Highlight from HighSchoolJournalism.org

Congratulations to Rebecca Gemmell, whose lesson plan is featured out front on ASNE's HighSchoolJournalism.org site!

Steve Elliott

Arizona State University

Phoenix

Walter Cronkite & Advanced Placement Conference

I was at the Advanced Placement national conference, held this year in San Antonio, Texas (I thought of Mark in Laredo, but I didn't rent a car to drive over. . .). Anyway, one of our plenary speakers was Gwen Ifill. She is a good speaker, by the way, and a fine representative of journalism (she specifically pointed out that she works on The News Hour, which has thus far continued to report news as opposed to sensationalism). She made a point during her speech to offer a tribute to Walter Cronkite, which garnered an enthusiastic ovation.

I offer this tidbit just to point out that Mr. Cronkite is appreciated and missed by thoughtful people everywhere. God bless him, and his family.

Juli Stricklan
Rigby High School
Rigby, Idaho

The most trusted man in America

Front page of today's San Jose Mercury News from the newseum.org

"A good journalist doesn't just know the public, he is the public. He feels the same things they do..." Walter Cronkite was quoted as once saying.
How relevant is that message to us today? With all the media in all its various forms and ways to access it, it is ever more important to be reminded of journalists like Cronkite.
Cronkite was able to establish trust with his audience because he recognized the journalist's role in society. Whether it was following the developments in Vietnam to see for himself and report to the rest of the country or bring guidance after the assassination of President Kennedy, he defined the ethics of journalism. He seemed to see his role as a public servant, with the duty of keeping the public informed in order to maintain our democratic society. That respect for the public was huge and cannot be over-emphasized.
When I go back to my classroom this year, I have a concrete example to refer to when I talk about the code of ethics. I can talk about how a reporter seeks the truth, how one does her own reporting, how one minimizes harm to colleagues and subjects, how one works independent of personal bias, and how one holds oneself accountable to the public.
It is a mouthful, but I am proud to say that I attended the ASNE Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Eric Chow
Phillip & Sala Burton High School
San Francisco, CA

Cronkite and ASU

I'm sure word of Walter Cronkite's passing has extra significance because of your time at the school bearing his name. In addition to the media coverage, you'll find quite a bit of information in a special report on the school's Web site, including the story of how we became the Cronkite School.

The photo above shows Mr. Cronkite with Cronkite Village, a group of top students living as a unit in an ASU residence hall.

Photo Credit: Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University

Steve Elliott
Arizona State University
Phoenix

News story on Walter Cronkite's death

AP's story on Walter Cronkite.

Mark Webber
Laredo, Texas

Testing? And Walter Cronkite's death

I heard the news about the death of Walter Cronkite and came to the blog to see what others were saying and put in my own 2 cents. I got a message that the blog was blocked. Did anyone else have that issue? I'm posting to see if this is blocked. If it goes through, let me say I was saddened to hear this news, but of course we were aware he was not doing well even during the Institute. With the Michael Jackson media circus, I am interested to see how this will be covered. So far, it seems very dignified and respectful, certainly as it should be for the death of an icon who was for a long time the most trusted face (and voice) in America.

Lynne Schneider

Jackson, Miss.

InDesign, Photoshop, et al

I just completed a course on InDesign. I took the course online through Lynda.com. For $25 a month, you can take a gazillion courses--all done very professionally, at...your....own.....pace.

When you've finished a course, you get this nifty certificate of completion that you can print, download or e-mail to your favorite administrator.

The Poynter Institute also is a great resource for FREE online lessons at their News University. Not quite as in deapth as Lynda, but FREE.

BTW, I miss you guys!!!

Rick Burd

Wickenburg High School

Wickenburg, Ariz

Chain gang follow up

It was 115° here yesterday. The news said it was the hottest location on earth. Some place in Saudi Arabia came in second.

Today I hopped in my air-conditioned car to return a book (The Scarecrow) to the library. Just outside my gated and walled development (fairly typical in Arizona), there was a women's chain gang at work on the landscaping. It was 104° at 10:45 this morning.

I stopped. I got out of the car with my camera and walked over to the officer who was watching over the prisoners. Officer Armando was very cordial. He asked if he could help me and I told him who I was and asked if it would be OK to take a few pictures. He said he would prefer if I did not. I immediately thought of one of the four areas of the SPJ code of ethics: Minimize harm.

