“Poynter” Items

NewsU’s First Annual Report: Infrastructure

With great sums of money comes great responsibilities to explain how the funding is used.  That’s the way it works when it comes to foundations.  So, Poynter NewsU sent along its first “annual report” to the Knight Foundation in June 2004, a little more than 15 months after receiving our first funding.

  • Conducted a survey of journalists [2,500 responded out of 12,000 sent] to better understand the potential interest in e-learning, the types of courses that would valuable and the technical capacity of those interested in online training.
  • Developed and presented the “meet NewsU” presentation to various journalism groups, including the National Council of Journalism Organizations, the Knight Foundation Chairs in journalism, and a meeting of the foundations that support journalism activities.
  • Built staff of two Interactive Learning Producers and hired a recent college graduate to fill a one year internship position.
  • Explored more than 10 learning management systems (LMS) intended to handle course development, asset management, course listings and registration, course delivery, class communications, and student testing and tracking.
  • Installed a LMS offered by eCollege on a trial basis in order to better understand NewsU’s technical needs. This trial period also provided NewsU an opportunity to beta test two faculty-led online courses offered to members of AAJA.

An interesting note in the report stated “more than 275 users have registered with NewsU, prior to the offering of any e-learning courses or any advertising or marketing effort. These are journalists who discovered NewsU on their own and have told us to keep them aware of course offerings.”

Developing the First NewsU Platform, LMS

Poynter’s e-learning site was originally built upon two different platforms.  The first was a Web-based content system that used Microsoft technology.  That linked to a learning management system created by eCollege.

In July 2003 Robin Sloan and I spec’d out what we wanted in this ‘unholy marriage” of systems and sent it to DataGlyphics, a local development and hosting shop in St. Petersburg, FL.  DataG was also the home of Poynter Online at that time.

From this we learned what not to do [no marriage of cats and dogs 🙂 ?]. It wouldn’t be our last development efforts.  Here are the overall guidance we gave to get started:

NewsU Site Structure. lst Phase

What does this first version of NewsU do?

It begins the process of building a database of users. It acts as a gateway to the eCollege
learning management system that we’ll be using to build courses initially. It provides a
comprehensive database (“the NewsU database”) of training opportunities for journalists
on- and offline.

From this little acorn…

Poynter’s E-Learning Future. The First Memo

You have to start someplace when you are looking a big project.

I had joined The Poynter Institute in 2002 as its “Presidential Scholar.”  One of my tasks was to explore e-learning and how the Institute might use that method of teaching.  I wrote a memo (of course) with a number of areas that should be explored and a desire to make sure everyone saw the scope of such a project and shared some of the same language:

The biggest challenge to exploring any topic is for the stakeholders to develop a common understanding of the scope of a project. Some of Poynter’s faculty and staff might envision e-l,earning as an opportunity to accomplish Poynter’s mission with remote teaching. For others, distance learning could provide a chance to extend the Poynter’s experience beyond the confines of on-site seminars. Still others might see such a program as an opportunity to use collaborative or groupware tools to increase the effectiveness of discussion leaders and other off-site faculty. Each vision is important and each could overlap with the others.

The reference to “the Poynter experience” would echo throughout my time at the Institute. More on that later.

Mr. Media Interviews Mr. NewsU

Bob Andelman, also known as Mr. Media, does lots of interviews — celebrities from film, TV, books, music, and more.  I was one of those “more” interviews.  He did a podcast interview as Poynter News University was starting to gain traction.  It didn’t hurt that Bob and I knew each other via a connection with Bill Mitchell, who was Poynter Online editor.

Full disclosure: I hired Bob to write two whitepapers about Poynter’s e-learning work.  However, he thought what Poynter was doing with NewsU was interesting enough to do the podcast interview.  One of my favorite things about Bob’s work was the Dr. Seuss-inspired rhyme, which I recorded for NewsU. [Sadly, I’m not sure I know where that resides].  Here’s the text:

You can do it wearing a hat.
You can do it with your cat.
You can do it at night,
And you can do it when you look a fright.
You can do it when things are slow,
Or when you can’t get the creative juices to flow.
You can do it when mother’s not there,
And you can do it in your underwear.

You can read the full interview on Bob’s Mr. Media site and there’s even an audio of interview.

Sad postscript: Bob died in early 2020.  He is missed. A great deal.

Journalism Should Give Voice to the Voiceless

As part of the development of The Poynter Institute’s international strategy, I traveled to Istanbul with colleague and friend Vicki Krueger.  We launched Poynter NewsU Turkiye at a news conference.  At that event was our partner, the Media Association, and the US Consulate in Istanbul.  The Consulate is the funder for the project.  After the news conference I was interviewed by the local English-language newspaper, Sunday’s Zaman.  Here’s part of what they wrote:

According to Finberg, journalism means “providing voice to the voiceless” and is a way of helping people understand what is going on around them. “Journalists are responsible for protecting the interest of the audience, citizens,” Finberg said when asked whether the journalists have a duty to protect state interests.

Journalists in Turkey have a difficult time, as the country is undergoing political stress and strain that often pits one media organization against another.

The full interview is on the newspaper’s Website , or at least it was. Better to access it as a PDF.

Poynter faculty and Indian journalists gathered for the traditional group photo at the Kochi workshop, Taj Gateway, March 2014

Points to Poynter: Report on Our India Workshop

In March 2014, Poynter took its teaching on the road to India — three three-day workshops, one each in Chennai, Kochi and Bengaluru, done in partnership with the U.S. Consulate. We covered more than 500 miles in the process. The Kochi workshop was organized with the Kerala Press Academy and ran March 23-25 at the Taj Gateway.

