Tag Archives: Journalism

Journalism and Project Glass

  By Jeremy Littau | April 1, 2013 - 11:04 am | Blog
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Stanford PhD student Andrej Karpathy has mined the list of people notified on Twitter about acceptance to the Glass Explorers project. As of Sunday evening at 6 p.m., he had catalogued 4,238 people who’d been notified. The full list is pretty interesting data – there is decent research potential here on how people envision using a project that they’ve likely only seen through media.

TechCrunch had an interesting roundup of the invite list. They note that there seems to be some favoritism showed to high follower counts and celebrity, according to Karpathy’s analysis. Not a huge surprise. There will be social challenges to something like Glass getting accepted enough that people will want to buy it in large numbers. Smartphones are one thing – the concept of a phone has been around for several generations – but this is a much more difficult product for people to envision in terms of useful features.

I went through the list and pulled out pitches that were geared around news or journalism (on the production side, not the consumption side). I added the people I found to a curated Twitter list, and you can subscribe to the list at the link. While I will be testing the device out as part of the program, I am very interested to know how other news people – both professionals and educators – are envisioning ways to use it. And it’ll be great to follow their progress.

Next up, I’m going to compile a list of university educators who will be using Glass.

Journalism students can’t afford to sleep on Google Plus

  By Jeremy Littau | July 7, 2011 - 12:06 pm | Blog
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The early days of a new tech launch are always a test. Should we adopt it or not? Will it be around for enough time to justify the time spent learning and using it? If it dies, will we lose all of our data?

Many are having this same discussion about Google Plus right now. As the new-kid-on-the-block challenger to Facebook, there are many questions out there about whether it’s worth it to learn it. I’m already on record about the fact that I think this thing is a game-changer, and I think it’s time for our Lehigh journalism, marketing, and PR students to get on the train now so they can be ahead of the curve. We don’t want to wait until someone tells us at a leadership or strategic communication seminar 2 years from now.

I’m also making this argument for the university as a whole, and you can read it here. I do think GPlus is going to change the way we do education, but this post is devoted to journalism.

Before I start, I do want to say that Silagh White and I are going to work to have a meeting on campus that goes over the basics and will have some networking for folks interested in using Plus here. More on that to come, but if you want to take part then please email me or leave something in the comments. And make sure to circle me on my profile. (more…)

Journalism education: More community of collaboration needed

  By Jeremy Littau | February 28, 2011 - 10:19 am | Blog
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The most interesting turn my classes have taken this semester has been the step up in collaboration. Both my J198 Multimedia Reporting and my J325 New Media & Social Change courses have been made more use of collaboration in projects outside the bounds of the class itself. This has been my “classroom without walls” vision on steroids.

In J325, my students are collaborating on a social change project with students in Kjerstin Thorson’s class at the University of Southern California. This has been interesting to watch mostly because my main rule for myself has been to stay out of things. It’s in my nature to plan and micromonitor the learning process, but Kjerstin and I both have made the committment to let these projects develop organically. In plainspeak, it means I’m staying the hell out of it and being more of a guide and sounding board. Their pitches are due this week, with only one guideline: we want you to wow us.

In J198 we’ve always used community folks to help us build stories. The new wrinkle this semester has been the expansion of the classroom in a cross-university partnership with classes doing something similar to what we’re doing with multimedia. It began with a Twitter scavenger hunt, set up by Carrie Brown at the University of Memphis, which had students at Lehigh, Memphis, West Virginia, Drury, and Oregon all doing the same assignment and following one another’s class hashtags. (more…)

Olbermann is latest sacrifice to god of objectivity

  By Jeremy Littau | November 5, 2010 - 1:28 pm | Blog
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Politico broke a story this morning with news that Keith Olbermann had donated to three Democratic party candidates in the run up to the Nov. 2 elections. The donations, it reported, were a potential violation of NBC News’ ethics policy. As Politico states:

NBC has a rule against employees contributing to political campaigns, and a wide range of news organizations prohibit political contributions — considering it a breach of journalistic independence to contribute to the candidates they cover.

It sounds like Olbermann potentially violated the spirit of the rule if it’s basically trying to stop donations. He did donate to a candidate after having them as a guest on his Countdown show. Whether that counts as “covering” them or not I don’t know, but an argument could be made for it.

