That’s my conclusion after overseeing the publication of “Master Class: Teaching Advice for Journalism and Mass Communication Instructors,” a new book produced by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication standing committee on teaching, which I’ve chaired for the past four years.

It’s no secret that journalism remains in a state of upheaval, with many media organizations struggling to find new, and profitable, business models that will sustain their operations. What often gets underplayed – or downright ignored – is how fast academia is adapting to those changes.

“Master Class” addresses the issues facing today’s journalism instructors in a way that the last book on teaching in our field, which came out in 1992, would have never imagined.

Here are some of the major takeaways that came out of the two years it took to put the book together:

1. Technology is the future

If your program is not teaching the technology that comes along with producing journalism, then it is in danger.

Many schools are now exposing their students to the best search engine optimization techniques and using social media. But many schools are woefully behind in these areas. (Hint: Look to see whether your school has a LinkedIn page and how many of your school’s instructors are on Twitter.)

And “technology” means more than showing students how to use a content management system or download and edit videos. Today’s journalism student needs to be exposed to how virtual reality and artificial intelligence can be used to help tell stories. They also need basic coding skills.

The leading journalism programs are training their students to build media apps, and to download and massage data in ways that help tell stories. They are teaching students to use technology to attract audiences that may have never been exposed to content that they want and find useful.

2. Instruction is moving online

Many of academia’s top journalism programs have online master’s degrees that cater to professionals that need to upgrade their skills and understanding of how mass media works. That’s good and serves the industry.

(Photo: Getty Images)

The next step is moving more undergraduate education, and perhaps even doctoral education, online. As our universities and colleges struggle with limited classroom space and resources, the solution is to put more journalism education on the internet. It’s how most journalism is delivered today.

To be sure, not all undergraduate students thrive in an online teaching environment. But today’s millennial student wants flexible learning, and journalism can easily be taught with online tools. I’ve been teaching one section of our introductory newswriting class online now for more than a decade, and I see more and more skills courses moving online.

3. Non-tenured instructors in the classroom

The percentage of non-tenured, or non-tenure track instructors in the classroom is increasing, particularly at state universities receiving smaller slices of the budget each year.

As a result, many programs are hiring lecturers and contract professors from the local market to teach many of their skills courses. There’s a positive to this move in that professionals have recent experience. But this leads to higher turnover among instructors, and could cause the quality of education to decrease.

Some journalism programs are also partnering with local media organizations to have reporters and editors teach their classes at no expense to the university. The media organization gets exposed to the students and is able to recruit the best ones to come work for it after graduation. And the program saves money that can be spent elsewhere.

4. More schools have become content producers

The “teaching hospital” model of journalism education espoused by the Knight Foundation has taken hold at many journalism programs, which are now having their students produce content – either in the form of print or video – distributed to the local media for them to use. Some media are even providing spaces in their shrunken newsrooms for the students to work.

These classes are typically capstone courses for seniors that require them to cover a beat as well as market their stories to the local media organizations. The students get published clips while the media gets cheap (often free) content. As an example, last year I started the North Carolina Business News Wire.

In some cases, this puts the journalism program in competition with the student newspaper, which can be a tricky relationship, especially if the newspaper is not independent of the university.

I’d like to see a future where programs start selling advertising on a website where this content is posted, allowing them to generate revenue that can be put back into the education of journalism students. It would also allow programs to experiment with journalism business models themselves.

5. The lecture is not dead, but it’s on life support

This should go without saying, but it’s no longer functional for a journalism instructor to simply walk into a classroom and spend 45 minutes lecturing about AP style or the inverted pyramid to students. The millennial student will zone out and start scanning Snapchat, Twitter and other social media on their phone.

The best journalism instructors today incorporate video, gifs and other technology into their class time. Whether we like it or not, today’s journalism student also wants to be entertained. If you can get their attention by using new and unusual teaching strategies, then they’re more likely to pay attention to the importance of checking facts.

I’m bullish about the future of journalism, and I’m bullish about the future of journalism education. In the past few years, I’ve taught myself – and my students – how to do basic coding, create a website, produce email newsletters, shoot and download video, and build an audience on Twitter.

And I’m still teaching my students the journalism basics I learned more than 30 years ago as well.

Chris Roush is the Walter Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism and the chair of the AEJMC Standing Elected Committee on Teaching. He was the School’s senior associate dean from 2011 to 2015 and director of the master’s program from 2007 to 2010.

The post 5 Takeaways on the State – and Future – of Journalism Education appeared first on MediaShift.

The stories from the North Carolina Business News Wire have been picked up by media such as the Charlotte Observer, The (Durham) Herald-Sun, the Charlotte Business Journal and WRAL Techwire.