What makes this document historically interesting is that it isn’t ours. It’s a report by Ashok R. Chandran, an independent journalist and researcher in Palakkad, Kerala, who sat through all three days in Kochi and then wrote up the whole thing session by session — with a great deal more style and mischief than any of our own after-action summaries. He describes the workshop as something to zip through, seatbelts fastened, and the reader really does get carried along.

The report opens Day 1 with a detail that tells you exactly what era we were teaching in: a participant tweeting from the room while the inaugural speeches were still going, using a hashtag the faculty had created for the students.

My own session kicked things off with disruption: Clayton Christensen, the collapse of U.S. newspaper advertising revenue, and then findings from The Future of Journalism Education 2013 report and a preview of Core Skills for the Future of Journalism, which was released the following month. The through-line was the gap between what professionals value and what journalism educators value, a gap that looked much the same in an Indian classroom as it did in an American one.

Chandran was kind about the session. Mostly.

It is not every day that one gets to see in this part of the world, an energetic 70+ educator enlightening the audience on “The Exciting, Changing Future of Journalism.”

I’ll happily take “energetic.” The rest of the faculty got sharper portraits: Tom Huang of The Dallas Morning News on credibility, story ideas and finding focus; Casey Frechette on digital tools and how to teach them; Zella Bracy of McClatchy on the business side; Jeffry Couch of the Belleville News-Democrat on transformational newsrooms and watchdog journalism; Sue Burzynski Bullard of the University of Nebraska on Twitter as a teaching tool and on digital ethics. And Vidisha Priyanka on multimedia, whose session Chandran renders as an action movie. I was tweeting from the room too:

@vidisha71 owns the room talking about multimedia at #PoynterIndia workshop. Lots of teaching.

The most valuable passage in the report, and the most uncomfortable, is the Day 2 session on editorial-business collaboration. Our faculty pushed for newsrooms to work across the old firewall; the Indian journalists in the room pushed back hard, describing the phenomenon of paid news and citing what the Times of India’s Vineet Jain had told the New Yorker: “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business.” Chandran’s verdict on the exchange is blunt.

The faculty see a storm coming but apparently misread it as part of century-long rivalry between journalists and marketers in media houses.

He also notes that the session then turned genuinely two-directional, ending with what he calls a Gandhian compromise — collaboration for need, but not for greed. That’s the part I keep coming back to. We went to teach and got taught, which is the honest outcome of any cross-border training worth doing.

He closes with the group photo — “It is a Poynter tradition,” I told him — the certificates, and a feedback session that ran hot instead of polite, recorded by a room full of phone and iPad cameras. His last line is the headline of the piece:

The future is in digital, and the Malayali journalist is already there.

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.

Arizona Republic Announces Redesign (and My Hiring)

The Arizona Republic’s newsroom newsletter, EN, announces the hiring of Mario Garcia to redesign The Arizona Republic.  And, burying the lede [grin], my hiring.

TWO MORE STEPS have been taken in our continuing effort to improve The Republic: A contract with Dr. Mario Garcia of the Poynter Institute to redesign the paper, and the hiring of Howard Finberg of the San Francisco Chronicle as our new assistant managing editor for graphics.

Garcia’s redesign of The Republic will begin in July with research to understand how readers and editors perceive the newspaper. He will be here the week of July 6. The schedule will give him a chance to live up to his nickname, “‘the Human Hurricane”.

I just love the irony that years later I would be working at Poynter, although Mario would be gone. The world is a small place.

Perhaps My First Poynter Faculty Appearance

While I can’t be sure, I think this is the seminar where I did one of my first Poynter teaching sessions.  I know I attended Poynter as a participant earlier than this date.  It is all a bit cloudy.   Here’s the description:

“Newspaper Design Seminar at the newly named Poynter Institute for Media Studies January 29-February 4, 1984. The emphasis of this seminar will be the layout and design of news pages’ with special emphasis placed on preparation of graphic packages and material for the 1984 Presidential elections.”

The seminar was led by Mario Garcia.  A few years later, he and I would be work on the redesign of The Arizona Republic.  Other faculty included: Phil Nesbitt, Michael Keegan, David Griffin, Michael E. Foley and Roy Peter Clark [who is still at Poynter].

It is interesting to note the prices:

Cost for the seven-day seminar is $400 plus hotel and meals. We have reserved a block of rooms at the St. Petersburg Beach Hilton Inn at $61 per night for single accommodations.

In 2013 dollars, the seminar would cost: $897.28; the hotel would be $136.84.  The invite letter is here.

An Award Dinner That Has Lots of Intersections for the Future

One of the great honors I’ve received is the Bernard Kilgore award from SDX [now known as the Society of Professional Journalists].  I was a student at San Francisco State University and the award came with $2,500 check [ about $15,000 in 2102 dollars].  Robert W. Chandler, who was president of the SDX Foundation, presented the award.  The award ceremony was in Chicago and at the head table I sat next to Clayton Kirkpatrick, editor of the Chicago Tribune.  Here’s what I remember from that night:  Kirkpatrick said that “if you ever want to work in Chicago, let me know.”  Two years later, I did.  But that’s a different story.

Here’s the irony of the that awards ceremony.  Nelson Poynter, board chairman of the St. Petersburg Times, gave the keynote speech.  This is years before he founded the Modern Media Institute, which later became The Poynter Institute and which I joined in 2003.

While I don’t remember his remarks, I think I must have heard them because his thoughts about how to improve the relationship between reader and editor.  Poynter was ahead of his time.

“Today we need better two-way communications between reader and editor, between viewer and broadcaster. We are merely transient agents.” Poynter said. “The white space in the paper and time on the air belong to our clients.”

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.