some of you asked about links to my poynter columns. i realize this sounds egotistical (mea maxima culpa), but they are linked below. if you're interested in the others, just do a search on my name on the poynter site.

it was a great week with all of you. if any of all ya'all get to buffalo, look me up. i buy you some real wings and a cold canadian beer.

joe marren


Writing for the Web
5/28/2003 5:52:54 PM By Joe Marren

Breathe Life Into Hedlines and Cutlines
4/19/2004 10:49:28 AM By Joe Marren

People, Not Numbers, Make Business Pages Turn
7/22/2003 3:49:11 PM By Joe Marren

Getting in There and Staying in There
11/19/2002 By Poynter Institute

Pace, the Ultimate Mystery
11/18/2002

How Do You Write a 300-Page Book...? -- The Project
11/18/2002

A Critical Look at the Academic Work Done on Narrative Journalism
11/18/2002

Short Features: When and How to Edit
11/18/2002 By Poynter Institute

Turning Personal Experience Into Narrative -- How Not To Be Boring
11/19/2002

Find a Home for Your Stories in Literary Journals -- Getting In
11/18/2002

The Craft of Online Editing
5/23/2003 By Joe Marren

The 2008 USC Newsplex Seminar Crew

The High Road from Richard Ganahl on Vimeo.

Poynter's Al Tompkins: How He Produces His Video Blogs

Teach Support Group

I have been discussing this idea with some of you already, but for the rest of you, here's what I'm proposing:
I'm hoping we can come up with a post-Newsplex Convergence Training listserv, where we would all stay in touch via email or blogs and exchange ideas and experiences on the best ways to introduce convergence into our courses.
So would love to know what you all think about this!
Nahed

You say Myanmar, I say Burma, oh boy ...

Is it Myanmar -- the choice of the ruling junta -- or Burma, the choice of the U.S. government, which never recognized the junta as a legitimate government?

It gets messy -- and complicated. See the debate at the American Copy Editors Society discussion board. Strong views all around.

Language Log also weighs in.

John McIntyre, who is in charge of desks at the Baltimore Sun, puts it well:
It's hard enough for the copy desk to make decisions about what will be intelligible to the audience without our having to rule on the legitimacy of governments and the legacies of colonialism.

Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis is a veteran police beat reporter from the Motor City (Detroit), but his current challenge is to revive the journalism program at the University of Michigan. The Wolverines have not had a functioning journalism program for several years,but Mike is looking to create a multimedia major that prepares students to succeed in the evolving journalism profession.
Mike undertook this position because at this point in his working life he considers time to be a more valuable commodity than $$. He is married, has four children and a dog named Kitta,and his wife is a second year medical student at Michigan State University. One of Mike's favorite journalism memories is the year he spent in the old Soviet Union reporting for the Associated Press. His favorite spare time activity these days is fishing, and he's looking forward to reeling in some big trout in Alaska in the near future.

Margo Wilson

Margo Wilson is having second thoughts about teaching a multimedia class next year after surviving a week at Newsplex. She truly enjoyed Newsplex and thinks it might be better to integrate multimeda into most of the classes she teaches at California University of Pennsylvania.

One of two professors in the journalism program, Margo should know by July whether she was promoted to associate professor. She won tenure in 2007.

She arrived at her teaching post in Southwestern Pennsylvania after 20 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Canada, Wisconsin, Indiana, and California, including the L.A. Times.

Some of the progams she was introduced to at Newsplex include:
Imeem-a program to upload music to the web and Audacity for audio editing
Twitter-a social networking and microblogger service
Vimeo--a video editing program

to name a few...

Sharon Stringer

Sharon Stringer, a journalism professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, celebrated her second day at Newsplex with her birthday. Stringer enjoys R&B music and ducking the Web cam at her Newspex post.-- MW

Stringer, of State College, Pa., says she came to Newsplex to update her skills and share her insights with her colleagues. She teaches radio production, newswriting, and mass communication classes, and has a background in public radio.

