(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Now, that seems easy to say in retrospect. But I do want to point out that the problem I
discovered in Vietnam came because students did not think using social media or even
capturing stories in a form beyond words did not matter to them. Why they thought this
probably has to do with what I and many other educators have been emphasizing in the
classroom, which is to focus on the grammar, news judgment, AP style and structure of
written stories. Writing students in our program, in fact, can graduate without taking a
photo class, for example. They can choose to take a class called Visual Storytelling,
which will allow them avoid buying a D-SLR camera. Neither student had such a camera
at the beginning of the summer and neither purchased one by the end. Neither owned a
Mac, which meant they could not operate Final Cut Express. And neither would have
bought a Mac had they not been offered financial assistance.
By the end of the summer, I realized that my assumption about a young person’s ease and
desire in using social media was wrong. Students need a lot more training in social media
and technology so that they can take part in what I call the media revolution. Readers and
consumers are choosing how to receive news more than ever. They are also taking part in
how news is sent. As a result, we need to think about how to convey the importance of
technology, social media and multimedia storytelling techniques in every classroom.
Here are my five top lessons for teaching journalism students more about social media
and technology:
1. Introduce the use of social media tools at the very beginning of their journalism
education. Require the use of Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other sites that are
useful to journalists. My sense is that students who are close to graduation have
become convinced that such sites are nothing more than a popularity contest. And
they don’t need them. I have tried to explain that these sites are increasingly
effective ways of engaging community and building credibility. But it is clear to
me after Vietnam that students who have been trained in traditional methods of
journalism are less than convinced. Indeed, my students never used Twitter to
build contacts or find out what their competitors were doing on the same subject.
Together, two students posted less than five tweets during the entire summer.
Only one student used Facebook occasionally to tell her friends about a story she
wrote. Neither student used Facebook to share links to other stories on Agent
Orange.
2. Require writing students to take photo and video classes or workshops at the
beginning of their journalism education – and throughout their education. UC
Berkeley currently requires every new journalism student to go through a oneweek
multimedia boot camp before they start classes. This is a terrific idea, and
one that I am trying to figure out how to incorporate into my classes, and
eventually into our program. My own experience in Vietnam reminds me why I
have to work harder to enforce these basic concepts. This summer, I watched one
student try to capture video in Vietnam with no tripod. The video was just too
shaky to use for an extended period. She also ran into the problem of her new
external drive not communicating with her new laptop. She was unable to store
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