This afternoon, MSNBC suspended Olbermann indefinitely without pay. It certainly is their right, but I would urge them to rethink the position. (more…)

Online News Association conference had your hope and change

  By Jeremy Littau | November 1, 2010 - 12:43 pm | Blog
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This past weekend I got to take in my first Online News Association 2010 conference. I debated going at all for a long time because, as someone who has never attended, I didn’t know whether it could live up to its high cost. I’m glad I went though because it was productive and engaging in a way I don’t usually find at my academic conferences.

I should have known, but any doubt was wiped away Jane McDonnel’s opening remarks: “Welcome to the conference where journalism doesn’t know it’s supposed to be dead.”

This introduction summed up my experience, for the most part. There was a hopeful vibe to this place from people of all walks. Educators who are enthusiastic about training the next evolution of students, practitioners who are putting their interactive skills to good use, and the dreamers who are constantly working on giving us something better. The message, it seems, was this: We’re remaking the industry with new media, but if the industry wants to stay married to intransigence then forget them because we got this.

That innovative spirit, heavy on the kind of boldness that appears to be hubris to outsiders, is a refreshing thing to see. There are days where I want to see the legacy folks evolve and incorporate the radically awesome new ventures in digimedia, and there are days I want to blow it all up and let the brilliant new media folks remake it all. I came away from ONA10 focused on the happy medium, but it’s good to know that the innovators got this if it’s needed. (more…)

Gimme some transparency

  By Jeremy Littau | October 22, 2010 - 1:04 pm | Blog
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A simple scenario:

Two reporters are assigned to cover a politician. They attend the same events and are in the room for the same interviews, thus building their stories off the same material. All things being equal, which would you choose: the reporter who (independent of their news stories themselves) keeps their opinions to themself, or a reporter who openly talks about what they think about the issues?

American journalism traditionally has preferred the former with the misguided belief that keeping it to yourself means lack of bias and that unattainable golden mean of objectivity. We saw this one on full display this past week when Juan Williams was fired by NPR for airing what could charitably be called unsavory views about Muslims. We don’t tolerate Reporters With Views very much in the industry; it opens journalists and news organizations to accusations of bias and favoritism.

Except we’re all biased as human beings, and it’s a switch that can’t be turned off. Naturally reporters should try to filter out bias as much as possible in their actual reporting, but if successful the result is fairness rather than a lack of a point of view. The process doesn’t eliminate bias, it only suppresses it. (more…)

What journalism gains from the read-write Web

  By Jeremy Littau | September 29, 2010 - 1:43 pm | Blog
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This is something of a brain dump post, as I am working on some ideas. I’ve been having conversations with some folks about a new journalism startup we’re hoping to launch sometime in the next year and am running into culture issues. One of them is the problem of how we classify the journalist.

We’ve been having this “are bloggers journalists?” argument for a few years now, and frankly I am sick of it. It doesn’t matter other than in the bounds of legality, and to be honest I don’t care. I don’t need a label to succeed. But that’s an industry-side fight that I’m all too willing to ignore, because the people who naysay the loudest often are the ones with turf to protect. If I was interested in protecting turf, I would have gone into landscaping.

There’s a flip side that does matter, though, because it affects how we remake this whole enterprise. It’s coming from average folks, those “people formerly known as the audience” who have a hard time revising their own definition. They’re people who see the problems with big corporate media and are more than happy for a new era where journalism comes from within rather than from the top down, which is great. But their conception of “journalist” and “journalism” is just as rooted in the old ways, which means they’re judging the new journalist with standards made for the days of top-down media flow. I find this unfair, and actually something of a threat to journalists seeking to do things a new way because it’s only going to encourage them to retrench into hierarchy – a bad deal for everyone.

Generally speaking, their notion of these terms is rooted in the sham myths by which journalists have operated for decades: objectivity, detachment, perpetual accuracy. They don’t account for the fact we’ve evolved, that we now know that objectivity and complete suppression of bias are a pipe dream more than a reality, and that it’s impossible for journalists to get it right all the time. To be fair, journalism as an industry has shilled these myths as a way of trying to control the conversation about why journalism matters, so it’s not like these user views come from nowhere. (more…)

A news semester: time for second gear

  By Jeremy Littau | September 10, 2010 - 3:24 pm | Blog
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Welcome back. Most of us in education are finally digging ourselves out of the rubble that comes with the first couple weeks of school. Administrative duties, forms to sign, students to corral, and all the other stuff that comes with a new term. For some reason I felt busier this time than I did last fall.

