Meeting of the minds
I met Professor Jim Stovall at the University of Tennessee in September 2006. I was pretty nervous about meeting him, after all, he was the author of Web Journalism: Practice and Promise of a New Medium, a book we had used in the online journalism classes at the University of Kansas. He was famous!
Lucky for me when I walked into Professor Stovall’s office, we immediately clicked. We share many of the same philosophies about new media and journalism.
We believe in good headlines and teases, multimedia storytelling, online-first news, external links, descriptive text and transparency in the reporting process.
It was with these things in mind that I helped him create the Tennessee Journalist, a news website for the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. The Django-based Content Management System (CMS) was development by Johnny Dobbins and me in less than 30 days. UT student Joseph Agreda has spent the last year upgrading the CMS and adding some great, cool features. Today, the site is updated daily (sometimes hourly) by a staff of more than 30 UT students. Professor Stovall often introduces me as the “mother of TNJN.com”, a title I am honored to be given.
Last week, Stovall and the Journalism and Electronic Media department hosted the Inter-Collegiate Online News Network conference to introduce and offer the TNJN CMS to journalism schools and professionals who are looking for a better way to manage and publish online news and information.
That’s me on the far right, yammering about something on the panel with journalism educators at ICONN January 16. Photo by Ben Moser
Due to an unfortunate incident with United Airlines at the O’Hare Airport, I missed the first day’s panels. You can get the full ICONN report on TNJN.com.
On Friday, I sat on a panel with journalism educators to pontificate on the future of journalism curriculum. I had a lot of random thoughts, including:
- What we need is a fail class. A retrospective look at new media initiatives that have failed.
- The new convergence is between editorial and advertising.
- There is no such thing as online journalism, there’s just journalism.
To close the conference, we discussed the mission statement for ICONN. We all agree that the vision has to be fluid, what we are today won’t be what we need to be tomorrow. ICONN must be able to evolve.
For more thoughts from the journalism educators, students and professionals who attended the ICONN Con, see #ICONN on Twitter.