Wow, 14 full years down. I spent 16.5 at my last job at West Valley College and 4.5 years as an adjunct at Reedley and Merced colleges before that. Even with my math-challenged journalism major I know that adds up to 35 full years of advising student publications.

I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t gotten a bit tedious from time to time. But I still find it exciting as well.

And if last week is any indication, I still work too hard. It sure feels like I worked at least two full weeks last week alone. The first week of a new semester is always a zoo. I often say that one of the best parts of teaching college is the opportunity to start all over again at least two or three times a year. Even if you have returning students in your classes you have new chemistry among them and the start of new semester is a good time to set or renew goals. Here are some of mine for this semester:

• Having just completed my fifth major program review in my career, I am painfully aware that one of my weak areas is in my mass comm survey course. Far too many students fail that class, whether in the traditional class or the online class. I need to intervene sooner when students are lagging and see if I can improve their success rates. I have a colleague who argues that it is up to the students, not the instructors, to improve success rates (i.e., passing the class). Ultimately, yes, but it is up to the instructor to set an atmosphere of success.
• On the newspaper class we have certainly expanded what we do each semester. See my last post in May for details on that. This semester I hope we can move our weekly radio show and the audio files we attach to stories as more NPR-like. Ultimately, I would like to make the radio show irrelevant; we should be creating the audio stories and posting them alongside the text stories and the radio show should simply be another way to use that content. Right now it is the radio show that drives the producing of audio content.
• I also hope that we can use our social media tools more effectively with the newspaper. I have already started contacting students as their stories get posted to our talonmarks.com website and suggesting that they “like” their own stories.
• We’ve made strides over the years of posting online first and print second, but print still lingers too heavily in the minds of students as to when they produce their content.
• I’d like to put more effort into making sure students don’t stay on Talon Marks too long. I like them staying two or three semesters, but not at the expense of them failing to progress in their goal of graduating or transferring to a four-year university.

I am curious what other journalism teachers’ goals are for the new semester.

When I was hired as the new journalism instructor at Cerritos College 13 years ago a big part of my responsibilities was to advise the student newspaper and annual student magazine, both print products. I did this by teaching the major skill sets of reporting/writing, photography and design.  (Yeah, there are other principles, such as ethics, news sense, leadership, etc., but the basic skill sets dominate.)

At my previous job we had worked a bit on an online version of our newspaper, so I knew that technological change was coming, but first we had to focus on the still new technological change of pagination….for the print product.

My how things have changed.

Today I increasingly talk to my students in the language of “brand” rather than publication. I try not, for instance, to refer to that pulp product as “the newspaper” –as though it was THE publication. Instead, I try to use language like “the print edition.” We don’t produce a single product any more, we manage a brand. We have multiple products and services. When I critique student work I still tend to focus on the print edition, but I am trying more and more to talk about the online edition and other products as well.

When I conceptualize my job as adviser I see a three-dimensional model:

• From one axis point I see the print edition, as it continues to be the product that seems to consume the most time and financial resources, and beyond it to the online edition and other editions; I can just as easily look at the online edition and through it to the print edition from the polar opposite axis.
• From a slightly different axis point all the various editions stand out: the print edition the online edition, the digital edition, etc.
• From still another axis point I see the skill sets we teach: reporting/writing, photography, design and, now, multimedia storytelling.
• But the axis point that is the most interesting is the one that shows the ever-expanding list of brand points; it can be visualized with the following branch mind map.

The main branch points are print, online, digital, new media, social media and co-curricular activities.

The different brand points of the Talon Marks brand

PRINT

Yes, we still produce a print edition. We currently do not print our annual magazine, but the newspaper is produced weekly, or nearly so, throughout the regular school year. Creating the print edition still dominates in the minds of students and for many on campus, it is the only edition they know of that we produce. We keep trying to market the other editions.

Even though the Talon Marks print edition newspaper looks a lot like the product from years ago, it has evolved. Along with pagination being standard, there is other innovation. This last school year the students produced a 3-D issue where a dozen or so color 2-D photographs were converted to 3-D and a pair of 3-D glasses was attached to each copy of the paper.

And it is now becoming routine to include QR codes in each issue. These codes can be scanned by smartphones and link up directly to online multimedia.

ONLINE

Web Edition

The flagship of online is the award-winning talonmarks.com website, which is run on the College Publisher platform. While students still produce content with the print edition in mind first and the online edition second, we are progressing slowly to a reverse mindset, as we must.

We need to do more with blogging and podcasts, but more and more students are producing video and slideshows as unique online content.

Mobile

And we are giving increasing thought to mobile. The College Publisher platform automatically converts our Web edition to mobile presentation, but we are moving beyond that, looking for the best possible mobile app presentation, one that incorporates more than our content. We want an app that integrates other portals that students –our main readers—will want to use.

In the meantime, we became the first community college –and still one of the few—with a tablet app. Thanks to the PaperBoy mobile app, Talon Marks can now be read on the iPad tablet. We’ll outgrow this app in time, but a major philosophy of mine is to be like the guy who builds a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert: not a lot of business now, but when the road comes through in a few years we’ll hang a sign that declares we’ve been in business since 2011.

