LB's Student Journalists Head to SF Conference

This weekend LBCC's student journalists will mingle with the pros at the Society of Professional Journalists regional conference at the University of San Francisco. Titled "Journalism Innovations III: The New Business of the News Business," this Region 11 SPJ gathering will focus on new ventures in the "changing mediascape."

"Journalism isn't dying, it's on the cusp of a new era," declare the organizers. I couldn't agree more.

This year I've got 14 students signed up to attend workshops such as "The New Student Journalism," "Committing Acts of Journalism and Public Health," "New Media, New Ethics?" and "Building the Open-Source Newsroom." Among the other attractions is the premiere of a new documentary: "A Fragile Trust: Jayson Blair and the New York Times."

The conference runs April 30-May 2.

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Jeff Jarvis Explains It All!

At long last, here is that Jeff Jarvis lecture in the spirit of TED.

As noted a several weeks ago ... it's an interesting speech on education, media, innovation, Google, collaboration ... and it starts with the "What Would Google Do?" author declaring, "This is bullshit."

Here's a couple excerpts from the rest:

I tell media that they must become collaborative, because the public knows much, because people want to create, not just consume, because collaboration is a way to expand news, because it is a way to save expenses. I argue that news is a process, not a product. Indeed, I say that communities can now share information freely – the marginal cost of their news is zero. We in journalism should ask where we can add value. But note that that in this new ecosystem, the news doesn’t start with us. It starts with the community.

And...

We must stop our culture of standardized testing and standardized teaching. ... In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization?

We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

It's a good speech that picks up on many of the concepts Jarvis continues to tout on BuzzMachine, his various talks and, of course, in "WWGD?"

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Twitter in Real Life?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Next week, the Media and Society class at LBCC will examine new technology and the Internet, including social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and blogging. Here's a fun video about Twitter from College Humor.

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Newspapers Add Value with "Unexpected Relevance"

When we get to the newspaper unit in LBCC's Media and Society class, one aspect of newspapers we agree that we like is how you happen upon stories, photos and other items that catch your interest as you turn the pages. You learn about things that you weren't necessarily looking for. You become engaged with something you didn't expect.

In a new blog post, new media expert Jeff Jarvis discusses this phenomenon: "Serendipity is not randomness. It is unexpected relevance."

He goes on to explain:

There’s a reason we find value in the supposedly serendipitous. ... When we read a paper and find a good story that we couldn’t have predicted we’d have liked, we think that is serendipity. But there’s some reason we like it, that we find it relevant to us.

Maybe that relevance is the unknown but now fed curiosity, maybe it’s enjoyment of good writing or a certain kind of tale, maybe the gift of some interesting fact we want to share and gain social equity for, maybe it’s a challenge to our ideas, maybe an answer to a question that has bugged us. In the end, it has value to us; it’s relevant.

To me, this discovery of something new waiting within the pages is one of the top reasons I keep buying and reading newspapers, and why we will always need editors and others to bring these gems to our attention.

As Jarvis notes, this wondrous sense of serendipity is one of the things that many media observers believe will be lost with the decline of newspapers. I agree when he suggests a somewhat similar sensation occurs through the use of Facebook and Twitter, where we're constantly discovering something new.

But it just doesn't feel the same as that comfortable encounter with the inky printed medium.

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(Photo credit: "Surprise from above" by zetson, courtesy of Flickr.com/Creative Commons)