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Twitter classes for aspiring journalists
5 September 2009
A new course will teach media students how to break news via social networking sites, reports Jon Marcus in Chicago
Students will learn to give readers the news in 140 characters or fewer in a new graduate journalism course at DePaul University’s College of Communications in Chicago.
The course, “Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets”, will train prospective journalists in the use of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.
Although such sites have become integral tools of journalism, present-day journalists “are ingrained in the old ways of doing things”, and don’t know how to use them to best effect, said Craig Kanalley, the DePaul alumnus who will teach the class.
While many people purport to write about the news on social networking sites, Mr Kanalley, who is also the founder of popular world news site Breaking Tweets, said: “There’s a lot of garbage out there and it clutters Twitter streams and it’s all over the place. So part of this class is finding relevant Tweets and swimming through all the clutter.”
Students – 13 are enrolled – will be taught basic software coding and will learn how to separate reliable and unreliable content. “It’s important that we hold on to all the principles of journalism,” Mr Kanalley said.
Bruce Evensen, director of DePaul’s MA in journalism programme, said that although some traditionalists decry the truncated nature of news provided in a Twitter posting or a mobile phone text, it was “eyewitness reporting”.
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Readers' comments
Been using twitter for 2+ years for supervising project students. A great way to reduce long emails and do to the point communication and yet beat the isolation experienced by final year students doing their projects. Students share sites that are useful for their project work and its management much like a virtual team in the real world may interact,. They projects are individual and twitter help them to learn on the job about different ways people learn and tackle different problems. In that they come across something they can use for their work.
I used Twitter during workshops with New Media classes for the first time this year. It was tricky to set up a large number of accounts all following one another but when I asked students to tweet as they read/watched new media works (rather than afterwards) we quickly gained new insights into how new media works are read - and the 140-character limit combined with permission to be irreverent and informal meant that students took the minimum time away from the reading process.