Pat's new blog

If you're reading this, you're doing what you're supposed to do.

Big announcement: Anyone who wants to go see "Damn Yankees" tonight at 8 p.m. please let me know. So far Richard and I are going. We can't do much of a wave in the audience with just two folks.

My computer won't dwim (do what I mean) today. So I think I have lumpy electricity. However, I am learning a great deal. My students back to VSU hate it when I come back from seminars like this because I ever so gently encourage them to learn what I've learned and then to make me obsolete.

Now back to the fun.

How much do online readers read?

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, projecting from a new German study, suggests that most users read about 20 percent of the words on a Web page and at most 28 percent.

Nielsen's calculations rely on a formula he derived from the study's dataset. The formula suggests users spend 25 seconds plus an additional 4.4 seconds per 100 words on a page. Nielsen's result is that -- assuming a fairly fast reading speed of 250 words per minute -- you have to have fewer than 111 words on a page for half of them to be read.

As he says, the curve declines precipitously from there.

Interesting reading, given the Poynter Eyetrack study of last year that suggested that once an online user chose to read a story, he or she finished much of it, even for a longish 19-inch story (still 62 percent).

However, the two studies might not conflict. The German study used software that intercepted pages and other behavioral data. Poynter used eyetrack, which physically tracks how far a person physically goes into a page, but does not track how many words each is actually reading..

Given the wide acceptance that most Internet users are scanners, it's possible they were reading few actual words even though they were going deep into a story. We would need time data from Poynter to determine that.

Bottom line is that while we keep studying it, we really don't have a truly solid handle on user behavior, partly because of the changing nature of the web.

Online Video

From Doug's CSJ Blog

If you haven't checked it out, click over the Newspaper Association of America's "Zooming in on Online Video" report. I'm still going through it, but there's some good stuff, such as the section on things to take into consideration to produce good video. Excellent blog links at the bottom, too.

Also covered: Ads, set-building and video live from the field.

Sheila Tefft

Professor Sheila Tefft is originally from Wisconsin who started working at an Iowa newspaper shortly after college. Having a desire to always go "international" however, she attended graduate school at the University of London for two years. Even though, in her words, she was unsure "why she came home", her career really took off when she worked in Atlanta and Chicago as a newspaper reporter.

Fulfilling her urge to go "international", Sheila left Chicago to work in Asia for 12 years where she freelanced and eventually landed with the Christian Science Monitor working for the newspaper and radio outlets. Her occupational travels in Asia took her to places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. She spent four and a half years working in China, and eventually met her husband in India.

While in Asia, Sheila covered a variety of topics - business in India; social trends and politics with the CSM; war coverage in Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.

After completing her Asian Tour (she has the t-shirt), Sheila came back to the US with her husband and began part two of her career teaching journalism at Emory University.

Sheila had this to say about the importance of having bi-lingual or even tri-lingual skills while reporting overseas...

Reed Smith

When Reed Smith is not teaching broadcasting students at Georgia Southern University the intricacies of convergence journalism, he's dragging his wife into helicopters to fly into glacier country for long hikes.

He's been teaching broadcast journalism for a decade, after a career in public radio. He's attending Newsplex partly to brush up on his convergence skills, and partly to accommodate his program's quest for accreditation with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

If you're interested in the history of ink-stained wretches, you've probably run across Reed's work. His research includes oral histories of journalists of the South, and an award-winning monograph on the role of journalism in the shameful legacy of lynching, including the horrific Statesboro case.

A bigger challenge, perhaps, is his hiking. He and his wife, Bev, like to get away from it all of the stuff that makes news. For them, that means heli-hiking. They board a big Huey chopper and fly north into the Canadian glacier country, where the Huey dumps them onto the ice and flies off, leaving them to their ropes, ice tools and survival skills.

At night, they return to a warm lodge, which may explain why they're still married.
Listen to this guy's baritone...


-- Mike Lewis

Joe Marren

Joe Marren is out of work this summer.