Student Portfolios

We are in the education business and one of the best things we do is provide students the opportunity to develop skills and portfolios. An earlier version of the College Publisher platform introduced a nice automatic portfolio option, but unfortunately, that tool was eliminated in the latest version and has not been satisfactorily re-instated after two years. We have cobbled together an imperfect replacement through Delicious.com, but it is labor intensive to maintain and we continue looking for other solutions. An automatic aggregation of student work through our online site, even if it means uploading PDF copies of print edition pages and special elements would be the ideal.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Despite students still thinking in a weekly print edition mode when it comes to deadlines –as opposed the multiple times a day mode that the online edition affords and rightfully demands—the introduction of the social media tools of Facebook and Twitter have helped crack the mindset. We can interact with readers more quickly and in different ways than the one-way communication of the print edition. While we’ve got a long way to go in perfecting how we integrate our social media, we’re at least on the right path.  We see digital newsletters as a growth area for the brand: Get snippets of news quickly from Twitter and Facebook, see more complete versions online, and see full versions in print. But aggregate sports, news, arts, opinion, etc., snippets and deliver them via e-mail to those who would like to get their news in that format.

DIGITAL

For several years we have been producing a digital version of the print edition, but haven’t done much with it. Years ago pagination evolved into PDF delivery of the print product to our printer. What a difference that made when we found a printer ready to accept the product through electronic delivery! We would paginate a page, then print it out in tiles and paste together the tiles into complete pages. Once all pages were done –with the last invariably being completed hours after the first and one page always seeming to hold up the entire process—we called the printer to send someone to pick up the paste-ups.

With electronic delivery of PDF files each page could be shipped individually. The last page is in the hands of the print just minutes after it is completed and exported.  The old way seems almost inconceivable these days. Just try explaining what a wax pot is to today’s students. (For that matter, try explaining pica poles, paste-up grids, sizing wheels, counting headlines, and so much more!)

But what about those PDF pages after the printing has been completed? They were relegated to the status of old paste-up boards: Interesting, but “collecting dust” until tossed out/deleted. Then along came issuu.com, that allowed us to store digital editions and attach a cute animated widget on our website. There is so much more we could do with these digital editions, though. All we have to do is market them. While the dynamic presentation of news on our website is more interesting to more people, SOME readers prefer seeing the newspaper in the same format as the print product. They’ll read the paper that way. We can even deliver tomorrow’s newspaper this evening as it can be e-mailed to subscribers while the print edition is being placed on the printing presses and delivered back to campus. All we have to is market it and build a subscriber database.

And, as mentioned above, we see digital newsletters as another growth area for expanding our audience.

NEW MEDIA

There is so much that can and should be done with new media storytelling techniques. It is easy to focus on slideshows and video, and learning to do them well is enough to fill your plate. We’ve found that a good storage channel for our video is YouTube and so we use it. And by using Soundslides as a slideshow tool gives us a means to embed them in our online edition.

But we found a new direction to try as well. Our college has a radio station that focuses more on the entertainment side of broadcast rather than the broadcast journalism side. Ever since I got here we’ve been looking for the right method to port some of what we produce on the news side to the radio station, mostly an Internet feed these days. While our efforts have been welcomed by the Radio-TV program, they do not include changing the focus of any of our broadcast courses to the journalism angle: We’re still trying to squeeze in between cracks. Our latest attempt, one that seems to be progressing well, is to provide a weekly hour-long radio show that utilizes sound clips collected by our print reporters while working on their print edition stories. To do so, we’re recruiting broadcast majors who want to broaden their skills beyond hosting music or talk programs.

While we still have a long way to go there is a reason why one trusts the businessman who hangs up that sign declaring years of business experience. Over time you make progressive improvements to your process –a key word, by the way, a lot of this is process based on developing defined values with available personnel. Over time you learn to get better at what you do. Our first semester featured a host summarizing stories in the print edition or the online edition and then chatting about them with a co-host; there was a lot of rah-rah editorializing reminiscent of banter between playing songs. Since then we are evolving into more of an NPR approach to a news show, one that has cohesiveness in its entirety, but one that can then be deconstructed into individual stories/podcasts that can be linked to online stories as supplementary information for our audience

We’ve had to rely on our broadcast students to edit the audio and are now starting to train the print/online reporters to edit their own stand-alone stories. There is resistance, though, as each semester easily half of our one publications class are new students who still have to learn the basic writing/reporting, photographic and design skills. We simply keep asking students to learn and do more each semester. But it is a process –there’s that word again—that includes returning students showing how it is really a matter of comfort, control and efficiency in the process.

CO-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

And then there are the extra things we do for our students to enhance their education. We’re a small program: There is just one full-time instructor, one adjunct instructor and a full-time instructional aide in the journalism program (the broadcast program has just one full-time instructor and two part-time instructional aides) doing all this. How much easier it would be if we were a larger program.