Mostly I’m settling into a role here at Lehigh that has been evolving here for the past year. I was brought in to help bring some direction to multimedia efforts here in the Department of Journalism and Communication, but that job hasn’t been so hard in part because all of my other colleagues are interested in this stuff. I have, of course, been working on curriculum changes and such that we need, but there has been no fight here.

JOUR 198 (Multimedia Reporting) is starting to encompass my other unofficial job as head cheerleader on new media. Nobody has told me this is my job, but it’s one I’ve kind of adopted. I have an excitable personality at times so this is a natural, but I see my role here as being the person to constantly extol the virtues of technology in our field in hopes that our students will catch the vision and embrace it.

Mostly I think there is the job of selling this new direction for us. I believe students need to see my passion and excitement for teaching them how to do these new things, and see my firm believe that journalism is by no means dead. The reason is that some of the tools I teach, such as social media, are new and weird for many and even to some who are educators in my profession. They aren’t making a lot of PhDs like me right now, although I believe that will not be the case for long. So there is still the issue that I am a bit unique in my own field and I have to sell people on why the things I do and think about are important. (more…)

SXSW panels on the brain

  By Jeremy Littau | August 11, 2010 - 10:06 pm | Blog
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South By Southwest’s panel picker opened today, so I officially have SXSW on the brain until next March. I wanted to talk a little about a panel I proposed and also plug a few others that I have voted for.

A shameless plug for our panel: If you like what you hear, please vote for us using the link a couple grafs below this one. It requires a short registration but you aren’t obligated to attend the event in Austin. Ours is the only panel tagged “journalism education” and so I think we bring a lot to the table here. (more…)

Parting words for my J198 Multimedia Reporting students

  By Jeremy Littau | May 13, 2010 - 1:53 pm | Blog
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This semester we took something of a leap when we introduced J198 here at Lehigh. As students in our department you’ve always had the journalism focus as part of your studies. The only thing that was narrow was the platforms you learned about: writing, photography, maybe some online work here and there.

This semester we learned (in the words of Cassie) everything. Yeah, we learned video. And photos. And Twitter. And blogging. And Web building. And maps. And a little Gowalla. And SEO. And podcasting. But there’s a common thread there. We used it to build something greater than the whole, and that something was the story. If there’s one lesson I want you all to take away from this course it’s something Steph said during her group’s presentation: When we learn the technology to the point where operating the equipment is second-hand, you realize something: It’s always about the story. Always.

You learned a lot about technology and networks this semester, and that kind of information will be vital. But now that you’re at the end of the term, zoom out and see the big picture. See how this all works together. For example, we didn’t use Twitter because it is all-important. We used it to build up networks and relationships with people, to listen to them in shaping stories and work with them to promote the work you did. We used it to get information and push information.

And it works. For example, Google south+bethlehem+arts and what do you get at the top of your search hits? Why, the very site put together by Andrew, Lauren, and Ope. Why is this? Because it was set for SEO, it had a clear title that was reflected in the URL, and it was sold in social media by both you and your followers. In other words, “everything.” All of it was pointed toward benefiting from Google’s system of rewarding clicks over big media brands. (more…)

Initial iPad thoughts

  By Jeremy Littau | May 12, 2010 - 10:27 am | Blog
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I am writing this whole post from my new 3G+WiFi iPad using the WordPress app. Who says you can’t create content with these things?

The app is pretty good, though it could use a WYSIWYG interface. Formatting links and text is sort of a pain, but then again I was surprised WP even had an iPad app so quickly, so maybe the limitations are due to them just getting something out.

I played with the WiFi version at the Apple Store, but I spent about 6 hours with this thing tonight. Immediate things that jump out with the luxury of time:

E-mail is real nice on this thing, much better than the iPhone. I like the flat design, where you can see your inbox and the called up message in one pane.

The A/V is sweet. Great screen quality and robust speakers. Resolution on pictures and video is eye-popping, far better than a computer. I streamed a couple ballgames using the excellent MLB app (more on this in a second) and got uninterrupted viewing at HD quality. Amazing.

