 The way of explanation, this is meant to be a bit of an un-talk, sort of just as the Berkman Center has been pioneer in the un-conference format, basically I was asked to do a lunch, I don't know, a couple months ago, they scheduled me, and I realized last week when I was asked to give a little blurb about what I was going to talk about that everybody here is probably pretty sick of all my usual subjects, and I've given various presentations and so on about global voices, which is our citizen media project and have done a lot of talking about Chinese internet censorship and corporate responsibility and so on, and that I didn't really think it was the best use of anybody's time for me to run through all that stuff again in this particular venue. But one thing that I thought would be interesting would be to really be selfish and pick your brains and tap your experience on how best to teach journalism, particularly focusing on the internet in this age where I think a lot of us are very skeptical about the quality and purpose of mainstream media today, what it is that people ought to be learning, and so on. It's pretty interesting actually that I'm actually about to become a journalism professor because throughout most of my journalistic career I was pretty dismissive of journalism schools. I would often, as bureau chief in Beijing, we would get a lot of young people who would come and approach me asking for jobs, internships, and so on, and people of course coming from a variety of backgrounds. And to be honest I never really saw what, you know, some of my applicants would be journalism school graduates or journalism school students, some of them would be people who were teaching English in China, some were people who just kind of showed up and had some variety of background. Of course I did require some language experience, but I didn't find necessarily that the J school students brought any particular value add, that it was more the practical experience of people that really mattered, and their street smarts, and a whole range of things that it didn't seem that J schools were necessarily all that good at teaching. And also sort of the ability just to kind of do as an intern assignments that weren't necessarily glamorous and, you know, that you weren't going to be on CNN immediately and so on. So I've always been very skeptical of journalism schools and kind of wondered what their point was if I had not found J school students have much value add. But as I left television and mainstream media and started playing around in this new world of blogs and what we're starting to call participatory journalism where journalists who is going to be innovative and effective really has to be quite fluent, I think, in using the web, living on the web, and also very open to interacting with the public in new ways. I started noticing some interesting things. I had a conversation with a friend of mine who's about my age, maybe a few years older, who's a journalist, who's been a freelancer but is trying to get a full time job with a media organization again. And this friend of mine pointed out that there's this very interesting thing happening in the field of journalism these days, which is that news organizations increasingly are looking for young, web-savvy people who can really do new things and take their organizations in new directions, or they've got sort of very senior staff, and they're not really hiring people in the middle, people who've been out there for the last 15, 20 years just kind of filing their stories and doing their beat but not really having paid much attention to all the new technological developments that are happening. And this friend of mine, who's about my age, was lamenting her lack of marketability these days. And that there's this real kind of, shall we say, leapfrogging that's happening with at least some news organizations in terms of hiring, that younger, web-savvy people are being hired pretty quickly out of journalism school and put in positions that in the past they would never have been put in because they're not afraid of the web and people in their early 40s are. And or we're speaking in general terms, obviously. But the other thing I noticed talking to a lot of people was that and also in some of the things I read was that news organizations actually are hiring a lot of J school grads who have internet focus. This is actually becoming a real demand and that a lot of news organizations don't know where else to find these people because since everything's so new, there's a very limited number of people who have the practical skills that they've developed on the job. And so people are really tapping right into journalism schools and grabbing people who know how to do web pages who are familiar with the technology and who are familiar with doing journalism on the web in new ways and just kind of not afraid to experiment. So that I found to be very interesting and made me think well maybe there might be a point to journalism schools despite the fact that actually some other people I know including one person who's the dean of a journalism school who's about to leave this journalism school quite soon has been complaining that they are training young people to do serious journalism, to do serious investigative journalism, how to do really quality work. And they train these students in this way with all the right values of what journalism is supposed to be. And they're unable to get jobs doing that type of journalism. There are just so few jobs that really give the reporter the chance. So I'm kind of talking in contradictions a little bit. There's a lot of contradictory trends going on. But you teach somebody how to do really hard hitting TV documentaries and all they can do is get an infotainment health beat at CNN or something like that. And so there's always this problem that there's a disconnect between what journalism schools are teaching and the demand of the industry in terms of quality journalism. And of course with the citizens media movement and a lot of other experimental efforts, there's part of the reason why the blogosphere has grown is because people feel dissatisfied with what mainstream media is offering and are seeking alternatives. The question is, is there a role for journalism students or professional journalists in that world or not? And this is also another big question that's really unanswered. And so just really thinking about what is it if we want, if we think that there's a role for professional journalism in our society that's important, if we think it can't all be done by amateurs, and if we think that probably some combination of the two citizens media and professional media is likely to be the way to go, what should we be teaching the next generation? And to what extent should journalism schools be taking the lead in innovation? Because another thing that we've seen is that a lot of news organizations are looking for new ideas, are looking for new ways to apply technology in covering the news. One would think that a lot of R&D should be coming out of