Some of the supplemental activities not related to “publications,” but still considered a part of the brand are:

• Journalism Association of Community Colleges – We can’t teach it all, at least not effectively, and we feel blessed to have California’s JACC as an adjunct to our program. Several times a year JACC sponsors regional or statewide conferences/conventions where our students can learn from industry experts through workshops on an array of topics. JACC also provides a plethora of contests that allow our students to hone and measure their skills against students from other schools. We participate in other organizations that provide contest opportunities, but none like JACC, which provides a more complete package.
• What’s Next? – A dirty little secret about community colleges is that they no longer seem to be a two-year college experience. The average student is here for more like four years, and even then only about a quarter of those who entered with the goal of transferring to a four-year school do so. There are a lot of reasons for this –to many to list and discuss here—but the immersion and engagement provided students who work for our publications is partially to blame. Students are just having so much fun learning from us they drop other classes and put off taking the general education courses they need to graduate. So the Journalism and Radio-TV programs have started an annual day-long workshop called “What’s Next?” that gives students more information on career opportunities, transfer options and self-marketing tools (“Step One: Stop posting all those photos of yourself drinking at parties on your Facebook page.”)
• Media Awards Night – At the end of each semester we team up with our Radio-TV program to host a semester-ending awards night for our students. It has many goals, including honoring student work, bonding of journalism and broadcast students, trumpeting of program strengths to college administrators (serve food and they will come), and smoothing out problems with students’ parents and significant others who wonder why our students seem to be devoting so much time each week to our programs. My Radio-TV colleague and I like to boast that we are one of the few programs on campus where we have to kick students out at the end of the day.
• High School Awards – Each year we host a high school awards competition for area high school journalism programs. The payoff for us is that we invite them to our spring Media Awards Night to get their awards. I often think of myself as a spider talking to as many flies as I can; if I can just get them to enter my parlor for a few minutes I’ve got them hooked. But recruitment of high school students is only one of the goals –good thing, because too few schools participate and even fewer students seem to get recruited. Another just-as-important goal is that when the high school students enter our mail-in competitions it is my journalism students who do the judging. They learn how much they have learned when they are asked to evaluate the high schoolers’ work. It’s a win-win.
• Journalism Club – Our campus has an active extra-curricular student activity program and a cornerstone of it is the clubs on campus. We maintain a journalism club mostly so we have a portal to their activities. My first reaction is that we keep our students busy enough doing what they are doing I don’t want them to be burdened with various club activities, which might include an information booth in the campus quad on twice-annual club information days to building homecoming floats each fall. But the students are members of their campus communities and as quaint and outdated as some of the campus student activities might seem at times, they do add to a college experience in what is an otherwise commuter campus experience.
• Alumni activities – Community colleges in general and community college programs in particular are not good at alumni connections. Too bad. Working on the school newspaper –sorry, print edition of the newspaper—is a memorable experience and we often have alumni drop by or contact us to reminisce. Cerritos College celebrated its 50^th anniversary a few years ago and we were one of the few programs on campus that made an effort to bring back alumni for a special occasion. We haven’t done much since then, though we keep talking about a follow-up event or really developing a database of former students and keeping them connected.  The online edition is a good tool for keeping them in touch, but we really hope to build on digital newsletters to aid in communication in the future. In particular, too, is a blog I regularly follow, even though I’m not an alumnus of the college or program, out of Missouri University’s well-known journalism program. Students there last year started a regular J-School Buzz blog for and about the program itself. I am coaxing my students to start a TM-Buzz blog so that they can chronicle their own activities as a brand. They can write about activities, blog about experiences, rail on the inadequacies of the program, and post all kinds of videos about themselves. And former students will relate.
• Advisory board meetings – Twice each year we meet with our vocational advisory board to share what is going on in the program and being in an outside look at the program to make sure it is doing all that it can, and that all that it is doing is worthwhile. The board consists of journalism educators from other community colleges and nearby universities and industry professionals familiar with or interested in our program. And each meeting we invite a handful of current student editors to participate. Not only do they provide a down-to-earth perspective of the program, but they develop leadership skills by networking with these interested professionals.
• Editor exchanges – Some semesters we conduct what we call editor exchanges. I will round up the editors of our publications and take them to visit with editors of publications at nearby universities or community colleges. Later those editors will visit our campus in a similar fashion. There are only loose agendas for these get-togethers, which typically last two to three hours each. The students bond with each other and learn that the issues they run across –problems of getting reporters to turn in stories on time, the problems of getting reporters to accept (and then complete) less popular assignments, etc.—are not unique to them. They can share common solutions. Most often, I think, other schools learn how much more my students work on the brand as much as on the publication.

Ways I read the Times, in my order of preference, include:

1. In print
2. Through the Times web site
3. Through Twitter on my iPhone (LA Times feeds)
4. Through my Kindle DX
5. Through third-party RSS links (from blogs) on my computer
6. Through Twitter on my iPhone (third-party Tweets with links)
7. Through RSS links from the LA Times
8. Through my iPhone app for the LA Times (sorry, this was too cludgey and I’ve deleted the app from my iPhone. So scratch this one. What a terrible interface.)

On any given day I’m likely to read a Times article via five or more of these sources.

My most recent pathway to reading the the Times is with my new Kindle DX. Reading it this way most decidedly is an acquired taste, one that I’m still working on.

I’ve read a lot about e-book readers being the next big thing for newspapers and have wanted to try it. Amazon.com sells Kindle and with no brick and morter stores to visit to test the Kindle, you pretty much have to buy one on faith. And that takes a lot of faith because the DX, the only version that handles newspapers, sells for close to $500. (Amazon did not even answer my query about whether there was such a thing as an educational discount or whether I could get a reviewer’s discount.)