The relationship worked well for everyone involved. The students received bylines in professional media while the news organizations received stories that they would not have covered otherwise because of their reduced newsroom staffs. And the journalism school received exposure across the state.

The North Carolina Business News Wire provided students with real world experience, and news outlets with stories they wouldn’t have otherwise covered. Photo by http://www.ncbiznews.com/.

“Traditional newsrooms in North Carolina can’t keep up, and that’s where we come in,” said Hailey Waller, a senior business journalism major from Manhattan Beach, California. “We fill the niche of providing timely, top quality, data-driven stories out of the sheer desire to get our names out there as aspiring business reporters.”

Before the semester, Waller had not written anything published by a news organization. But she wrote more than 40 stories for the Business News Wire and parlayed that experience into an internship for Bloomberg News next summer and several freelance assignments for Business North Carolina magazine.

The goal at the beginning of the semester for the News Wire was to write stories about small public companies and private companies that often fell below the radar of many state media. Our theory was that exposing North Carolina residents to these companies would improve their understanding of the state’s economy.

Some issues with production

To be sure, there were issues. The students struggled at the beginning in understanding what was newsworthy in the Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they were reading every day. Others failed to meet the minimum number of stories — two — required each week although some aggressive students regularly wrote three and four stories per week.

The News Wire incorrectly identified a Bojangles’ investor in one story, and it used the incorrect logo for a bank in illustrating another story.

Some media in the state ignored our stories when we sent them copy about companies in their circulation area. And the students learned a hard lesson about journalism: Some newsrooms use newswire content to alert them to stories that they needed to write themselves without giving credit to the journalist who originally broke the story.

Speed was also an issue. When news breaks, it doesn’t usually wait around until 10 p.m. — after a student is done with classes and completing homework — to be written. The student reporters learned that the earlier they could get their stories on the wire, the more likely they’d be carried by a professional media organization.

But the positives far outweighed the negatives. In all, the students published more than 330 stories across 15 weeks, and approximately a third of those stories were picked up by one media organization or another.

The students learned what our media “clients” wanted in terms of content and what they ignored. Stories about layoffs, gleaned from WARN Act filings with a state government agency, were fought over by the student reporters after it became obvious that these would always be picked up. But stories about economic data and patent and trademark applications or grants were dropped after fall break because no one was publishing them.

Justina Vasquez, a student who worked with the North Carolina News Wire will intern with the Wall Street Journal next summer. Photo by Chris Roush.

“Although the wire covers local news and all its content probably isn’t newsworthy to every publication I’ll ever write for, I’m relieved that I have a better grasp of and more respect for important events in a company’s life that should be covered,” said Justina Vasquez, a student from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who will intern for The Wall Street Journal next summer.

The students also experimented. For example, after Donald Trump was elected president, Vasquez was assigned to produce a story about how the election was affecting North Carolina stocks and put together a chart showing the biggest gainers and losers.

By the end of the semester, the students were also posting Facebook Live segments where they discussed the major business news stories in the state that day. They also created a Twitter account for the News Wire and a daily email that by Dec. 8 had 90 subscribers.

The day after the end of classes, the News Wire students presented their experience to a group of faculty, professional journalists, fellow students and the head of investor relations and public relations for one of the companies they’d written about.

“I’m impressed that I’ve written so much,” Vasquez said. “I’ve been keeping a Google Drive folder of all my stories, and I easily have about three times the clips I’ve written anywhere else combined. The stories are short and the nature of the wire requires lots of content with a quick turnaround, but I’m still impressed with myself and my ability to write well about companies in such wide-ranging industries.”

Suggestions for improving

There were suggestions on what they could do better — the IR professional would have liked to have met the student reporter who covered his company’s IPO — but the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Mark Sutter, the editor of the Triad Business Journal in Greensboro, told the students he used their content to supplement the reporting from his newsroom. Almost everyone suggested that the News Wire expand its content next semester with longer, in-depth stories about the companies we’d covered.

As for next semester, the News Wire is expanding. Some of the students will be returning for a second semester of work, while eight new students have signed up for the wire. As a result of the larger staff, the News Wire will expand by covering Maryland companies for citybizlist’s site in Baltimore.

We’re also considering the News Wire’s future. The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper, is interested in creating a subscription business news site reporting on the Research Triangle Park companies that are the News Wire’s bread and butter, and I’ve held some informal talks about how we can collaborate.

More importantly, the North Carolina Business News Wire has shown news organizations that there’s a desire for stories about companies that routinely fall below the radar of traditional media.