journalism schools. And Dan Gilmour has written about this and some other people have written about this. But we're seeing very little in terms of partnerships between media companies and journalism schools in terms of developing experimental techniques or tools or anything like that. And again, why is that? And what might people start to do to try and move it in that direction maybe taking some maybe looking, borrowing a little bit from what has successfully been done in the software industry or computer science departments and companies or something like that would be interesting to know. On another side, one very interesting thing about where I'm going to be teaching is I'm going to be teaching in Hong Kong. And Hong Kong's an interesting place because it is an autonomous region. It's called a special autonomous region of China. And China and Hong Kong have this one country, two systems formula so that technically Hong Kong's legal system, political system and so on, was to remain unchanged after it was handed over by the British to China in 1997 for 50 years at least. And Hong Kong has always had a fairly relatively free press. It's a completely different structure on mainland China. You have the party secretaries in the newspapers and TV stations. You have very tight control. You have ultimatums going down about what news organizations can report and what they can't. Things are opening up a bit. There's more free market, but there's still tremendously heavy censorship and so on. The internet, as our colleagues have documented extensively, is heavily censored in China. It's not in Hong Kong. Yet at the same time, because most media organizations in Hong Kong are owned by people or owned by multi sort of these conglomerates with business interests in China, there's tremendous actual pressure on the news organizations and the journalists to self censor. And so we're seeing that increasingly a lot of the local media are not going after certain hard hitting stories or not covering certain things and so on. And that there are some blogs who are starting to try and fill in this niche in Hong Kong, but it's still fairly limited. And one example that I thought was kind of perfect was there's this Hong Kong blogger named Roland Song who writes a blog called East South West North, which is really kind of required reading for anybody who follows China. And he wrote about how he was coming back from a hiking trip on Sunday and he ran into a huge demonstration. It seemed to be thousands of people from what he could tell. And this wasn't reported anywhere in the Hong Kong media. And there didn't seem to be have been too much sort of blogging or sort of internet coverage of it either. And so then the question is how can one I mean this seems to be really low hanging fruit for journalism students in terms of there's lots of things to cover in this very small place geographically that is not being covered well by the mainstream media. Legally it's not illegal to cover this stuff. It's just that the big media corporations with their financial interests in China don't want to because it's not in their interest. So it seems like there's a great deal of low hanging fruit to get students involved with some very interesting citizen media projects which could help to publicize what's going on but also maybe to help develop smaller niche types of media models that might be sustainable perhaps as even businesses or something. And so how one goes about that. So that's just kind of an overview of what I'm looking at and some of the questions I'm facing going into this is first of all how to prepare young people for new kind of journalism that is a kind of journalism that we think they should be doing. But at the same time how do you equip them with skills that actually result in jobs. And how do you also manage their expectations whereas if the real kind of journalism that we've taught them they should want to do if it becomes possible to do that kind of journalism in an existing media organization should we be teaching them to be more entrepreneurial about creating new types of organizations or finding completely new solutions. And again how you do that in a realistic manner is also an interesting question what types of businesses or organizations outside the university should one be collaborating with etc. So anyway that's just I'm going to open up to questions and maybe target a few of you individually but I sort of as I've been putting together my first class that I'm going to be teaching in the spring is this new media workshop basically which I've kind of put up my draft class schedule on a wiki and basically this this program for the master's students it's like a one-year program they don't put people in track so they're not tracking them out to say you know you go into the broadcasting track and you go into the magazine writing track and you go into the internet journalism track that's what they do at like Columbia Journalism School you have to choose a track and you have to decide what kind of journalism you're going to do which strikes me is kind of really outdated way of doing things in this day and age but that's what a lot of journalism schools do. Fortunately this is a new enough new enough program they're not doing that it's small enough and so they're basically requiring people to take a bit of everything and then they do a final project in one medium or the other or some combination there of and and they're meant to be fairly versatile and and flexible in that regard I think also assuming that that it's more about the mindset and kind of the journalistic values that you're teaching rather than necessarily specific technical skills which are changing too fast to really be worth paying tuition to learn at a journalism school. So yeah and and in this class I decided what I was going to do since it's supposed to be workshop a lot of lab and so on again not to focus too much on you know here's how you build a website with Dreamweaver and you know etc etc and you know learn how to use HTML perfectly but really get people blogging right away and reporting on what happened in each class reporting on each other's reactions subscribing to everybody's blog I mean I won't kind of go through this in detail but but really to to start getting the students right away used to the idea that it's not just about you know you put something out there people read it and that's that forcing people to link to one another create discussions but also to use their blogs as a way to invite the public into helping them do their research for their stories and and actually for the masters for those people who do a new media masters project for as their kind of final thesis they're going to be required to use a blog and potentially a wiki to engage people outside of the school or just other people in the school or you know other people in you know okay I'm doing a thing on waste management in Hong Kong you know can anybody give me their local stories in their neighborhood and you know this kind of thing and and to learn how to use this the