While I like LISTENING to books –my iPod/iPhone gets a lot of use and I currently carry almost 100 books on it– I can’t really say I’m an avid book reader. I DO read novels and non-fiction books from time to time and do a lot of newspaper and blog reading, to say nothing of textbooks because of my teaching job. I just don’t READ enough books to justify even the lower-end Kindle that sells for around $300.

I like to listen to books while walking, which I do a lot, and highly recommend Audible.com. I’ve been a subscriber for years and can download two unabridged books a month from its humongous and ever-growing library for less than the cost of one newly released printed book. (Hey, Audible, if you are listening, I would willingly accept the gift of a free book for that unsolicited but heart-felt plug.)

Lately, though, I’ve found the Kindle book reader app for my iPhone and that has increased my love of book reading, especially with favorite authors who don’t seem to condone their books being distributed in mp3 format. Yes, Clive Cussler and Tom Clancey, I’m talking about you! I’m currently devouring Cussler’s Oregon series since only two seem to be available in iPod/iPhone listening format.

I bought the Kindle DX because my job includes reading lots of course outline documents. The DX screen is big enough to read these documents as PDFs, which are easily uploaded to the Kindle. Carrying the 1/3-inch thick device around is far superior than carrying 3-inch to 5-inch stacks of course outlines that my job as campus Curriculum Chair requires. That made it worth the purchase price.

My verdicts so far:

* Reading books on the Kindle DX is okay, but quite frankly, the touch screen navagation of my iPhone makes that experince far more satisfying. I even prefer the limited iPhone experience (forget texts that require illustrations) to reading a printed book.

* Reading newspapers on the Kindle DX is interesting, but ridiculous. Forgive me, but presentation DOES count and the presentation on a Kindle leaves a lot to be desired. More below, but I cannot for the life of me understand why Kindle limits newspaper readership to the high-end unit. With some minor tweaks in the interface, my iPhone would be a much more convenient way and I don’t see why it can’t be done. The navigation system of the Kindle is cludgey compared to the touch screen iPhone and if the rumored Apple iTablet ever comes out and gets into the newspaper game Kindle will have a competitor.

* Reading short PDF documents on the Kindle DX is a godsend. But the built-in search function combined with the ridiculous chicket keyboard makes including pdf reference books, such as my college catalog, which I have to refer to almost daily, a lousy choice. Again, the iPhone approach to touchscreen navigation and virtual keyboard is going to blow Kindle out of the water.

Let me talk for a minute about the newspaper reading experience on the Kindle DX, which some of my journalism teacher colleagues have asked about.

In short, you subscribe to a text-only version of a newspaper. (Again, why the cheaper versions or iPhone app can’t handle that is unclear.) The DX has a built-in wireless connection to your personal Kindle account and the paper is delivered automatically within minutes of turning on the unit in the morning. The previous day’s paper is moved to archives. That’s cool. But unless you are a hard core newspaper reader the appeal drops off after there.

You access your files/newspaper by scrolling down the home menu with a five-way joy stick key that can give your thumb a blister. And it takes a while to become comfortable with what you can and cannot do with the the joy stick.

When you select the newspaper you want to read it defaults to opening up the text of the first story, presumably the lead story of page one. You use “Next Page” and “Previous Page” buttons on the right side of the Kindle to page through the story. Because you have some control over the size of text a story can take more or less pages to display. (And given the Times’ penchant to make any story long, count on most stories taking multiple pages, even at smallest font size.)

There is a slight delay in the pages changing on the screen after clicking the button and the button requires a pretty good push to activate, but you get used to that…unless of course you’ve gotten use to the easy touch screen swipe on your iPhone. You learn to click the button before you get to the bottom of the page so as to keep the interference with the reading flow to a minimum.

You use the joy stick to linearly page through the stories one at a time. But because presentation isn’t an issue with Kindle, you have no way in this mode of knowing where you are in the list of available stories and what is coming up. With the printed version or online version you can scan for the story that interests you and jump directly to it; you can read which stories you want in the order you want. That is not the consideration here.

There IS hope, though. Move the cursor to the bottom of the page with your joy stick and you can select a “View Sections” option that lists the major sections of the paper (Front Page, California, The Nation, The World, Business, Sports, Opinion, etc.).

You can choose one of those and start your linear oddessy just in the section you want.

The Section View also tells you how many stories are in the section. You can even move the cursor to number next to the section name. Click on the number and your Section View changes from a list of sections to an RSS view of the stories in that section: headline and first few lines of the story. Ahhh, now you are getting somewhere. You can now choose which story you want to read without having to wade through each story. Simply move the cursor to the headline and click on it to get the full story.

But did I mention that presentation matters? There are no photographs with the stories. The headlines are barebones and there are no drop heads or pull quotes to entice you into a story. Roundups and letters to the editor are difficult to read because there is not even an extra line of space between each item and the subheads are indistinguishable from body text.

