mistersugar: Bloggers at the gate

Bloggers at the gate

This is posted in the Sugarcubes linklog to the left, but I feel strongly about the point, so I’ll say it again:

No new dean of the UNC j-school should be hired until he/she has read this and responded to it – on a blog!

Because you sure wouldn’t know by looking at the j-school’s website that the school was a sponsor of the highly successful Triangle Bloggers Conference, where journalism was an important topic of the dialogue. (I like and respect my former classmate John Kuka, who is new to the job of assistant dean for communications; I hope a new dean gives John room to become a blogger.) Even the university news service was baffled about sending out a news release for an already popular conference. I responded with a measured but passionate “the reason to send out a news release would be less to drum up participation and more to build knowledge of how the university is supporting innovation in journalism.” (The university mentioned the bloggercon in a news brief of a few paragraphs.)

One of my favorite moments of the conference was when Phil Meyer slipped in, took a seat and soon began to give his unique perspective on the intersection of blogs and newspapers. Note 2 to new dean: give Phil a blog on the school’s home page. That will instantly get the country paying attention to the school. While you’re at it, invite Peggy Noonan and Jay Rosen to campus for a roundtable discussion on blogs and journalism. If you don’t, the blogging community will, and journalism will look that much stodgier and that much lamer.

The ball is in your court, JOMC.

And if you need a visual cue, see this (via Dave).

NB. Paul Jones, co-organizer of the conference and my inspiration, is a member of the JOMC faculty as well as the SILS faculty. He’s a star, and without him the bloggercon wouldn’t have been what it turned out to be. Thanks to him for his vision.

late evening on 02/17/05 in "Media" | permalink

As a faculty member at the JOMC and a blogger, I think that Anton and Eric have made some good points here. I mentioned recently in a news-ed faculty retreat that we need to start teaching blogging. I got a lot of blank stares. There are few faculty members who think that blogging is something that they need to pay attention to. It reminds me of what some people thought of the Internet, and the looks on their faces must have been similar to the executives of the eight-track tape companies when new technology was introduced.

I’m also on the search committee for a new dean, but I doubt that we’ll pick someone who has read the Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

As for the school’s vision, yes it it lacking. But next week, the faculty is scheduled to begin a series of meetings about what our vision for the future will be. I think that will get us started.

No journalism school is perfect. But we’re a collection of who we are. If Phil Meyer wanted to start a blog, he could have one up and running in a day. Right now, we’re full of old dinosaurs who are aware of blogs but aren’t willing to embrace where the mass communication world is heading.
— Chris Roush on Sep 16, 09:13 PM #

Mark, you’re right that there have been other blogging efforts at JOMC: the Certificate in Technology and Communication, a distance education offering, has a course taught by Deb Aikat that included a number of modules about blogging, which I wrote. And JOMC also offered an executive education seminar about blogging for professional journalists (which you participated in), an idea I proposed to John Conway.

Deb and John and Paul Jones and a few others – and now Ferrell Guillory and Eric Gautschi with their SouthNow southern politics blog – certainly recognize there’s a place for blogging in the j-school. And Bob Stepno was talking blogs in Carroll Hall before I arrived.

Deb and Tom Linden regularly gave me time in their classes to talk about blogs and e-journalism. Louise Spieler, John Conway’s replacement, jumped at the idea to sponsor the Triangle Bloggers Conference.

Geez, listing all that makes me wonder if I’m complaining for no reason. There is plenty of faculty interest in blogging.

But I guess my point still stands about the institutional interest: blogging is one of the biggest issues in journalism today, and there’s nothing on the JOMC website, the window to the institution. Which makes the j-school look like it missed the boat. Heck, I’d be happy even if JOMC used its website to argue against blogging.

The j-school will announce a new dean in the coming weeks. That new dean has an excellent opportunity to push JOMC onto the boat.
— Anton Zuiker on Feb 23, 10:00 PM #

As a State grad and someone who’s made a career in journalism without a journalism degree, I don’t usually defend the JOMC program at UNC. However, in fairness, there is this: http://www.jomc.unc.edu/executiveeducation/internetstudies.html

In addition, last year the school put on an exec ed course about blogging and journalism. I know ‘cause I was on one of the panels.

Sure, the J School could and should do more with blogging, etc. But it’s not fair to make it sound as though it’s doing nothing.
— Mark Tosczak on Feb 23, 09:06 PM #

Eric, great response. Thank you. I fretted about my post above – I was able to get my master’s degree in medical journalism precisely because of Dean Cole’s success in building the school and Tom Linden’s success in creating the medical journalism program – both prime examples of how JOMC is adept at innovation. (I also didn’t want to step on John’s toes; I know he’s got a lot to juggle.)

Blogging is just one eddy in the roiling river of journalism, I know. I’d love to see the next JOMC dean sponsor a series of community charettes to get as many ideas as possible for how media can be rebuilt. I suspect blogs will have a place in the new journalism house.

Maybe that Dean will also hire you to create a new department of online journalism. :)
— Anton Zuiker on Feb 21, 12:11 PM #

Anton,
I applaud your dedication to promoting blogging as a useful tool—in community-building, agenda-setting, media criticism and even reporting, it’s already had a profound impact and it’s obviously only the beginning.

However, in all of the giddy exuberance over the possibilities of this new tool, I think a lot of people are getting swept up in a spirit of boosterism and magic bullet-ism. In other words, blogs have tremendous potential for affecting positive change but they aren’t necessarily the be-all-end-all. Blogs are just one piece in a larger puzzle that is the changing media landscape.

The fact the UNC J-school doesn’t blog isn’t suprising at all. They have bigger problems. While the school has been really successful in attracting good people (faculty, staff, students) and good facilities (a nice building, the Park library, updated computer equipment, new convergence lab, etc.) it has done so largely by being really effective at fundraising. Dean Cole has been a world-class fundraiser. What the J-school has not been so successful at is in figuring out how all the pieces fit together, i.e. defining a vision and an identity. It’s what Bush 41 once dismissively called the “vision thing.” Well, the J-school needs the vision thing.

Part of that vision would be defining how the J-school will fit in with the changing media ecology.

Blogs, you say? How about just catching up with the Web? First and foremost, this is a JOURNALISM school and yet it offers not a single course in online journalism. It is school that defines “electronic communication” as television and radio and taught undergraduates a course essentially in how to use the Internet (J50) as recently as 2004, something that would have been much more appropriate and actually rather innovative were it offered a decade ago.

To me, this is the discussion we need to have about blogs and J-schools—how can bloggers learn skills and professional standards from journalism and how can journalists learn the tools and the ethos (openness, iterative process, group-think, speed-to-market and creativity) of the blogosphere.

Honestly, this J-school is not ready for that conversation. At this rate, maybe it will engage in that discussion somewhere around 2015.

If the dean is down with the blogosphere, great. And if he has the time to devote to blogging, I’d be amazed and maybe a little disturbed too—there’s only so much time in a day and there are all kinds of mission-critical activities a dean should be spending his time doing. Is blogging one of them? I’m much more concerned about whether or not he is just up with the times and isn’t so stuck in an outdated mindset that he can’t adapt.

One last point—Peggy Noonan wrote a fascinating column, yes. What she does for a living (former political speechwriter and advisor, now an op-ed columnist) is pretty close to what most bloggers do. I’d be more interested in hearing what a veteran reporter/editor/publisher has to say about the intersection of journalism and blogging, however.

Lastly, congratulations on a successful conference. It was very impressive.

-Eric
— Eric Gautschi on Feb 21, 10:14 AM #

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