various participatory medium in in sort of fluent in in a fluent and natural manner and to really start out that way and so the the class is is going to be very much oriented towards you know kind of doing little mini papers on their blogs but then also reacting to each other's mini papers and and doing presentations some podcasting using Flickr YouTube tagging so on etc so that's pretty much I won't drone on and on but I'm I'm interested in any reactions and suggestions people would have I'm a little leery because I'm coming from a practical journalists and and sort of project running person's perspective rather than a teaching perspective I'm fairly new to teaching I think I'm very likely to over assign way too much work not necessarily on the reading side but more on the stuff that people have to do per week kind of thing so I'm really interested in people's reaction both students in terms of what you think would be engaging and what you think would really help people learn and and also people with teaching experience in terms of how do we best engage a class when I guess the the goal of the class is first of all to have students come out with a clear understanding of what's the difference between doing journalism on the web versus just doing stuff on the web i.e you know creating cool cool shit and you know impressing your friends with all the cool stuff you put on the web or chatting on the web what's the difference between journalism on the web and chatting on the web or just online diary on the web you know so that people have a clear sense of that and and also a clear sense of how how you do you do that journalism in new ways and how you teach yourself new tools and and how to think innovatively and just not be afraid of learning new things um and uh what else yeah I guess that that was pretty much I think those those two things just in in in in terms of less about you know I know how to do a web page using xyz tools but more about level of comfort on the web um the other thing actually it's it's interesting just on a footnote that I've been hearing from some people who run news websites for news organizations is that a lot of news organizations have really good web 1.0 websites you know like I heard this from somebody at cnn he says you know our our site was really great in the 90s it was really cutting it but one interesting thing and and and I found this too because with global voices and you know we're a wordpress blog we've just hacked the thing it's it's all open source it's all all just kind of playing around our our wordpress content management system can do more more flexibly and creatively than Reuters multi-million dollar you know custom content management system can and and so this kind of goes to show where things are headed but one thing I've found very interested interesting in working with news organizations is that a lot of the people in the web teams and news organizations you know they're trained in web 1.0 they you know they know their content management systems and their tools but you know you talk to them about rss and and it's really kind of disconcerting to them because it's not the way things are done you know and I get a sense from people who are in top management in a lot of news organizations that they're recognizing there's a disconnect between what's going on there with youtube and delicious and dig and you know all these great new sites that are really innovating like crazy and no innovation is happening it's coming out their web teams like zero and they're having to buy these other things because their web teams aren't innovating and so there is also a real need in news organizations and I think increasingly going to be a demand for people who are really fluent in 2.0 not just 1.0 I mean whether or not you like those terms I find it useful to differentiate between the web of the 90s that news organizations are pretty good at now and the web of now which the the you know the living web which news organizations aren't very good at so anyway yeah the one thing I'd say though I mean I used to work at the New York Times website and I think the everybody would like to be more 2.0 and everybody understands 2.0 but institutionally it's really difficult to do it yeah just there you know all the New York Times content comes from a content management system at the paper that is not that's dumped in and and you can't make that 2.0 just a click switch you can't and and you know you can't put it all into WordPress because it's all in some foreign you know different content management system that IBM built 20 years ago so it's you know it's the sort of changing the institution is the hardest thing for the existing news news organizations I think right yeah and and this this kind of points to where you know how news organizations report the news and in what format and whether also over time it really makes sense to be sticking newspaper content on the web or whether you need to completely rethink how you report based on what works on the web and then how that interacts with your non-web product and and so on and so forth but man I'm interested in hearing from you guys having heard this random picture that I've painted what what what what what do you think what what is your advice I mean what what's your advice about what I should be teaching people who are going to enter into this position where they might know a whole lot of stuff and they can't really implement it when they go work for a company because their their boss is going to be well you know that's really nice but you know it's just completely not how we do things here how do you prepare people for those yeah I mean what should you know or or give them impossible assignments and then change the assignment to last minute I mean I think this is one problem that a lot of journalism schools are having in that they kind of they're teaching journalism as the way they like it to be and then people go to news organizations and then they have to work in the way it is and it's very interesting to see what happens because a lot of graduates will then be extremely dissatisfied and and maybe not interested in sticking around long enough to wait till they get to position of seniority enough to change or you know there's there's all kinds of different things but I think it's disconnect between what you you know the kind of skills you can teach a young journalist and the way it works in a news organization and whether you're I mean when I was in college I worked at the New Bedford Standard Times you know a much smaller place and you know they're the same institutional issues I mean if that's a Dow Jones paper in New Bedford Massachusetts and you know putting the way putting the publishing the website is just they're the same kind of constraints you have imposed by the company you can't and I think it's sort of the trick as a journalist is trying to figure out how to do creative things within those constraints right and figuring out how to you know yeah I don't know take risks and and experiment maybe experimentation is the figuring