When I look at how I select stories to read from the print edition of the newspaper I rely heavily on those drop heads and pull quotes and photos to give me more information about whether I’d be interested in the story. No so luck with the barebones approach. And that barebones headline may not be very descriptive. There does not appear to be any effort on the Times’ part to rewrite the headlines with the Kindle interface in mind. A clever five word headline followed up with a more descriptive drop head –to say nothing of the interesting photo– works fine in print and even on the web. But that same five word headline as the ONLY information I have about the story does not. True, in the RSS view I have the first few lines of the story, but use an anecdotal lead, which the Times does a lot, and you have no idea what the story is about.

Don’t buy the Kindle DX to read newspapers or even books. If you can find another reason like I did, then think about it. If Kindle tweaks its interface, if photos and additional subhead information can be included it might someday be good. Last ngiht, for instance, I had time to kill waiting for my daughter’s beach party to end, so I plopped my butt into a chair at a Starbucks and enjoyed reading the SJ Mercury and a few Times stories had not already read earlier in the day. It was hgih tech, it was cool.

Now, I’ve left out a lot. The screen IS easy to read. Maybe not as easy as my iPhone, but the iPaper platform works for me. It is not backlit, so you still need a well-lit environment. But you could read this thing on the beach (if you weren’t worried about the sand getting in it and gummying it up). It has a built-in dictionary; move the cursor to any word, click on it and the definition appears at the bottom of the screen. And the sucker is supposed to be able to handle something like 3,500 books (because they are all text-only with no graphics), not that you’d ever want to do that. Without a better navigation system, I don’t see it being a viable option for textbooks, too bad.

To put documents on your Kindle, those you don’t buy for greatly reduced prices from Amazon, is really easy. Either attach your Kindle to your computer via cable or email the document to your special Kindle account and wait for it to be delivered wirelessly.

There is a text-to-speech function I haven’t tried, but the thought of uploading a light background music mp3 file sounds like something I may try.

Despite my mostly negative comments above, I like my Kindle and look forward to its interface being upgraded to be more useful. Unfortunately, without the touchscreen archtecture built in, though, I’d probably have to actually buy a future generation version to take advantage of a fully pleasurable-to-use unit. (Apple or Kindle, keep me in mind as a reviewer of new versions; I think this technology has potential and will accept my current role as an unfortunate early adopter.)

Chief Legal Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC Dan Abrams attempted to put fire to feet of former attorneys-general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales April 28 in the third installment of the 2009 public lecture series sponsored by the American Jewish University at Universal City’s Gibson Amphitheater.

Ashcroft smouldered throughout the evening, but Gonzales just sat there, often with a sheepish grin on his face.

The three gave individual opening statements before sitting down to spar. Most notable was Ashcroft’s somewhat Orwellian explanation of the necessity to have rules in a free society. He started with the simple-to-agree philosophy that in a free society you want to feel free from someone raping or murdering you, so society needs rules and needs to enforce them. But he did not make it clear where he would stop with that logic: if I did not want to be offended, where should society draw the line on freedom of speech, for instance.

At times it looked as though he would like to silence the journalist moderator for asking what he considered to be unfair questions. Indeed, Abrams made no bones about not only being the moderator, but also having his own answers to some of his questions. Even the split audience agreed from time to time that Abrams appeared to step over the line with questions.

And tough questions they were for these two Bush-era attorneys general, who clearly felt that recent actions by President Barak Obama to declassify “torture memos” that defined the practice of water boarding as not being a form of torture. If “the best” legal advisers for the president said that waterboarding was not torture, then it wasn’t, they said. Releasing the memos only served to aid the enemy. “We relied on the best minds at the time,” Ashcroft said.

Gonzales agreed.

A contention point was whether a practice defined worldwide as illegal suddenly becomes legal simply by changing a law –or if as RIchard Nixon told David Frost “when the president does it, it is not illegal”– even if the act remains the same. The law has been changed again, so now the practice of yesterday becomes legal today, just as it was illegal last week. Again, doesn’t that sound like a bit of George Orwell’s 1984? From a strictly semantic point of view, it makes sense, but humanistically, it’s flawed?

From water boarding Abrams went to the firiing of federal prosecuters under the Bush administration. Again the two attorneys-general felt that Bush not only was within his rights to fire any attorneys that refused to uphold the policies of the president and refused to entertain the argument that the firings that took place were politically motivated. In fact, they both agreed that firing Democrats just because they had different political views would be illegal.

At one point Ashcroft was livid when he felt Abrams asked an unfair question of Gonzales. All issues are somewhat politically motived, Ashcroft argued, and it is important that federal prosecutors act on the same page. For instance, he said that if a California prosecutor refused to prosecute marijuana cases just because California thought the federal law should not apply here then that is a politcal issue. But the attorney could/should still be fired.

Gonzales said that what he regretted most out of the attorney firings was that the reasons for the firings were not better communicated. In fact, both felt that poor communication with the public led to the controversy of many of the Bush-era policies.

Ashcroft, for instance, said he wished had done a better job commnicating to the public how the steps taken after 9/11, including the passage of the Patriot Act, prevented future attacks. “9/11 was devastating,” he said, “but nothing compared to what could have happened if he did not respond.”

One thing he was unwilling to communicate, though, were details of the now infamous hospital visit by then White House Gonzales and President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to persuade bed-ridden Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which Deputy AG James Comey had just determined was illegal.

