 to learn about News University.

a five-year, $2.8 million project to develop an e-learning program for journalists. The program is a partnership between Knight and Poynter, rated the nation’s top journalism training organization by the Where’s the Investment? study.

At the Poynter meeting the chairs brainstormed course ideas — how to analyze government data, how to understand scientific claims — and the article notes that work began immediately with William Gaines, the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, on an investigative documents class. The individual web sites of the Knight Chairs were to be promoted through the Learning Links page at NewsU.

The feature describes the official launch at the April 2005 American Society of Newspaper Editors convention, designed to make the case that NewsU is not just informative but a fun resource — “like thousands of journalists at a dinner party” — featuring material from 18 Knight Chairs in Journalism, a Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies and a Knight Professor in Constitutional Law and First Amendment. Elsewhere in the report, Reznet’s Dennis McAuliffe Jr. describes his own project’s plan to work with NewsU on a distance-learning course.

The photo caption identifies the NewsU development staff at the time — Elizabeth Ferris, Howard Finberg, J. Paige West and Casey Frechette. The story ends with a line that gave the feature its title:

“Journalism,” Finberg said, “is a world full of connections.”