out how to experiment is probably the most important thing for yeah so you think if one is just teaching you know giving people like a good sandbox where they're not worried about constraints just becoming very comfortable with experiment that that would be and then they're going to go hit reality but they'll just have to deal with reality but at least they'll they'll be equipped to be creative um do you think that's a useful approach yeah yeah I think yeah I think experiment experimenting is the biggest most important thing I think from a teaching standpoint I mean you've already identified the hardest thing which is you've got way more cool necessary important stuff to cover than you can ever possibly hope that students will have time to do um and so how you select the key pieces that are going to most fundamentally advance whatever you decide the core lessons that you want to get across are is the trickiest part um I'm just looking at part of what you have further down on the uh wiki I mean I think given that you are teaching a very practical subject I think you're exactly on the right track to try to build in as much as the the learning whether it's studying model other models uh new assignment.net you know there's hundreds of other models to see what people are doing or whatever it is rather than just having those b reading assignments and things that people talk about trying to build as much of that into their actual exercises so blogging about that reporting on it uh synthesizing that the more it's all built into practical exercises that that build the skills of journalism while also getting them to focus on reading about and studying everything else that's happening in this new space seems like a great way to pull those two together and then you you kill a couple of birds with one stone you still have way more birds than you could ever stone but at least you get a few more of that way and you do it in a pretty practical way so I really like your idea of trying to get them to go out and kind of do online I think that's something that should definitely be a lot of people who know how to make stuff online yeah not a whole lot that people are much worse when it comes to so having them I kind of I don't know maybe you can make an assignment to infiltrate a community of someone I know online and gather yeah kind of like insider work yeah online yeah go into uh go into a forum and start interviewing people and find your story ideas and then go offline right yeah yeah that's that's really sort of interested to hear your thoughts on like what I see to be a sort of basic tension between citizens media and the practice of journalism because journalism sort of attracts people that want to have voice but that want people to know that it's their voice yeah and you know especially in the context of places like china it's it's you know you have a billion more than a billion people you want to be different but I mean it's a sort of oppressive regime and the the sort of the sort of anonymity that citizens media has is attractive so how do you sort of reconcile wanting to be a sort of prima donna journalist but also living within the constraints of the regime that will put two kilograms of c4 under your you know your seat and blow you up if you say something that's a really good question and and that's what's gonna make this I think teaching in Hong Kong really really interesting because a third of my students are gonna be from mainland China a third of me from Hong Kong and a third are going to be from random other places you know around Asia and you know there's even a few Americans you just you know want to learn journalism Asia and and actually I'm I'm gonna do the way I've drafted my it's like a 12-week semester um I'm gonna spend I think one class looking at the Hong Kong situation specifically and the interaction between professional and citizen media and one session looking at Chinese situation mainland China specifically and the what what I'm thinking of doing at the moment is in our lab to do some very specific exercises on use of circumvention and anonymity tools because frankly I think people who are working and living there as journalists need all journalists need to know these tools and I'm pretty shocked at how many journalists working in that region know nothing about any of these tools um well that's kind of an aside but yeah um this is definitely attention I think with all media and citizen media anywhere where I think a lot of journalists would just like to be able it's much easier you do your story you have control over it it has your byline on it it goes out you get kudos everybody you know says oh you know so and so from the New York Times wrote such and such isn't be cool and and it has a big impact and you know causes some policy to change and you can take credit for it and you know I think that's that's kind of the you know the the 20th century kind of journalists drain way that it works or kind of ideally the way it works and we are shifting into a new paradigm where it's just a fact that you know you can't as Dan Gilmore likes to say you know it's it's no longer a lecture it's it's it's a conversation now and and your audience often knows more than you do about a lot of things and if you're not enabling them to participate in what you're doing but somebody else is the audience is going to go over to that place and increasingly be hostile to you because you're not listening and reacting and talking you're just lecturing and and I think in an environment where everybody's lecturing that's fine but where some people are lecturing and other people have gone beyond lecturing to the conversation um the audiences and again you know we don't really know where everything's going but it early indications are your website is more sticky you develop a community around a site where you're not just sticking content out there that you're you're involving your community of readers audience whatever viewers and so on and that that's that's just kind of where it has to go if your news organization is going to survive in the long term and you're just going to have to be perhaps a little less of a pre-madonna about everything going through you um but this I think also goes back to what are the fundamental values of journalism and what is the point of journalism because you know I mean I when I was in Beijing I would sometimes have these kids walk into my office and you know how do I get on tv and they obviously had no interest in actually journalism per se they just wanted to be on tv and be famous and influential and and that's kind of the most extreme thing but but basically if you're going into journalism to be famous and just kind of be important in my view you're going into journalism for all the wrong reasons you know and and there are plenty of people who do go into journalism for that reason um but you're better off just you know going to become an actor or something you know you know get on some reality show and become famous or I don't know you know emulate Monica Lewinsky or something but