He refused to answer questions about the incident, including reports that he threatened to resign afterward if Bush’s override of his refusal was not reversed. All he would confirm was that that was the story printed in the press. Gonzales followed Ahscroft’s lead and, with a Chesire grin on his face, refused to comment further.

What can California’s newspaper publishers do for journalism education at the high school, community college and university levels?

That’s one of the questions I will have to try to answer in a 10- to 15-minute presentation I will be making to long-time publishers next December when I report on the state of journalism education in the state of California. As chair of the California Journalism Education Coalition I lead a group that is trying to assess that topic for what we hope will be a bi-annual report. I’m already nervous.

As I woke up under the hot streams of my morning shower this morning –that shower time is some of my most creative thinking time– I pondered possible answers to the question of how they could help. Perhaps in the next six months of research that will go into the report we’ll ferret out specific needs, but I found one general answer this morning: Just talk to us.

Of course, the needs of journalism education will vary from level to level, with high schools probably being seen as needing the most help. But at all levels, I think we certainly need more communication with newspaper publishers in our area. In my 12 years at Cerritos College I’ve met only a handful of editors and publishers at local media outlets.

• Thanks to my good friend Pat McKean of Long Beach City College I met, once, the editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, but that editor is no longer there and I have no idea whether the current leadership even knows there is a journalism program at my college.
• A year ago I spent five minutes talking to LA Times Editor Russ Stanton at the conclusion of a keynote speech he made to the Journalism Association of Community Colleges, but I hold no illusions that he remembers the conversation.
• Over the years I’ve had a bit of contact with reporters from local publications, but with all the downsizing taking place, few of them are still around. I DO have ONE editor who is not a former student of mine as a Facebook friend, but we really have not communicated.

Admittedly, this lack of communication is as much my fault as anyone else’s. In my previous job, 16.5 years as an instructor at West Valley College near San Jose, I had more contact with local publishers in the six months surrounding the college’s decision to eliminate journalism –when there was a crisis– than in the remaining 16 years. And truth be told, I didn’t really try all that hard when I should have. Fortunately, some of my teacher collegues at other community colleges and at universities are better at this than I, but not many from the discussions I’ve had. And woe are the high school advisers, many of whom are even more overworked and untrained.

I have more lateral communication with other community college journalism instructors and even with many four-year instructors. And I am getting better with comunication with high school instructors, but even that is hard.

How can newspaper publishers help journalism education? Help break that logjam.

Here are some simple suggestions:

• When one of your reporters writes anything about one of the high schools, community colleges or universities that is not merely a rewrite of a press release, have that reporter check in at the school’s newspaper. There might be source material there, but that should not be the reason for the call. The reason should be, “Hey, we know you’re here and we want to say ‘hi’ and find out how you are doing.” It will be awkard at first, because we don’t expect that you know we exist.
• As important as that will be, it will be more important if editors and publishers take time to acknowledge that we exist. Consider making calls –or visits if you’ve got the time– periodically. Pick up the phone or drop a personal note two or three times a year just to say, “Hey, we know you’re here and we want to say ‘hi’ and find out how you are doing.”That will make it easier for the programs to reach out to you when they have needs. It is better to establish relationships when there are no specific needs than wait until there is a crisis and the basis of the relationship is that I am in desperate need.
• The idea I like best is to have lunch together. It will be tempting to pull together an annual lunch and invite the 20 or so high school, community college and university advisers all at once and counch the day in some kind of formal activity. While there would be value in that, I think that more value will be in smaller, less formal groups.

  Every six to eight weeks a half dozen of the advisers from community colleges in my area get together for what we call Lunch Bunch. There is no formal agenda. We just get together to talk and let the topics of discussion develop naturally. I like that formula. Invite just three-to-five advisers for lunch this month and another three-to-five next month and make these lunches a regular routine. Keep the groups small and informal. If you’d like to talk to students, too, keep the numbers small so you can carry on an informal discussion and include everyone. “Hey, we know you’re here and we want to say ‘hi’ and find out how you are doing.”

  While holding these lunches at the newspaper from time to time might be a thrill for some advisers and students, even a cheap-o lunch a mall food court will have value. And for those busy high school advisers with little flexibilty in their schedules, consider one-on-one brown-baggers on the high school campus during the teacher’s lunch break.

It’ll take an effort to do these. It might be easier to write a check for a specific need, but if you really are interested in helping journalism education in the long term, it is going to take a long-term personal touch. Start with, “Hey, we know you’re here and we want to say ‘hi’ and find out how you are doing.”

Probably the biggest topic discussed over the day was a long-term project to develop regular “State of Journalism Education” reports for industry leaders. The group is working on a report that would cover the high school, community college and university levels and which would be delivered to the California Press Association next December. The hope is that there will be status reports every other year.

Putting together a concise, but comprehensive, report will be a daunting challenge, especially when it comes to high school journalism. The overwhelming (in all its connotations) thought about high school journalism is that we don’t know what we don’t know.