Any app that uses Web browsing within its interface (i.e. not using Safari) better put out an iPad app quickly or they are toast. If there is no iPad version it loads at iPhone size and you can blow it up, but it usually pixelates. That works ok at times for the app itself, but it kills Web pages and often makes them hard to view.

Students love it. I have let about 15 students tool around on the thing for a while. Some were skeptical of it before using, but I have yet to find a user who doesn’t love it after trying it. Better, they generally see a use for it that either is unique or inadequately filled by a device they already have. I think this thing is going to be a hit for students once the textbook market revs up in the iBook store.

My own media habits are changing. Pre-iPad, I often had my laptop out in the living room with me for media browsing (quick email checks, news, looking up things on IMDB). Now I barely pull it out, and I don’t miss it. If I need more computing power or things for work, I use the laptop. But that’s what it’s for. Regular surfing for info or quick looks is easily filled by the iPad. The laptop was always clunky for around-the-house stuff, and the iPad has simplified my life a lot. Not once have I found myself wishing i could plug in a USB drive.

Favorite app: MLB At Bat, and it’s not even close. Especially with MLB.tv streaming games. A really nice way to watch a game. Pitch speeds and types, player stats, live video, and all kinds of info at your fingertips.

Unexpectedly cool app: Star Walk, which uses GPS and the compass functions to locate constellations and planets in the sky. Really cool for star gazers or space lovers like myself. Awesome app.

Other apps: I’m looking forward to checking out the magazines on this such as Vanity Fair (not a magazine I normally read; I feel I should point this out). Twitteriffic is probably my favorite Twitter client on there, but Tweetdeck is nice too.

Overall my sense of this device is unchanged: If you understand what it is and is not, you’ll love it. Most of the critiques I read are from programming and architecture enthusiasts. Their criticisms are valid and usually true, but it’s a mistake to think these views match the general perspective. So I think public perception of the iPad depends largely on how Apple sells this thing. It can’t market it as a computer, but if it sells the value of a niche device then it has a hit on its hands. The experience is that good.

Steps forward in multimedia reporting

  By Jeremy Littau | May 4, 2010 - 4:01 pm | Blog
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This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

  • Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
  • Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
  • South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
  • Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling. (more…)

With the iPad, you’ve gotta think about it

  By Jeremy Littau | April 6, 2010 - 8:46 pm | Blog
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This picture within a picture will BLOW YOUR MIND.

I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few days with people who don’t seem to know what to do with the iPad. Buy? Don’t buy? Is this going to change my life? Is it going to be a waste of money?

If you’re still confused, Guy Kawasaki posted a pretty good decision-point flowchart that might help you out. It’s pretty funny and even this Apple fanboy can admit it’s pretty right on.

I posted the other day that the iPad is a complementary device for almost everyone. You aren’t going to ditch your desktop and likely won’t ditch your laptop for it, although you might get rid of the latter if you don’t use your laptop for much more than news browsing, video/photos, and e-mail. No, the iPad is a device for consuming media while comfortable.

My wife’s latest issue of Newsweek seems to confirm this idea (pictured). The back page of the mag has an iPad ad featuring a person writing a fairly mundane e-mail. Interesting, but the feature isn’t the thing. Notice the positioning. It’s on the user’s lap, feet propped up and crossed.

Apple has a little more of a sell job on its hands than it had with the iPod and iPhone. The iPod was a breath of fresh air after a few years where tons of complicated MP3 players had flooded the market. It simplified the mobile music experience and solved all kinds of problems related to music purchase thanks to the iTunes store. The iPhone filled a similar void. A lot of smartphones were of the BlackBerry variety, with reputations more rooted in business use than personal use. The smartphone market wasn’t going to grow past the business base unless a smartphone came along that was fun and easy to use.

The iPad is different. Consumers have to think a little harder about whether this device makes sense for them. Unlike the iPad and iPhone, most people don’t have a tablet computer and haven’t thought about one. So people have to sit down and think about how they browse and use media before taking the plunge.

That’s why I think Apple has created ads such as the above. It’s selling features in a sense, but Apple also is tying it to a type of experience. In this case, comfortable media browsing. We’re going to see more of this, not less. Obviously Apple has to sell what the iPad can do, but it also has to help people imagine what it can be or what spaces in our lives it might occupy if this is going to go mass market.