but uh you know if you want to be famous you know don't come work for me I mean that's I had some conversations with people that were practically that frank you know that that uh the real point of journalism and I think what the public ultimately would like journalism to be is to serve the public discourse and and to serve the public with the information that citizens really need in order to make informed decisions about all aspects of their lives and so are you serving the public discourse better by lecturing and by having full credit for that lecture or are you serving the public discourse better by stepping aside and saying well here's a bit of what I know but so-and-so you know who's the garbage collector down the street you know he has this to say I step back let him say it um is that is that serving the public discourse better you know and I think ultimately that that needs to be the measure now in more repressive societies obviously than that then there's the whole anonymity issue and and I don't think that citizens media equals anonymity um you know I think that if you're if you're in a if you're in a place where you have basic protections on freedom of speech and if you're doing anonymous citizen media um your credibility is going to take massive hit and I think people are coming to understand that and if you're in a place where having your identity known can get you in jail or get you blown up obviously that's completely different dynamic and I think audiences will take that into account but one thing you're actually seeing like in China which is very interesting you're seeing some very interesting teamwork happening between the blogosphere the chinese blogs and professional journalists and a lot of professional journalists have blogs sometimes anonymously but they also have relationships with various bloggers and so what'll happen is you know there's a certain amount of stuff that they can publish which is fairly prescribed and then there's all this other stuff that's just not getting into their stories or it's not getting on air um and they kind of either put it on a blog anonymously or they give it to a blogger who gets it out and there's always a whack-a-mole with censorship and all that kind of thing that gets out that way and and and there's been a couple of instances of cases um where you actually saw a change that resulted from momentum being built in the chinese blogosphere and attention being brought to things that just wouldn't have gotten the same attention if it was just kind of left to mainstream media alone because they feel so because they are kind of powerless on a lot of issues and and so yeah I think and if if what you care about is journalism for the right reasons I think you applaud that and you know you work with that and you see bloggers and sort of anonymity strategically used as your ally in serving the public discourse and so but but I think I think one will have there's some very interesting conversations to be had with young chinese journalists about how to navigate all of this in a realistic manner you know because the other thing you want to do is not to uh over inflate people's expectations so they end up going to jail when they hadn't really wanted to you know there's a difference between people who are like I don't care if I go to jail and people who think that they've insulated themselves enough but then they were kind of misinformed you know so so that's always it's the point of this project actually they do not cover news from the north please so this this project is based on this this host that the majors do not cover in the in the mainstream right yeah and the good point of it is that it has been a huge success so the majors went to buy the content from this project but as it has a critical enlightenment non-conversion we are trying to so I think it's these are years of all of this change really good new yeah about new models based on the open journal in my country about china here what's real where are their hopes in the society that are not covered by the major and then take these opportunities to build but at the same time I think it's important to show the students the realistic factors that okay during the day you are looking for a job in a major because have to survive and during the night you are doing another kind of step for fashion yeah in some years can give you money because it's a new and I think it's a new model so do you have you have arabic journals that you put material there and then you can and if the major is like your photo or you can buy pieces of this material so there I think there's a lot of space to and even if in our country a lot of democratic problems as china so they have a lot of space to fight to be all with new space that the major good that previous a lot of projects in Brazil are being built exactly based on this road that and I'm not here with my computer but I have that regarding the decrease of the sales of the major journal that's what it's somehow so it's a decrease in people are looking for other sources of news and this legitimate sources has a very many more other kinds of open journals are increasing so it's a huge change that they advantage from this new material yeah yeah yeah yeah that's definitely I think the challenge is to encourage people to figure out how to innovate and to find these opportunities and also find a way to make a living at the same time yeah yeah even if you are worried about my name can if my name is going to appear there or not for example there is a huge data base of historical data from this portfolio here that the science the social science university that is related to the university they are trying to do so we are trying to build a wiki for them to work but then you can put your profile there right so all the scientists are involved with this project so your name is going to be connected to the project anyway but the project is for the good of the public yeah so there are made there I think there are models that can relate the two interests you know the public interests and I have to to put my name there to maybe get a job in another major yeah this is my life objective yeah yeah but what do people think I mean borrowing from other industries um where you have more cooperation between you know companies non-profits investors and student work um and research and what's the best way to kind of go about saying okay we're going to encourage students to come up with some of these ideas that fill these niches because increasingly and we're seeing this too I think in in data that's coming from media markets around the world that is niche media that's really actually kind of niche and specialized media that's increasingly making more money than than general media or is doing a lot better that's kind of where the growth is so so how do we how does one structure a situation in in in a university setting where you're encouraging students to kind of come up with these ideas to start working on them to show that they have something there and then try and get funding or grants or a relationship