There are so many high schools in California and the two main representative groups: The Journalism Education Association of Northern California (JEANC) and the Southern California Journalism Education Association (SCJEA) touch only a small fraction of the schools that are known to have journalism programs, to say nothing of most schools where no one has a handle on whether or not 1) there are journalism programs, 2) what they look like, or 3) whether those teaching them have any background to prepare them for the job (though they often probably don’t).

The community colleges are fairly cohesive compared to the other systems. And our pattern of period snapshot surveys we’ve conducted in the past help. What with the state’s budget status, though, an abbreviated survey between now and December will probably be wise.

While the four-year college and university programs are reasonably identifiable, when you factor in the private institutions, it can be a chore to sort out what is going on among them.

We put together a timeline action plan to gather information for the report that I, as Cal-JEC chair, will present in early December.

WEB SITE

The group decided to start a new web site and use blog interface so that we can share information about what is going on in journalism education across the levels. It will be reminiscent of the current JACC Blog, but will also include regular articles about high school; four-year college/university; other educational groups, such as San Francisco State’s Center for Improvement and Integration of Journalism and adviser training groups like Newspapers2; and industry articles related to journalism education. Leaders of the constituent groups of Cal-JEC committed to posting regular articles so that there is new material on at least one of the levels each week.

Another major element of the site will be a calendar of journalism education events across the state.

The site is already under construction and will be located at www.caljec.com.

UPCOMING EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES

Speaking of upcoming events, in addition to our own convention, some of the most noteworthy discussed at the meeting included:

CNPA Equipment Grant Deadline — April 24

These grant awards are intended specifically for the purchase of equipment to improve the production process at campus newspapers. There is no minimum grant amount. The maximum grant in 2009 is $1,500.

Journalism Innovations II: New Work and Ideas for Making the News — April 30-May 1 — SFSU

The group is seeking panelists to participate in discussions on Big Ideas About Media and Journalism Policy; Funding and Philanthropy; New Business Models; Public Media and Social Ventures; Evolving Journalism Methos and Techniques; Career Counseling; and Social Media, Citizen Journalism and Blogger Technology.

SCJEA Write-offs — May 16 — Fullerton College

This is the equivalent of JACC’s on-the-spot contests, but without the surrounding conference. Students compete in periodic contests throughout the year to qualify for this competition. They usually need a lot of judges who can show up for a few hours that afternoon. So mark your calendars.

JEANC State Convention — Oct. 23-25 — Sacramento

First, it really is a Northern California event and, yeah, it is pretty close to our regional conferences, but it can be an opportunity for us to connect more with high school programs.

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CIIJ is planning yet another workshop on technology specifically aimed at journalism educators in early October to coincide with the scheduled Online News Association convention Oct. 1-3. More to come on that later.

Other possible CIIJ future activities include:

• A Digital Diversity Fund that will provide students and educators to apply for $200-$500 stipends to attend technology training workshops. This is an idea in progress, but may be up and running as early as fall.
• A Journalism Incubator program to foster entrepreneurial opportunities for students. This idea is also in progress and may take until at least 2010 to get underway.
• A revamping of the annual SFSU Journalism Job Fair as a job and internship fair.

About 20 journalists, journalism teachers and journalism students  learned the basics of WordPress blogging software today at workshop held at and co-sponsored by the Cerritos College journalism program and the Los Angeles Chapter of the Asian American Journalism Association.

A second, more advanced workshop will be held at Santa Monica College next Saturday.

During the workshop I was able to set up a new WordPress blog site for Rich’s Musings, adjust features and design (and managed to create the logo above in PhotoShop and then upload it) and transfer all my previous posts from my Blogger blog to the new site. Later in the day I even went to GoDaddy.com and purchased the more generic domain of richsmusings.com. I knew from previous experiences how to set the new domain to forward to the new site. The latter step was not necessary for the WordPress blog, just another thing I learned I could do. Previous experience also gave me the knowledge I needed to link to Leezal’s photos and the Flicker slide show.

Cerritos Journalism likes to co-sponsor events like these with professional organizations to 1) give students the opportunity to mingle and network with professionals and 2) to enhance the skill sets of journalism students and professionals. Other groups we’ve hosted in the past few years have been the Society of Newspaper Designers and the California Chicano News Media Association. In addition, we’ve hosted our own workshops on podcasting (with the help of Apple Computers) and editors’ roundtables. And we often host high school writing competitions or workshops.

Hosting these events gets easier with each one you do and you might consider trying it. We host enough events during the year –from our own Media Awards Nights twice a year, to simple events like the editors’ roundtable, to professional events like this one that we have a good supply of paper plates and napkins and plastic utensils and nice table clothes (important, classy touch!) that it is easy. We actively seek to do at least a couple of things each semester. We’ve got a good facility and the hardest part of hosting the events is finding a partner who usually does all the promo work and supplies the workshop leader.

Well, learning social networking using Facebook has me learning how to share the short story, too.

One of Facebook’s main features is the “what are you doing now” feature where you are encouraged to tell your “friends” what you are doing now.

A lot of my friends write a lot of unintelligible dribble. Yuck. Even the ones who write an intelligible message, such as “Rich is sad,” don’t tell you WHY they are sad. If I care about my friends, I want to know.

Being journalistically minded I at least want to put what I am doing into some kind of context so my friends, if they care, can understand what I am saying. I try to convey a short news story about myself.

