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Recently, MediaShift started running reports from “embeds” at various media outlets and educational institutions. This report comes from Mark Van Patten, general manager for the online efforts at the Bowling Green (Ky.) Daily News.

I decided early on that the best strategy for our newspaper to grow its web presence was to not to hire people, but to find other firms to partner with.

This took us from working with a guy with a server is his apartment to working with a phone company and finally a newspaper-specific host/content management system. We gave up control over many aspects of our website in order to remain flexible.

Today, we partner with the largest newspaper Internet hosting publishing firm you’ve never heard of, TownNews.com. I’ve been the catalyst for the Daily News online activity since it began in 1995. The Daily News is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, home of Western Kentucky University and the only place in the world where Corvettes are built. Bowling Green is located in southern Kentucky, 90 miles south of Louisville, 70 miles north of Nashville. The Daily News employs about 100 people in a growing county of 100,000.

I’m still the catalyst today for our online activities. Am I saying that with pride or braggadocio? A little of both, but more out of frustration. The problem? Only a handful of employees in the building are wishing we could do more online. But we’re as deep with features as most newspapers, despite our smaller size.

I’ve used the same strategy for our online newspaper as with any other venture in the newspaper business: try to hire or partner with people smarter than me.

Chris Houchens is a smart guy that I hired to bring a different perspective to our online newspaper. He had a marketing perspective with plenty of non-newspaper media experience. Be careful when you hire a smart guy, they have a blog and aren’t afraid to use it.

Reacting to a comment that Mitch Joel wrote in his marketing blog about print publications needing to become multimedia productions, Chris said:

But even at this very moment, the offices of newspapers, magazines, radio/TV stations, and other traditional media are full of people who: 1) don’t understand this; 2) don’t want to understand this; 3) are afraid of this; 4) feel that they are already on the cutting edge just by replicating their content online; 5) are so caught up in a traditional stylebook of the ‘way things ought to be’ that they are actively fighting online ventures.

We have all of those people in our building at the Daily News.

Enter TownNews.com

TownNews.com provides hosting and a publishing system for over 1,500 newspapers and shopping circulars. A newspaper entrepreneur (yes there are a few left) Marcus Wilson was working for the Bigfork Eagle and saw the potential in the hundreds of newspapers like the Daily News. We wanted more, but just didn’t know where to turn. His International Newspaper Network (INN) was the forerunner to TownNews.com, of which Lee Enterprises is now a majority partner.

Like the partners before TownNews.com, we have been the squeaky wheel that, hopefully, has kept them on their toes. We have pushed and they have pushed back sometimes, but we always have been pushing in the same forward direction.

Here’s some of what TownNews.com brings to the table to help newspapers “own the Internet” in their communities (CEO Marcus Wilson’s mantra):

> The Job Network: to compete with employment sites
> YP (Yellow Pages) Engine: a directory to compete with telephone directories online
> The Port: a social networking component
> Ad Owl: placing and paying for classified ads online
> Wheels Lite: automotive inventory management system
> Real Estate Lite: real estate inventory management system
> SWAT: a person that comes into the market to build revenue

Here is their current menu for newspapers. We have integrated all these modules into our site, except for The Port. We appreciate their efforts, but often ask them: “what will you do for us today?” We don’t want to be bleeding edge, because we can’t
afford it, but we want to be leading edge.

With TownNews.com, we are backed with a staff of designers and developers that would be totally unaffordable to us. Our readers expect teeny-weeny newspapers like ours to have the same features as the big news sites. TownNews.com gives us a shot.

Underserving Newspapers

Yet, it is very frustrating that the very features that should be routine for a newspaper website cause me the most grief:

> Video player embed code doesn’t work after 24 hours because of their
link-naming convention.
> RSS feeds have no formatting. RSS readers are fed an unreadable block of text.
> The photo gallery is so poorly designed that it is embarrassing.
> Not enough capacity for a huge traffic spike /opportunity-missed.html

These sweet spots, as Houchens refers to them, for newspapers are woefully underserved by TownNews.com. Yet Marcus Wilson, TownNews.com CEO, touts their importance on a regular basis.

As with most partnerships, communication is important. TownNews.com is as good as the newspaper business at communicating with customers, i.e. very poor. TownNews.com knows we want to be among the first to implement new tokens, widgets, features, modules. Yet, more than once, our online director Houchens has learned of something totally new by serendipity.

I’m glad we hooked up with some smart guys at TownNews.com, but I wouldn’t be true to myself if I wasn’t constantly looking for other smart guys to partner with. Giving up some control has served us well and it’s a strategy most other newspapers would do well to follow: no matter their size.

