The Evolving Newsroom

I've been in the process of moving house - to a place with no internet access - while spending a busy week producing the Fieldays Exhibitor, an annual publication created by Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) students and distributed to exhibitors at the Fieldays agricultural show out at Mystery Creek, near Hamilton.

Between the 12-hour days, long commutes in the dark and paucity of connectivity at my new part-time home, I've barely been online for the past 10 days. I've also barely picked up a newspaper, haven't been able to find National Radio (a preferred source of news) on the dial and haven't watched television (haven't got round to buying a connector for the aerial).

I feel like I've been living under a rock. Can't say I like being that disconnected from the world. So it's nice to be back online while I'm on the road for a few days.

I've managed to get a little bit of connectivity going at my new place, via a Vodafone vodem - a dongle which you plug into a USB port on any desktop or laptop anywhere and get whatever connectivity's available - 3G in the cities, 2G in the hinterlands. It comes with an outrageously overpriced and unneccessarily complicated data plan, of course - that's telcos for you (masters of grasping obfuscation) - but it scores pretty highly for convenience if you're someone who spends a lot of time on the road and works out of different offices.

It only musters 2G at my place in the hinterlands so it's slow - fine if you only do one thing at a time. That's not my style, but it is what it is, at least for now. On the upside, there's a fabulous beach just down the road and lots of trees and birds. It's all about priorities, after all.

Anyway, back to the Exhibitor. It's a terrific publication that runs daily for four days during the Fieldays each year. Wintec journalism students take over a mobile newsroom and spend four days scaring up stories from the 1,000 exhibitors and more than 130,000 visitors to the event, the biggest of its kind in this part of the world.

Meanwhile, I had a team of five very capable design students – all third-year students of the Bachelor of Media Arts - on the production desk putting together between 8 and 16 colour pages a day, with copy and images often flowing in 15-60 minutes before deadline – very much like any other daily newspaper in the world.

It was great fun laying out pages again and working with such a young, motivated team who, despite having no newspaper layout experience, took direction incredibly well, soaked up information like sponges and produced a pretty tidy looking product.

It was a nice reminder of what I loved about being a chief sub-editor (on the Business section of the UK’s Daily Telegraph) - intense work, layout puzzles to solve, juggling a thousand thoughts and things-which-must-be-done-before-deadline - and what I didn’t love (long hours, tired brain). It’s hard work making newspapers, but singularly enjoyable.

So where’s the website for the Exhibitor? Still on the draftboard I’m afraid. For reasons outside our control we were in danger of doing two things badly rather than one thing well. So we opted to do one thing well. Next year will be a different story.

In fact, next semester Wintec is launching a digital journalism paper which aims to arm students with tools for multimedia storytelling, researching stories online, working collaboratively and distributing information and stories online. I'm really looking forward to seeing it take shape and I hope to write more about it in a couple of weeks.

Lee LeFever, he who makes those wonderful 'in Plain English' videos, posted a reality check recently about how those of us who spend a lot of time online forget that most people don't.

"We make videos, we put them on the Web, people watch them. We track our views, our Technorati links, our mentions in Twitter, our blog comments. A good percentage of people we see in social situations in Seattle are aware of our work.

"Viewed from the comfort of our living room, bookmarked pages and social circles, the Web looks pretty small and awareness looks pretty big. It's too easy to assume that people have heard about the tools and sites we use everyday. But they haven't.

"I sat back [at a conference] and asked myself - forgetting Common Craft - do these people know about Twitter? Has Flickr become part of their world? What about wikis, do they care? Are they using RSS readers? My completely anecdotal evidence says the answer is no. In our own little online world, it's too easy to assume they do."

I agree. Another assumption is that young people 'get' the web and know all about it. But I've been consistently surprised this year when I've asked students about their online lives.

Very few blog, most don't know what RSS is, almost none have heard of Twitter and few are using Flickr. Say Seesmic, Pownce, Twine, Friendfeed to them and you get a blank stare back. This is as true of degree-level students as it is of of the Waikato 15- to-17-year-olds I spent the day with yesterday (giving them a taste of journalism). It's also true of adults; I'm pretty sure some of my friends think I'm making this stuff up.

Their experience mostly boils down to Bebo, MySpace or Facebook, Google, Yahoo and YouTube. Aside from that, the only difference between these kids and me growing up is that boys these days can type.

Try this as an exercise: Explain Twitter to someone who’s never seen it. You’ve got 10 seconds to think about it. Oh, and you can't use a computer. Ready? No? Too bad, away you go.

It's harder than it looks. I know because I attempted to explain not only Twitter but also RSS feeds, Google reader, Google alerts and the usefulness of blogging to a group of journalism students yesterday – but without a computer.

I was at the new Whitireia Community Polytechnic campus on Cuba St in Wellington (upstairs in a nice light, roomy space which is not quite finished) and the PCs weren’t hooked up yet, nor a data projector. So it was the whiteboard or nothing. Which worked well enough given that it was an informal session. But my diagrams and illustrative anecdotes sure do need work.

I’m going to be working with three journalism schools this year, in one capacity or another, and really want to give students some ideas on how to use web tools in their jobs.

To use Twitter, for example, the way beat bloggers are: asking colleagues for question ideas, contacts, seeing what people are talking about and picking up on interesting links.

To follow prominent bloggers in their beat, and use RSS feeds and a reader to keep track of blogs and news. To use Google alerts to track names, places, topics; shared bookmarks to pool their resources and help each other out; and mine forums, Flickr, Twitter, Pownce for story ideas.

And to blog, because what better way to get used to writing every day and understand keywords, headlines, links.

So far I’ve introduced myself to around 30 students; only four or five are bloggers, most don’t know how to use RSS or Google alerts, none were familiar with Twitter or wikis.

I have my work cut out for me.

I’ve found a new respect for teachers this week, having had to stand up and ‘teach’ a class of my peers during a teaching and learning conference at AUT University in Auckland and walked unprepared into the classroom yesterday morning.

I’ve no shortage of ideas on what I’d like students to walk away with, but less idea on how to go about it.

It’s not enough to stand up there and talk. Powerpoint slides are good, but can be inflexible, tie you to the computer and restrict you to a sequential presentation. The whiteboard’s good but you have your back to the class and it’s harder than it looks to listen, write things down in your best handwriting, encourage participation, value students’ suggestions and use them to make the point you set out to make. Good teachers make it look effortless. It isn’t for a newbie.

So, my homework is to play with some active teaching ideas, look harder at the excellent Common Craft series of videos which I think do a great job of explaining web tools. And I’m going to dive into Wired Journalists to see what’s there and scour Paul Bradshaw and Andy Dickinson’s posts for ideas.

Anyone got any other suggestions?