And it’s shown other journalism schools that there is at least one new and unique way of providing students with professional work that gets them experience, as well as an understanding of how a media organization works.

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also the author of “Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication.”

The post How UNC’s Student-Run Business News Wire is Expanding appeared first on MediaShift.

Called the North Carolina Business News Wire, the news service is covering more than 100 public companies that regularly file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as hundreds of private companies that also file with the SEC when they raise money from investors.

The students will receive credit for their work as part of a new class in the School of Media and Journalism called “Business News Wire” that will continue in future semesters, ensuring that the wire service has a steady stream of stories.

The wire service has been an idea I’ve had for more than a decade, but other obligations prevented me from getting it off the ground in the past.

The stories will be distributed in a daily email to media across the state, and media will be free to use the content as they see fit without charge. If the wire service is successful in the fall, the School may charge media a small fee to use the content beginning in 2017 to fund student internships for the wire service during the summer.

An early user of the content

One media organization has already begun using the content, with others saying they will begin using the stories soon.

Rick Smith, a longtime business journalist who runs WRAL.com’s Tech Wire, began using stories last week.

“Having your copy helps me greatly, and it also helps that I can expand on your copy quickly as necessary rather than having to read filings then generate stories from scratch,” said Smith in an email to me. “I hope others see the value in what you are providing.”

Here’s how the wire service will work:

Each week, the students in the class will have to write at least three stories based on SEC filings. They’ll track North Carolina company filings using Sqoop, the free, online service used by many business journalists throughout the country that allows them to receive regular emails when a company files a document based on their saved search.

I’ll edit the stories before posting them on the website to make sure that they contain information readers will want. (I’m a former business journalist with experience at BusinessWeek magazine, Bloomberg News and the business news desks of the Tampa Tribune, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Atlanta Constitution.) At the beginning of the semester, students received story templates that show them what should be in each story based on the SEC document.

Among the stories that the students will be writing will be executive compensation, quarterly earnings, insider buying and selling of stock, investors buying and selling company stock, mergers and acquisitions, and executive and board member resignations and hirings. Each story will include a link to the filing, and each story will include the company’s stock price if the company is publicly traded.

Students with experience

UNC’s School of Media and Journalism started an undergraduate business journalism major with the Kenan-Flagler Business School on campus in 2010. The program now has three dozen majors and has alumni working for major media, such as Emily Steel and Sapna Maheshwari, who are both on the business desk of the New York Times, and CNBC anchor Kayla Tausche.

Most of the students working on the wire service this fall have already taken “Economics Reporting” and “Business Reporting” at the School, so they know the importance of these stories to readers.

And many of them have professional experience. For example, senior Lauren Thomas has had internships at TheStreet.com, Bloomberg News and CNBC’s San Francisco bureau. Senior Wei Zhou interned with the Wall Street Journal this summer in Shanghai. Junior Lauren Hong honed her writing skills this past summer at the Triangle Business Journal.

Senior Hailey Waller began writing for the wire before the semester started, so she could get comfortable with the writing style and finding news in the filings. Some of her stories have already run on WRAL.com’s Tech Wire.

Her story on health care company CTMG Inc. raising $2.37 million was picked up here, and when a New York hedge fund bought a 6.6 percent stake in BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, it was picked up here.

One student’s favorite class

“There’s no shortage of SEC filings coming into my inbox every day, and there are a surprising number of interesting stories that sometimes pass under the radar,” Waller said. “We appreciate the reader feedback we’ve gotten so far about which filings to cover.

“The school semester doesn’t start for another week, but I can already tell that North Carolina Business News Wire will be my favorite class. By having Chris edit one of my stories almost every day, I’m able to make the most of his feedback and use what I’ve learned going forward when I write my next stories.”

The students will also be learning the operational side of a news wire. During the first few weeks of the class, they’ll have to set up the email alert system for media and develop how the stories will appear on the website. They’ll also have to create pages on the website for news about specific companies, and they’ll have to create Twitter and Facebook feeds and pages.

The students are also interested in experimenting with the news wire. A couple of them want to produce and distribute a regular video that will cover North Carolina business news.

Professional feedback and help

During the semester, students will also get feedback from business wire service experts, such as AP business editor Lisa Gibbs and Tom Contiliano of Bloomberg News, who provided guidance on how the wire should be formed before it started.

The AP is currently using software from Durham-based Automated Insights Inc. to help it write thousands of earnings stories each quarter. Its CEO, Robbie Allen, is a UNC-Chapel Hill alumnus and has offered to meet with the students as well and let them use his company’s software.

If we’re successful, there’s a business news media company based in Maryland that wants us to start covering companies in their state next semester.

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also the author of “Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication.”

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