While we were talking, a worker for the City of Surprise came by and introduced himself. He told me that the city contracts with the prison to get the landscaping done. "Saves us a lot of money," he said. I asked Officer Armando how the girls felt about being out here in this heat. He told me that they see this work program as a "privilege."

"They have to work their way up to level one in order to be considered for the outside," he said. "And if they mess up, they go back down to a lower level and it takes them at least six months to get back on the list."

When I first came to Arizona ten years ago, I thought that 'forcing' women to do menial labor in the hot son was horribly cruel. Perhaps some of my fellow Reynolds Institute graduates felt the same way. The girls do not see it that way. Officer Armando and the Surprise city worker agreed; the girls would much rather feel like they are contributing than to stay inside a prison all day. There is a waiting list to work on the outside.

I was given the name of the City of Surprise supervisor of public works. I will contact her and see if she would like an article done in our school newspaper. Maybe it will help someone. Maybe journalism can make a difference. I hope so.

Rick Burd
Wickenburg High School
Wickenburg, Ariz

Bucking the trend of newspapers-buy them

For a long time newspaper owners on the high end of the spectrum have been gutting newsroom staff and demanding unrealistic profits. Across the country newspapers are apparently on life support. Lay-offs and salary cuts are the norm.

So, how about this: a former Wall Street type has bailed on the corporate life and purchased several newspapers in Iowa (including the Charles City Press).... and in a posting shared with members of Sportsshooter.com, the buyer - Gene Hall - shares his reasons (follow the link in bold, below) and why he believes he is NOT taking a huge risk.

THIS POST with his reasons makes me think that maybe there actually are a few people out there that are thinking about newspapers in the right way.

Good luck. Hopefully he can start a trend...

Jeff Jones

Miyamura High School

Gallup, NM

Reynolds helps with more than just journalism

SchoolTube - A Vision for k-12 Learners Today

Shared via AddThis

Today, I started an AP Institute for AP Language and Composition. We watched this video to discuss the rhetorical triangle. It's about teaching, not journalism, but the film just gave me more motivation to use technology. And not just for journalism. I'm ready to try blogging for book discussions in my other classes by having students complete a set number of blogs and comments like we did during the Reynolds Institute. Have any of you English-teacher-types tried that? How did it work for you?

I'm trying not to lose what I learned in Phoenix this week while we are focused on AP, and I'm hoping that thinking in terms of how it can fit with my journalism classes will help. But I'm finding that what I learned in Phoenix is starting to fit in what I teach in regular English classes even better. It's really quite useful how we can fit it all together. I know that ASNE is trying to help us with high school publications, and there is no doubt that the Reynolds Institute does this. I hope ASNE and those who are involved with the institutes know how much this can help us teach, period.

Lynne Schneider

Murrah High School

Jackson, Miss.

More resources for The Scarecrow

Here is another resource for my lesson on Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow.

Connelly speaks from the Tattered Book Cover in Denver via the Author's Ontour Live podcast. The podcast series, itself, is so good that I subscribed to it and went back through the archives to listen to several more. Enjoy.

Debbie Aughey
Campbell High School
The Spartan Chronicles
Smyrna, Ga.

Localized Media -- Social, for sure

http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bctid=28892569001 (Click on Tribal Radio piece)

Sorry. TIME is not with the program that lets you embed the HTML as far as I can tell. Nice mix of sound and slide interspersed with video. Arizona, too!!!

The Hopi Indians are masters of old school social media in serving their community. What I love about this is that there is a "there" there. Definitely not corporate radio.

Art is a storyteller postcard from a museum I picked up. Sorry about missing attribution. Conveys the idea of telling, however, even if very old and maybe Javanese, not Native American. It's all stories, right?

Joanna Greer

John F. Kennedy High School

Silver Spring, Md

Sounds like you should link . . .

BOOKMARK THESE Blogs about radio/audio

B0th web sites came from the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)

http://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/?p=2426#more-2426

fieldsepulchra » lake

I couldn't find audio art so I have included this photo from my hometown in West Virginia. Subway moved into this Exxon station and they insisted that the stuffed dog who had lived there and was the station mascot be removed. The owner complied. Now the dog and the Subway and the station are all gone. This was a good story that got away. Think of the audio you would want for a piece like this. Obviously the dog would be mute. But the accents alone are amazing and the explanations about why the dog got to live there and why they wanted to preserve him would be as well.

