It has been quite a while since I posted anything to my Rich’s Musings blog and I really should spend more time here. I seem instead to do my blogging on Facebook.
What got me thinking about this is that I have spent much of the last week laying groundwork for a major program review of the Cerritos Mass Communications program that is due next year at this time. This is something we have to do every six years, but I won’t be around at the college next year at this time, so I have been trying to help my colleagues out by moving us along the path as much as possible this far out so they will be ready for it.
Anyway, it has gotten me thinking about what I have accomplished as a journalism teacher and what I wish I had accomplished or might continue to work on after retirement
Something that I think is lacking from high school, community college and university programs today is resource outreach. We all tend to work in our ow silos when it comes to covering news and that limits us in so many ways. While I am a b-i-g believer in community-based news coverage, the industry today is having to manager regional, state and national coverage with media partnerships. Newspapers, news radio, news television and independent news operations are cooperating more and more in news coverage. For instance, a newspaper might partner with a local television station to incorporate video with a written story on the newspaper’s website.
I wish I had or could find the resources to start a non-profit news organization dedicated to partnering different community college programs to better tell far-reaching news stories.
For instance, through my OnlineElsewhere.facebook.com site, where I repost stories from California community college student publication websites I see a number of colleges are developing free tuition programs. Every site covers it from a one-college point of view. A partner effort could cover it from a statewide perspective: who is doing it and how is it being financed. Such coverage could help those colleges not yet talking about these kinds of plans. It would put the topic on the table and help those not yet doing it see what kinds of efforts work.
Every year colleges across the state report on enrollment figures. Some colleges go up, others go down. What are the statewide trends and where are they happening? There are just so many stories that could be told.
And the benefit to the students who worked on such projects would be so awesome. We all know that the workplace requires team effort from a diverse team. But we teach that only within our college boundary silos. We could be doing so much more.
This is one of those “if I won the lottery” ideas I run through my head from time to time. I would love to help such a program be developed to train better journalists for the future. I have devoted 41 years to community college journalism and hope that I have made contributions that leave all the programs in the state better off, not just my own program. While I am just months from retiring from teaching, I feel I have so much more to give.
Rich's Musings 