The press elites failed us on health reform

  By Jeremy Littau | March 22, 2010 - 8:32 pm | Blog
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NYU professor Jay Rosen likes to talk about the “church of savvy” in political journalism. Diane Winston has a pretty good breakdown of the term, but essentially it describes how the journalism elite shape the news in cooperation with sources. The result is a contextless news presentation, with focus on horse race, tactics, gamesmanship, and “how will this play politically?” rather than verification and hard questions, rigorous reporting, and a focus on getting it right.

This is necessary in elite political journalism, of course. It shies away from tough questions because tough questions mean no guests for Sunday morning talk shows. Wash, rinse, repeat, frustrate your audience.

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com likes to describe the outcome a different way, such as how he did during his SXSW panel when he argued that journalists have become “stenographers for those in power” rather than people who fact-check.

I was thinking about this as I followed the Twitter stream last night during the health care vote. The endless coverage on the cable nets had to fill airtime somehow, and so we got a fair amount of the usual stenographer action. Republicans say X, while Democrats say Y, meanwhile there’s an actual bill online against which we can check such claims. The result is repeating two contradicting statements, at least one of which by definition is actually false, rather than verifying both claims and reporting only the correct one.

In other words, the press didn’t really learn from the Joseph McCarthy problem. (more…)

Transmedia stories and the future of context in news at SXSW

  By Jeremy Littau | March 16, 2010 - 12:51 am | Blog
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I have to be honest: I was pretty disappointed by most of the journalism-specific panels I attended at SXSWi. It’s not that the info wasn’t good or vital, it’s that I expected a lot more forward-looking or cutting-edge stuff. I blogged about a particularly disappointing one (not so much the panel’s fault, I think, as much as it was the tone set by the questions), but that was fairly typical. The best sessions that I could use were in non-journalism arenas such as gaming and marketing.

One panel I have been looking forward to actually exceeded my high expectations. “Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online” with Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris was everything I was looking for here at SXSWi: important questions, big ideas, and a focus on discussion and solutions. No teeth-gnashing over stale questions like “Will bloggers replace journalists?” and other such important chatter from 2005.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and recap this thing. Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune did an excellent liveblog summary of the panel and discussion, and if you want to hack the raw tweetstream check out what the audience was doing with the #futureofcontext hashtag. What I want to do here is briefly sketch out the argument and where my mind has been going with this since the panel spoke.

Rosen had the best visual description of the context problem facing our journalism today. Imagine, he said, downloading a software update to your computer for a program that isn’t installed on your machine. The absurdity of such a situation should be self-evident. The update does the user no good because it’s an add-on to a program that doesn’t exist on the machine. It’s a waste of the user’s time, it’s a waste of resources, and it doesn’t accomplish the mission set out for the software patch. (more…)

Faith, sports, and journalistic inquiry

  By Jeremy Littau | February 5, 2010 - 4:17 pm | Blog
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The Wall Street Journal today had a thought-provoking piece by Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam (@spulliam on Twitter) about journalism’s handling of faith and sports. The piece has a great news peg attached to it after all the controversy surrounding the Super Bowl ad from an anti-abortion group starring Florida Gators star and soon-to-be NFL draft pick Tim Tebow and his mother.

The column dissects some of the troubles journalists face when covering athletes who profess faith. Journalism is a profession based on inquiry and skepticism, and so when covering athletes who talk about religion this can get complicated. Pulliam neatly summarized some of this clash:

  • Journalists see a lot of sides of athletes, including their bad sides. How do they match words with deeds, and are they qualified to judge hypocrisy or a person’s devotion to their faith?
  • Journalism is empirical, a discipline that requires observation and the testing of facts. How does one materially test something such as faith?
  • How do you honestly tell an athlete’s story without talking about the faith that motivates them? Out of that, how can you determine that the motivation is real?

Obviously an athlete’s faith becomes part of the news at times. Pulliam cites Cassius Clay’s transformation into Muhammad Ali as an example of something that is news itself and impossible to ignore. (more…)

Foursquare, journalism, and a sense of place

  By Jeremy Littau | January 20, 2010 - 10:44 am | Blog
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Location-based wikis? There totally is an app for that.