Mark Van Patten isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. He has compensated by surrounding himself with smart people. As a result, he in his 38th year of working at small newspapers, starting on the street as an ad sales rep and working his way up to publisher. Currently, Van Patten is general manager of the Daily News in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He blogs, Twitters, Flickrs, Diggs, Stumbles, Tumblrs, and Woopras his way through the web and is Linked-in. He blogs at MarkVanPatten.com for business and GoingLikeSixty.com for fun.

Recently, MediaShift started running reports from “embeds” at various media outlets and educational institutions. This report comes from Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.

“Multidisciplined” and “flexible” were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying.

The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.

As a result, money is pouring into new projects such as the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, bringing together 12 U.S. universities to “direct a bold, experimental digital media program” or the Tow Foundation grant to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for “the research and teaching of professional journalism in new and emerging media.”

These are much-needed programs and go to the core issue in journalism education about what and how we should teach at J-schools. It is something that we have wrestled with at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. We are a small graduate school with around 50 students enrolled in a two-year Masters program.

When I joined in 2006 after 16 years at the BBC, we still had separate courses in news-writing, multimedia and research methods. Students learned key journalism skills such as strong reporting, as well as gaining a grounding in online writing or producing slideshows in Flash. But we found it provided a fragmented learning experience that didn’t make enough of the connected way in which journalism is evolving.

This past academic year, we decided to combine these three disciplines (news-writing, multimedia and research) into an ambitious team-taught integrated journalism program. Over two days every week for the two semesters, students receive training in core journalism competences. They get to apply these skills through assignments that take them from covering social issues in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to tackling questions of diversity, with the work published in TheThunderbird.ca, an online magazine.

Questioning What Is News

The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.

But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred. As Andy Guess writes in InsideHigherEd:

bq. In today’s landscape, defining ‘the media’ isn’t nearly as clear-cut as it used to be. Big-name newspapers and networks mingle with cable channels, all-purpose websites and blogs in the minds of the average news consumer, and for good reason: They are, in many cases, converging, with widely read blogs run by newspapers and online web stories originating from cable networks.

We adopted a business school model, bringing together a core group of academics and media professionals with different areas of expertise, from places as diverse as the BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, CanWest Global, and “60 Minutes.” As journalism itself gets more complex, teaching in silos is no longer appropriate.

Fortunately we had buy-in from all team members — even from the ones who were self-professed digital newbies. Of course, there were different points of view but these took place in a collaborative environment without rancor. It probably helped that we are a small and relatively new J-school — just 10 years old — so there are no political empires to defend.

Getting such a project off the ground requires a high level of coordination. Much of our time over the summer of 2007 was devoted to devising a syllabus that coherently blended the different elements that make a great journalist. From a practical point of view, this involved breaking down who was teaching what and when, down to the hour of each day, and then making sure the syllabus ran on schedule.

Demands on Students

Part of our approach involved decoupling journalism from any particular medium, not just in the curriculum but also in the minds of students. On Day One at the school, we ask students where they see themselves working. For many, journalism is equated with a career in print, where it is simply about good writing. This is something that other J-schools face, what Jo Geary at the UK’s Birmingham Post described in a discussion on the Online Journalism Blog on the role of J-schools as a “rather outdated, ‘mono-medium’ view of working in journalism.”

The hard part, though, is trying to do all of this in 24 weeks, even with two days of classes every week. Many students come in with little or no journalism experience. By the end of the first year, they have to learn to research, report and write accurately and fairly, acquiring a wide range of technical skills working in sound, vision and code.

If that were not enough, we also want students to gain a conceptual and critical understanding of what makes journalism, how it is changing, and to experiment in new forms of media such as blogs. The demands on today’s students are much higher than when I went to J-school more than 20 years ago and reflect the complex industry they are entering.

After just one year, it is too soon to reach a conclusion. But the students landed some great internships over the summer from the Village Voice in New York to CBC London to Deutsche Welle in Washington, D.C., and three won scholarships to the student newsroom at the Online News Association annual conference in September.

This summer we are revisiting the course, seeing where there is room for improvement. As Emap’s David Cushman observed in the discussion on the Online Journalism Blog, everything is in beta now and university courses should be no different.

Just as prospective journalists are asked to be flexible and multidisciplined, so should J-schools. Technology is enabling new forms of journalism and new news outlets that were unimaginable a generation ago. But journalism is too important to be left to the technologists alone. Journalism educators have a vital role to play in helping students gain the conceptual, critical and practical skills to flourish in today’s newsrooms and the newsrooms yet to come.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.