with some media or software company how does that how might again since I've I've not done that I mean I've started a non-profit thing myself but how does one structure an environment for that to kind of happen well that is the structure of most academic research departments right and I don't know much about journalism schools however it sounds to me like these people are paying to go to your school right and so is there such a thing as a phd in journalism because a phd is a research degree and it's and it's during that research because I mean it does seem like you're very invested in the idea of fomenting novel approaches and that is I mean research at its core and so I guess I don't know it may be the question you should be asking is to your future university right because people don't want to necessarily pay to do this they want to get paid to do right exactly even if it's a pittance you know even if you're a graduate student at Harvard or a graduate student at MIT you get a survival wage but it's you're investing your time and you're going to reap this later and you're actually it's it's a phenomenal opportunity to harness the irrational exuberance of youth and you know send them off on these ideas and so what I don't know is if you're you know I was curious I mean it sounds like your main responsibility is teaching but do you also have additional time to develop a cohort of either peers or students or fellows I mean it sounds like you want to start the berkman equivalent in hong kong where you have the funding to bring in people to let them to explore new things and yeah that's a really good question um they do have I think a very small number of occasional phd students it's a fairly new program it's only like six years old so they're they're still kind of getting going on that although I sense that they take the more traditional social science approach to research which is you write a really long paper right um and and that's your research um which in this that doesn't seem incompatible it's it's not incompatible but you know the question is does it need to be a bit more kind of lab oriented as it were um right well at the end I mean at the end if you if you send someone off into a lab be it um you know be it a social science lab or a or a physical science lab or biological science lab they do all kinds of stuff right all side kinds of stuff comes out of it and you know this is actually something that I'm interested in is like you're generating vast amounts of data that end up living on the web right but you still at the end of the day have to look at it and think intelligently about it and say something about it or else nobody's going to necessarily care and so so I was I don't know what the journalism is this is funny term the journalism literature you know is there are there the journals of journalism I don't know yeah I imagine that there are yeah yeah and so at the end of the day it seems like those are the places that you want to report your results yeah and you want them focused more on innovation right and the difficulty rather than just on documenting what people are doing and the difficulty is the metric of success in those situations yeah I think it's how do you how do you judge when a project is meritorious as I said so it's like is it just cool yeah have we actually done something yeah you know because yeah invariably when you're in a thesis writing situation yeah someone has to pose a question you know and and then what a what a phd is you learn the ability to answer that question in a in a respect in a given field and so yeah how does I and this is my ignorance in the social sciences how does one pose a question in journalism and then go about answering that question yeah and so what is the metric for results because if it can't be like readership or something yeah well it's interesting because I think up until now generally in sort of media states of journalism and this is why sort of traditionally I haven't had that much interest in like ever going for a phd in journalism because I felt I was learning more and being more useful to society by doing practical things rather than getting a phd in journalism because it's such a social science approach it's kind of like you know you do a degree on I don't know history or political theory or something like that where there's it's more just kind of documenting what's going on in a particular thing and and maybe saying something new about it but again I'm not a scientist at all but I get the sense that original research and and theses in the sciences do require some kind of innovation or discovery of something new something that's going to advance the field so that like in practical terms new things can be done yes and from everything I've read in kind of the journalism media studies literature there's very little of that kind of focus and and and it's more just kind of I don't know documenting something that hasn't been documented quite as fully but but not necessarily tied to what can the news industry then take away and you know or or could some company be formed around this or sounds like something like this and so it sounds like I mean it's very interesting I'm sorry go ahead I want to get it I I'm not sure if I disagree or I think we're a little bit on the wrong track I think that so at least the banner there says undergrad masters and diploma I think that the majority of the students you're going to be working with they're not there to become published in journals about journalism but they're there to learn to be journalists right right and so I think that with them you focus on student media empire right you build yeah build there's a niche right if they're not if there's not honesty in reporting right because there's self-censorship there's building on it if the students are interested if they can if they can handle it build that off that you can hang all kinds of different you know approaches to doing it but then they're learning by doing and they're working with these new tools and they are proving that model the industry is not going to respond to a journal about journalism industry is going to respond to the industry pays no attention because you got a million hits a month I will I'll buy into that mark and then I think so I think then there are the few doctoral students and then there's you and your colleagues and you report and you do your analysis and evaluation and your academic work on that those exercises on what's happening in the industry but I think that that's by and large reserved not for most students maybe a few select students but the student the majority of the students the engine are doing this stuff and I think you know going back to what you said at the beginning you know you and you kind of fall into the same trap as the current journalism schools right is they they trained for journalists the way they want it to be but it's not and you're saying well I'm going to train them the way that I want it to be but it's not the difference is that this may be the future this may be the way it becomes whereas it