Joanna Greer

John F. Kennedy High School

Silver Spring, Md

Took a break last weekend

After our fantastic learning experience in Phoenix, I went to Chicago for my mother's surgery. She is fine. However, I was without my computer and pretty busy with their household issues while she was recovering. I did get to go for this great walk with my sister and I want to share it with you in celebration of our time together AND the lesson plans are finished. PLEASE KNOW THAT I KNOW THE SHOOTING IS NOT SO GOOD. My defense is that I wasn't expecting cool things, I had that little digital camera, AND it was sunny, sunny, sunny . . . could not see what I was shooting. Still, you can find interesting things to shoot/show in spite of all that and I wonder about so many of these performers. Who are they? What are their plans? How long did they have to practice to get this good? Potential stories are everywhere.

Miss you guys!

Joanna Greer

John F. Kennedy High School

Silver Spring, Md

Lesson plans posted

I've posted links to your lesson plans and supporting documents here. There's also a link at left.

Steve Elliott
Arizona State University
Phoenix

Movie to see re ethics

A few weeks ago one of our sessions revolved around ethics. Just by chance today I stumbled across a movie on IFC titled Shattered Glass. It was made in 2003 and it tells the story of The New Republic "journliast" Steve Glass and all of the stories he fabricated and how he was eventually exposed by Forbes On-line.

Toward the end of the movie a receptionist looks at the editor asd he enters the office and says that there was a way around this whole fiasco - pictures. If everybody you write about has to be photographed then it is hard to fabricate somebody.

The movie also points out one of the major holes in jouralism: the reliance on journalist's notes as facts and primary source informaiton. For so many reporters this has been a system that works, but for soembody like Steve Glass, who chose to be dishonest, the system can be exploited.

--------

Jeff Jones

Miyamura High School

Gallup, NM

ASNE lesson plan

I just finished up my lesson plan about an hour ago and submitted it to Steve. It feels good to have accomplished this. I started with something that interested me personally and this seemed to help. The best part was going through the process. I did a lot of Google searches for lesson plans formatting and learned a lot about this while completing the assignment.

My lesson is on how governments and world leaders attempt to get their message out via popular media. I focused in on 4 countries: Israel, Cuba, Venezuela and Russia. I was going to pick North Korea since I have been following the story about the two reporters in custody there but decided to stick with my original choices.

I am going to try this lesson with my class and have it lead into another one where we discuss social media and networking and how government opponent's get their message out.

Well, as my summer nears an end I wish you all well. I head into heavy-duty lesson planning next week so I am ready for the new year.

Mark Silverstein
Media and Journalism Instructor
Douglas High School
Douglas, Arizona

Lesson plan done!

It is 2:39 a.m. here, and I just finished and sent my lesson plan to Steve. It has been on my mind and I hope what I came up with will be helpful. Hopefully it is unique and creative enough, but I'm not sure of that when there are already over 250 plans already posted at www.hsj.org. Is anyone else having problems or worries?

Good luck to anyone who is still dealing with this part. The lesson plan is easily the most difficult assignment for me of all that we were given. We write lesson plans all the time, right? The big deal must be that these will be seen by Steve, Diana and others at ASNE. Even scarier, I'm assuming all the fellows will also be getting them. That's kind of daunting with such an impressive and talented group! It's also hard to be in the mood for objectives and essential questions in July. My need for CEU's is just to great to skip this. :>

Is there a plan for us to get copies of the lesson plans? I hope so, since I'm counting on all of your plans to help me through next year.

Lynne Schneider

Murrah High School

Jackson, MS

Photo editing woes?

Greetings! I am in a cheery mood, despite a meeting earlier this afternoon with my principal who told me that I should not count on getting Photoshop software on my computers for my digital darkroom class.

This digital darkroom course will be for one semester and I will have three sections a day x 28 students. That sounds like a lot of students with nothing to do.

Thankfully, there are people out there who do not want to make a profit off of everything they do, and after some searching I cam across some FREE software that looks to be very powerful - coming very close to what I do with Photoshop CS3, and did I mention it is free?

The software is called GIMP. It's an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It runs on both PC and Mac, as well as (I think) Linux etc. If you are looking at wanting to have some control over the images, and you have no budget, I would say give this a try.

It has tools that Photoshop has - like cloning, quick selection, layers, unsharp mask, levels, curves, and so much more.

I did mention that it is free, didn't I?

Also, for those of you that like to shoot with high quality, there is a second piece of software called UFRaw that can open raw files (though I am not sure how current of Nikon cameras they support - my D200 and D80 files open fine). And then you can import the image directly into GIMP, or you can save the file as a JPEG with basic exposure corrections and color balance changes.

