The “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” book is entering its printing stage, which means whatever happens next has to be on this blog. No more “Wait! We have a new example of a disaster we can stick in there!” or “DAMMIT! What do you mean “YikYak” isn’t a thing anymore?” rewrites.
The nice thing about the way this blog is set up is that you can access “chapter topics” I’ve covered over time, so you can assign a chapter and say “Also, go read what this yahoo had to say about Chapter 6 on his blog” or something. There’s also always something new to say, given the rapid rate in which we have news flowing, disasters brewing and people generally falling on their keys in public.
The purpose of this blog was to help instructors who used the book (and those who don’t but enjoy the vibe of this approach) to tackle topics that matter to them and their students. For the most part, I’ve been guessing (hopefully well) but if this book is to become more than a colorful doorstop, I need to make this worth your time.
With that in mind, here’s my ask today: Help me help you. Either email me, hit me up on Twitter or just post something below here to tell me what you want me to cover, examine or discuss on this blog. Tell me what you want to see more of or less of as we go forward.
Vince,
Your “YikYak” comment above made me think about what we are doing here when it comes to teaching social media tools and reporting. We no longer teach a specific social media tool; what we do instead is teach storytelling and then have students brainstorm what social media platforms that are popular now with our target audience can best be used to tell that story. I remind students all the time that the social media tools we use today will like either be obsolete or have evolved into something dramatically different a year, or even six months, from now. They have to think about story first, and then the platform for that story as the reporting and research begins.
I think it would be great if this blog could feature some of the best of that content from student media — and journalism classes — demonstrating how to make those platforms relevant for the story at hand.