Via Mediashift – by Alfred Hermida
With students flooding back into classrooms in universities across North America, the key to getting through this demanding first week of term is simple — planning, planning and more planning. In practice, this means an August that becomes a hectic month of preparation, getting syllabi in order, ordering textbooks from the bookstore and making sure the technical gear and software is ready to go.
In the past, most courses have several expensive textbooks that are required purchases. We are taking a slightly different approach and cutting back the required textbooks. Students are told to purchase “Reporting and Writing the News” by Gerald Lanson and Mitchell Stephens, which covers the basics, as well as a collection of readings compiled as a coursepack. We also recommend the students get hold of Mark Briggs’ Journalism 2.0, available as a free download.
Because we cut back on the number of textbooks, we added one more required item — a good quality digital audio recorder. Taking the advice of online journalism professor Mindy McAdams, we recommended the Zoom H2, an affordable option for students. In any case, most students end up buying a digital recorder for interviews so they should get good use out of the device, even if they don’t use it for multimedia reporting.
