ICONN … We Can … Do This

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I’m in Tennessee for a two day meeting of the Intercollegiate Online News Network. They met once before last year, so I’m still catching up. 

Jim Stovall at the University of Tennessee is leading a charge to bring together online student media groups, help everyone learn a little faster. I did my part on a panel this afternoon, now I get to toss in random comments and pretend to know what I’m talking about. (Which, to be honest, was sort of the point I made this afternoon about how I teach …)

A quick summation of what I learned today:

  • Everyone in the industry is scared.
  • Everyone in academia is scared.
  • Some in academia believe the only way to fix academia is to kill off the dinosaurs. (That was not my idea, though I did make it public.)
  • Innovation is the key. To everything. 
  • And that I have a very big mouth. And need to learn to shut up.

On that last one … every Gannett employee employee is being forced to take five unpaid days off between now and March 29. So I put out an idea – educators should call their closest Gannett paper and offer to do a weekly workshop for journalists on some aspect of online news reporting and then the reporters have to come back in a few weeks and talk about how it went – to a class. 

Yes, I probably just volunteered to teach more. But think of the benefits for my students. 

Thinks I need to explore more based on people I met today:

More tomorrow. Maybe.