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

(more…)

A fish out of water is a good thing

  By Jeremy Littau | December 3, 2009 - 2:38 pm | Blog
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I taught my last Media & Society (COMM 100) course of the fall semester today. I can’t believe how fast my first semester here at Lehigh flew by, and it feels like I’ve been running from Day 1 here as I adjust to a new job and a new life. Still, it has gone more smoothly than I could have hoped. I love my department and think the world of the active minds I see in my classroom.

This was a semester of agility in M&S. The course deals with the intersection of media and culture, but really has a focus on making students aware of the media environment in which they literally live. It’s a really broad subject, and as I planned the course this past summer it felt like I was wrestling with too much.

My vision for the course changed over the term somewhat. The initial plan was to talk about media platforms, then apply that to media theories and areas of ethics/law, then finish with Dan Gillmor’s We The Media and talk about the converage of media into a diverse ecosystem.

The plan stayed intact, partly out of necessity. But something really cool happened along the way. (more…)

Google wave, “Flash waves” and Journalism 2.0

  By Jeremy Littau | November 23, 2009 - 12:02 pm | Blog
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So I’ve been messing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, thanks to generous invites from former Mizzou PhD colleagues Mark Poepsel and Heath Hooper. I’ve been hearing about it since late last year and it has gotten considerable hype among new mediaheads.

My initial reaction after using it a bit is that the hype is well deserved. I’m going to scribble my thoughts below and probably add some more down the road.

We went over the Cluetrain Manifesto this past week in Media & Society and G-wave reminds me of one of those wonderfully simple-yet-powerful phrases contained in their 95 theses: “Markets are conversations.” The idea being that as communication technology evolves it has become more social (in the example Cluetrain was highlighting, tech’s impact on markets). We are deemphasizing mere publication in favor of conversation, hierarchy in favor of hyperlinks.

How do you describe G-wave to people who don’t have it yet? Turns out, it’s really difficult. (more…)

Twitter, Darfur, and Lehigh

  By Jeremy Littau | November 19, 2009 - 2:14 pm | Blog
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The Brown & White student newspaper did an article today about a project I’ve been working on a little bit during my first semester here at Lehigh. For about a month now a group of students have been using Twitter to raise awareness both about the conflict in Darfur and the United Nations’ role in helping us find a way through it.

The article’s great and really shows the thought and preparation (not to mention the current hard work) put into this project. It’s off to a nice start, with students tweeting a few times a day, building an audience, and also following others for the purpose of retweeting (follow them at @DarfurConflict).

I won’t overstate my role in this, as really I’ve just been the Twitter adviser here to help shape students’ understanding of what this thing is and offer advice on how to make it work. They’ve done a great job both creating content and listening to their audiences. Twitter is one of those forms of media you have to use a little before you really have a handle on what it is. I’ve noticed a marked growth in the quality in the short time the students have had to get more comfortable.

This project is what I loved about Lehigh as I was getting to know the place while on the job market. Opportunity abounds here. The project started because someone at the U.N. contacted Bill Hunter here at Lehigh (we are a U.N. partner campus). Something that simple is the catalyst for something interesting.

Of course we are having to look hard at how to define success. Followers were scant early on, but they’ve picked up steam as we’ve gotten more of an audience. This is in part due to retweeting, I’d bet, but also because the students have shown interest in others by following like-minded folks on Twitter simply by searching the live feed for “Darfur” posts. I’ve been tracking followers by the day and it has been an interesting case study in building a social media brand from the ground up.

What’s most interesting to me is that these aren’t trained journalists. Most of them aren’t even studying journalism or communication here. It is a powerful reminder to me of what I already know, that the heart of what we do in media is still about telling stories and that is something people can identify with both as consumers and producers on the Web. Most of us are storytellers at heart in our own little way, and different media platforms are merely channels for our stories be it a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. Stories are the building blocks of social change and action, though, and so this is a field experiment at work.

I gave them a little bit of guidance by telling them to “find your voice” on Twitter, be it straight reporting, opinion, analysis, or a mixture. We aren’t editing or approving anything they write, and so I’ve really been testing out this notion of a light hand of direction that we learned with MyMissourian. We aren’t editing for style or grammar. It runs back to the basic questions: Is it true? Is it fair?