The challenge is, though, is that you have only about 150 characters of space with that “what are you doing now” tool. I’m finding it good practice for me to say what I want to say more concisely.

Of course, when that doesn’t work, you always have other options, including posting a sentence devoid of enough information, and then immediately posting a comment –which you friends can do, too– that gives additional information, kind of like a subhead to a headline might.

Now, I haven’t really delved into Twitter, though I recently have started to see some good journalistic samples so I’m beginning to understand the value, but there you are limited to just 144 characters per message.

Another thing I am trying to do with Facebook and social networking is tell stories a bit more often. As Solano College’s Mary Mazzocco shared on the Journalism Association of Community Colleges’ listserve when I started eging on JACC instructors to join Facebook, you want to get out and mingle often at the party, not just stay in a corner, but you don’t want to overdo. Unless there is a reason, I really do not need to know that you are leaving your office to walk to your car and then get another note once you’ve arrived at your car.

But I try to share often, at least daily, what is going on in my life. Some of my Facebook friends NEVER seem to share what is going on in their life.

Okay, I’ve just used up more than 2,193 characters, or about 407 words, so I’ll shut for now. I could never have shared all that in 150 characters!

(Feb. 24, 2009) — Donna Brazile was delightfully folksy, Mike Murphy was amusingly arrogant, and Maureen Dowd was disappointingly detatched as the three lumanaries squared off in a panel discussion on timely political issues Monday night at the opening salvo of the American Jewish University’s 2009 speaker series.

Outspoken political commentator and founder of the Huffington Post online news site Arianna Huffington stood in for missing-in-action news commentator Jim Lehrer as moderator for the discussion at the Universal City Gibson Amphitheater.

CNN political commentator Brazile and conservative political media consultant Murphy controlled the night as the group evaluated the effectiveness of the Barack Obama Administration and, in Huffington’s words, “the upside down world we live in today.” In fact, the two, at times, seemed to be competing for who could produce the most sound bites as they unabashedly represented their liberal and conservative views.

Brazile won the battle for most sound bites and provided some of the evening’s most amusing moments, especially when her stage microphone did not work properly at the beginning. “I knew I’d have problems with it if I put it (the microphone) over my right side (breast),” she quipped. She tapped the mic until the sound crew got the sound levels correct.

When it was working properly she turned to Murphy on her right and, while tapping the microphone, asked him if he wanted to touch it. It became a running joke throughout the evening as she offered to let him touch it and he quickly declined the offer.

Murphy predictably pushed conservative points of view, but was refreshingly self-effacing and practical in many of his answers. If Brazile was popular and funny, then Murphy scored with some his statements, such as pointing out that the Republican Party, nationally, is in big trouble for now as it is has all but been relegated to an unimportant minority in the House of Representatives, Senate and White House. And, he said, things are likely to get worse and stay that way for “four, eight or even 12 years.”

He said the party’s biggest problem is that it currently appeals only only to one demographic: white males. While white males may still be the largest part of a plural electorate, it is shrinking.

Unless the GOP redefines itself to appeal to Hispanics and African-Americans, without giving up its conservative values, of course, he said that it will continue to diminish in importance.

Unless, that is, Democrats “continue to do what Democrats do and go too far and screw up” to give the GOP an opening.

The group gave California as an example. Panelists agreed that California’s state government is considered a joke around the country. Murphy added that he felt it was because the legislature is too dominated by Democrats who act in a dysfunctional fashion. Without party parity there is little hope they will allow the state to become governable.

The whole panel gave Obama good marks for his first month in office, but each felt that he has yet to live up to the potential he has. Even Murphy felt that the president had potential to make significant changes in government, but only if he is “visited by the ghost of LBJ” and learns how to control Congress, which seems to be working its own agenda right now.

NY Times columnist Dowd seemed detached from the discussion all evening. She is bright and articulate and had interesting answers whenever Huffington drew her in to the conversation, but she seemed otherwise unengaged. In fact, she spent most of the evening with her body slightly turned away from the rest of the group. While others were sure what they wanted to say, she had to spend moments deciding what she wanted to stay.

In retrospect, this should not be too surprising. In podcasts I’ve listen to of other lectures she has given, this is her speaking style. She’s a great writer, but less-than-enthusiastic speaker.

Her most memorable moments of the evening were when:

• Huffington cornered her in to sharing a dinner-table admission that she had twice placed notes in Jerusalem’s West Wall, while on assignment, asking for a Jewish husband. She’s come to the conclusion that God probably doesn’t think pairing a Jewish man with a Black Irish Catholic woman is a good idea; and
• She revealed that after Obama’s almost embarrassing acceptance on his European trip after securing the Democratic nomination that she asked him if he “needed a cigarette” after the experience, implying that the treatment he got was almost like having sex.

Huffington, after an opening monolog on her take of today’s “upside-down world,” relegated herself to moderator and did a good job mixing it up and making sure Murphy and Brazile did not totally exclude Dowd.

The panel was the first in a series of lectures/panel discussions scheduled by AJU. To come later this year are former New York mayor/Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuiani; an attorney-general faceoff with Janet Reno, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales; and a Mid-East discussion with Madeline Albright, Jehan Sedat and Dahlia Rabin.