Even though it is free, if you feel guilty about using somehting this cool for nothing, or you feel generous, they do take donations . . .

Jeff Jones

Gallup, New Mexico

I bought a sunday paper

SF Chronicle goes small format

This was the first time in a looong while. I paid my hard-earned summer savings to buy the Sunday Edition of the SF Chronicle. As much as I loathe the changes that they have made in content and design, I thought it was the right thing to do.
I had been reading The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. I got to the part in which they explain how "citizens are not customers," and in fact, it is the advertisers who have traditionally funded the news in a triangle relationship with news - citizens - advertisers. It made me realize that my role in supporting the democratic society that I live in involves supporting the free press. While I can get updated news from my Twitters and from online, it is just as important to support the lady who sells the papers in front of the bagel shop, talk to her about what's happening, read the news to my wife or talk about some article at the coffee shop.
I think one distinction that Kovach and Rosenstiel said is that we seek the news, but we don't consume the news. The news is everywhere, it is free, and it is unmitigated. But journalists and newspeople help us make sense of the news. And at their best, they give us the information that we crave and let us discuss it and form our own opinions. What a society it didn't have journalists?
Surprisingly, the Chron had 4 front-page stories instead of the usual jumble of teasers. There was an article about how California residents are struggling with the economic woes and another one about a new study on salmon hatcheries that may actually be harming the natural order. I did the right thing this July 4th.

Eric Chow
Phillip & Sala Burton High School
San Francisco

First day

Hi, all.

I'm sitting here waiting for Cathy to get ready for our two-hour drive to Sedona, where she'll visit with 'The Princess,' Anna, and I'll visit with my BFF, Daniel. They are four and six, respectively. Our daughter and her husband will be there, too, but they're not as much fun.

I finally got time to sit at my desk and get caught up on some loose ends. I spent five brutal days this past week in Structured English Immersion class. Arizona requires at least 60 hours of SEI in order to maintain certification.

Anyhow, this is a photo of Kye on our first day (Sunday?) at Cronkite. What a great two weeks!

Rick Burd
Wickenburg HS

Friday in Southern Arizona

The monsoon season is upon us. It rains at least once everyday.

As much as I enjoyed and learned being at the Cronkite School for 2 weeks I am glad to be back home. I love the community in which I live and teaching means everything to me. I am glad to be back in my classroom and getting ready for the new year.

I am going through all of my books and will be putting together a list of titles a bit later this summer. Next week I will be putting together curriculum for the new year. I came up with dozens of ideas while in Phoenix and will be fleshing them out for the new year.

So, thanks to all the staff, speakers and attendees for all that you shared.

Mark Silverstein
Media and Journalism Instructor
Douglas High School
Douglas, Arizona

Ethical dilemma: selling ads and writing stories

I just left a meeting of the Jackson Area High School Press Association, which is a group of local professionals and educators working to support high school journalism. We only had four people today, so it was a very casual meeting. I spent some time sharing what we did at the Reynolds Institute and how it would help not only at Murrah but throughtout the area.

Donna Ladd, the editor of our local alternative weekly, the Jackson Free Press, asked me if anything came up about students selling advertising and writing stories, since that is not considered good practice in the professional world. I told her that we discussed conflict of interest, but I didn't think anything about students doing both came up. She seemed to think it was a no-no, but then I told her with 17 students on staff it was hard to keep the two totally separate, although obviously no one sold an ad and wrote a story about the advertiser.

I thought I would ask this group for some feedback. Do your students sell ads and function as reporters for your publication? Does anyone see this as an ethical dilemma on a high school level? If you don't allow students to do both, how do you manage to have enough ad revenue?

Lynne Schneider
Murrah High School
Jackson, Miss.

A great read on image manipulation & ethics

Mark Hancock is a photojournalist who spends an incredible amount of time on his blog - with research, trends and explanations of his work.

I have heard about various cases of image manipulation in news outlets over the years, and always wondered what these people were thinking. In the post linked to below, Hancock has detailed the specifics of multiple cases - going all the way back to Mathew Brady in the 1860s.

I encourage you to read through it - it is long, but very thorough and definately worth the time. I will be sharing this entry with my journalism students this fall.

PhotoJournalism: Image manipulation is a global problem

Jeff Jones

Miyamura High School

Gallup, NM