ain't going to become the way the journalist schools or journalism schools are doing it now and the models then the current models as we've heard in whether in Brazil or in Boston or anywhere the current models for newspapers for you know at the very least are you know dying right yeah so there's going to be a new model and you're going to have the people who are conversing with these tools and as you pointed out kind of willing to experiment and try new things and to create new models and then to be able to adapt to whatever situation they're put in recognizing that who the hell knows what situation they're yeah that's I think that's that's a really good way of framing it although I would say it is interesting the degree to which the industry has no interest in what academics who study journalism are writing or doing zero interest when you said they hate if they don't like j-schools why would they listen to yeah and whether you know is is there a way for it not to be the case um and given the lack of innovation happening in the news industry maybe it's changing now a little bit but you know would would there and and I guess my question is less about what I because I think what you just outlined is what one should be doing like this year and next year and so on but thinking kind of I guess more broadway broadly is is just the the social science approach not necessarily the right approach for j-schools in the future and should they be taking more of hard science computer science kind of model in the way they or or some kind of hybrid in in the way they approach their function or or is that I don't know I mean it's just throwing a question out there I mean without a doubt your your first priority is to the people that are paying the bills that are paying to be there but you know one kind of yeah I think that I think that bigger question is an interesting one and it sounds as if I mean and again I don't read the journalism literature but it sounds as if maybe the the journalism research the media studies journalism studies maybe has sort of fallen into one of those academic cul-de-sacs and it's one of the it's what it sounds like and maybe it's ripe for you know a paradigm shift you know sort of an intellectual invigoration but again I really don't know what I'm talking about I just know that I just know that this happens in science all the time you know this happens in science all the time in fact you know there's murmuring in physics right now that you know what have we done you know people people have followed string theory so far and and it's gone there's you know small and I guess smallness has a book out now about you know it's like untying the knot it's like you know the fields get very wedded to their own internal consistency and they just keep following that and then you know then something just out of left field comes and then it really revolutionized it so maybe this is a situation like that if you're willing to listen right but you may the field but the resistance is off the charts yeah I mean yeah I mean everybody that's currently writing in those journals you know I have another friend who who just you know complains that you know she doesn't have there aren't the right people to read her grants because she's like the only one pushing this you know and and of course the great analogy was was Einstein is that Einstein was at some university in Germany and the faculty just full on admitted that they didn't have the expertise to judge his thesis so not that perhaps you're in Einstein maybe you are that will that will become that will become clear but you know it just sounds like an exciting time obviously yeah I mean and I guess that that does come down to why I'm doing this at all having been so skeptical of journalism schools all my life is that it does feel like it's at this point of paradigm shift where one could as one might say cause maximum trouble or maximum disruption but Colin had his his hand up yeah I mean I'm a graduate student at Emerson College right now and it actually seems like it's way more exciting to hear you as a future professor talking about how are we going to use these new web tools when I'm like at a school trying to find who the professors are that are teaching these new web tools so I mean I also think it's there's a certain amount of catching up to you and we might just be in this time where you know there are professors who are their instructors who are a little bit older not using these tools afraid of these tools and the newer generation that's more comfortable with these tools looking for ways to use these tools in an educational setting so there may be that kind of you know housing also yeah well I have a question for you then because because this comes up a lot where even people teaching new media find that a lot of their students know more than they do it's kind of a a variation on Dan Gilmore as my audience and it's more than I do and and so especially in new media probably in everything but especially in new media should should professors be taking a much more participatory approach and allowing the students to teach each other much more than they're doing or finding new ways to bring in the knowledge that the students have that professors might not or the skills into the class and if you have any thoughts about good ways of doing that well I've had one conversation with a English professor who took like a digital storytelling workshop with other educators and that opened up their eyes to possibilities of using just even video blogging say or you know digital storytelling there needs to be still so much education among teachers instructors professors about these new tools that seems like the big hurdle yeah that if you can just you know push your colleagues to be start a wordpress.com blog and just start blogging and see what happens yeah you know start editing a wiki and have fun with it yeah like these kinds of things like get hooked on this new tool yeah get excited about them so then you'll say oh you know and then you'll bring them find creative ways to bring them in the classroom because there's also it seems like this exciting point in this vagueness that there are opportunities for professors to kind of push the envelope a little bit and kind of introduce something into a course that they may not have done before so there's like this is what I'm seeing this is kind of what I'm advocating for pushing for hard like with my own instructors in my own classes and they're kind of like okay yeah maybe we will try video blogging in this class you know I've never done this before and next thing you know everybody's like what's video blogging and what's a wiki and next thing you know we're doing a collaborative movie making project in my classes just because somebody was open to an idea so it's attracting us. That's a really good point. I think it's important too that because I work mostly with young high school middle school and so they use all these tools but I think what's lacking is their understanding of the like the thought behind them and how sort of the change and in collaboration and participation that these sort of signify and so I find like people like most people have blogged or read a blog or something like that but they don't really know how why that's very different and I think I've seen some professors I took a class where you know they wanted us to blog but people never really got point past the point of just posting their own entries they never got to that point why blogs are interesting because you can comment on other people's and you can start a blog role and and so I think I was you know as you're kind of talking about what you're doing is that there's sort of a lure to be like oh these great technologies and it's a new tool but unless you're kind of talking about the philosophies behind why they were developed or how they're different than the tool tools you're just going to be using like blogs as another power point or another yeah yeah tool versus a way to change a process of yeah can I ask them so that that's a really interesting comment one of the I've looked at this with primary secondary school teacher high school teachers and certainly the cases I mean it's always the case that the kids are going to know how to use the technology if not at the beginning by the end much better than the professor or the teacher whatever that's just a given and the cases where that where that causes trouble is for the teacher who can't deal with losing what they perceive as losing control to the class and that that imbalance in knowledge right that asymmetry drives them crazy but what they where they don't lose it is exactly where you're pointing out so I think that what you do is you let loose the reins you know who knows about video blocking teach us and you point you know you make your you know you let go of control of the class and you point you make your point that the audience knows more than you do but you use what you know which is a contextualization which says hey look I may not know how to you know do this but I know where this fits yeah and that's where you really deliver your values I think that's a really that's a really really good point yeah exactly right right yeah that's that's a really really really good point yeah you're in a real conundrum and and it's not just you but the school in general when you're trying to train people for an industry that's in such flux yeah and you personally could go a lot of different directions and not bear the whole moral burden of the whole thing but I mean no pressure it's a tough thing you should I mean rightfully the school needs to teach people to be ready to work for the New York Times or be ready to blog and really do the right thing and not get paid anything and go find a job somewhere else and it's it's a tough thing or somewhere in between and who knows what to do with that I think I think you'll need to teach people to be flexible yeah ready to do a lot of different things yeah and you might end up journalism school might end up being teaching people not to write stories but being able to filter stories and produce that yeah yeah I don't know if that class exists or yeah but increasingly yeah and and I'm hoping we'll do a bit of that I mean I think doing really good blogging that's basically what you're doing as well you're you're right contextualizing to a certain extent but the question is how far do you go with computer science yeah are you going to be having people write algorithms for yeah well since I can't write an algorithm there's you know so I'm going to have to see yeah I mean I guess at least the first time around what we'll have to see because I'm obviously I'm coming from a a journalist's perspective rather than a geek's perspective and and I think I myself will have to be very open to there's going to be people there who are going to know how to do things I don't know how to do and and how to bring that in and figure out yeah exactly to what extent do we have that manpower to do algorithm writing do databases you know database journalism is another new field of journalism that that certain news organizations are starting to starting to get good at which I don't think is taught very much and that's another area that I don't know that much about you know in terms of actually implementing but again there is a computer science department so maybe there are some interesting collaborations that might go on there um but I agree yeah that that it was really interesting actually when when um when I was at this you know the night foundation has this innovations and journalism award thing and global voices ended up winning but actually ended up winning what actually the grand prize I found some of the other projects in terms of what they're doing kind of with computer science at that intersection of computer science and journalism was really fascinating there were there were a couple projects that were database oriented and that require a lot of special coding and this kind of thing um and they weren't as sexy because they didn't have Chinese dissidents and and and so on you know and and uh African aid workers involved but but in terms of what they were doing in terms of innovation in that space I thought was really important and again you kind of have to reorganize the way you have your department set up to to really teach that effectively because most journalism professors I mean not only are they afraid to blog but they really can't code and they really don't know the first thing about algorithms and and so yeah how do you rethink really fundamentally what you're doing um it's a really good question definitely not something that one starting out professor is going to change overnight but last question so I think what you're really touching on is a kind of a technology adoption curve and it's inevitable that the New York Times and all these other sites will be web 2.0 at some point right you might be on 5.0 by then you know but what I think that you know is really interesting about these new media programs is that you can show how we currently and economically can condense what would take you know talking head camera person and satellite drive down to one person a student one student with a camera phone and maybe a laptop yeah that's it yeah absolutely and very very economically and I think that's really like the strength of the kind of programs you're talking about yeah I think you're absolutely right the the sort of the journalistic power of the individual right and eventually all these things will come into play like knowing how to blog and rss that will eventually help I think these journalists and students in the future or depending it could be the near future if they do the work for you know maybe more New York Times yeah it might take 10 years before those technologies really work but at least having the the comfort in operating on the web to be able to say that they know how to do basic things it from what I'm hearing it sounds like it helps people get hired at this point you know that having those skills yeah I don't know well um thank you so much thank everyone