But judging from his smile, I don't think he's too worried about his employment status. You see, Joe plans to enjoy his summer with his wife Penny and daughter Sara, 10, doing things a dad and husband enjoy.

How, you ask, can a man of Joe's responsibilities afford a summer off?

Well, credit his wife for that gift. She retires this summer after 30 years in social services at Erie County, NY. She insists Joe should take the summer off. "She says after this summer it's my turn to support the family," Joe explains.

So how will he do that?

His more than 18 years as a professional print journalist provide the foundation for his career as a college teacher of journalism at Buffalo State College in New York. Joe's colleagues recognized this year his contributions over the last six years by awarding him tenure.

Don't bet, though, that Joe will be completely off the clock this summer. Check his jouralism-related website at Joe Marren.com. and you'll see Joe is never far from his passion for journalism.

-- Richard Ganahl

Pat Miller

Pat Miller wound up teaching journalism at Valdosta State University in Georgia by "utter chance." She started out in the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop, where she discovered that MFAs were "useless as toilet paper." Miller earned a Ph.D in English with a specialization in journalism. She has now spent more than 20 years building, and rebuilding, the print journalism program at VSU. Here's what she has to say:




--Jennifer Rauch

Jennifer Rauch

Come meet Jennifer Rauch, a Pennsylvania native, who now teaches journalism at Long Island University. She has one brother, a mechanical engineer. Her father is a retired mechanical engineer who worked for Bell Labs, as did her mother. She teaches news writing, magazine editing, and mass communications and new media. She also teaches special topics courses, including one on YouTube and the demise of broadcast news. Her favorite thing about teaching is that it's "never the same thing twice." She's also a bird watcher.--Pat Miller

Here's what Jennifer has to say about what's she's learned at this seminar:

-- Pat Miller

Craig Stark

Broadcasting Professor Craig Stark says public radio should care more about public interest and less about profits. Most critics blast commercial broadcasters for ignoring their public responsibilities. Craig, a professor of broadcasting at Susquehanna University, argues public radio is equally guilty. Public radio stations need to stop chasing the almighty buck and push diversity and lesser-heard voices in their communities.




He should know. He researched public radio and its ability to foster diversity and a sense of local community for his doctoral research at Penn State. Craig has been studying or teaching broadcasting for 13 years. The New York native bailed out of business school "when I couldn't get past Accounting II." He took a few broadcasting classes and voila, "That's when the bug bit me." He followed his mom and step-dad to Texas to study and teach. Pursuit of a Ph.D. took him to Pennsylvania where he now lives with his wife and two sons, Zach and Jack.

-- Sheila

Richard Ganahl

Richard Ganahl left the news fields of Missouri for the halls of academe of northwest Pennsylvania about 15 years ago.

Ganahl and his brother, Dennis, bought a series of semi-weekly and weekly papers around the St. Louis, Ozark and Kansas City areas for a number of years before he decided to go back to college.

That led to his current job of teaching courses such as PR, media research and online courses at the Pennsylvania State University, Bloomsburg campus, for the past 15 years.

It is the longest job I've had in my life, Ganahl said and laughed while attending the Summer Seminar in convergent journalism at the University of South Carolina.




The journalism and academic fields can be a bit transitory and Ganahl acknowledged that as he talked about the winding road that led him to his current job.

"I think it's like the old tramp printer style," he said. "Journalists have that great storytelling tradition."

--by Joe Marren

Melissa Wall

Twenty years ago, Melissa Wall decided to quit her reporting job, pack her backpack and venture on a trip around Africa and Asia.

"I wanted to see the world; I wanted to be a better person," explains Melissa.

Melissa spent two and a half years discovering the two continents. During this period, she wrote travel articles, toured many new cities and ran a youth hostel in Zimbabwe.

In the early 1990s, Melissa returned to the U.S. and embarked on a new adventure, namely grad school.

"Initially I wanted to learn more about Africa from an academic standpoint," says Melissa. "Then I was on this assistantship, so it was basically free!"

After another quick trip to Zimbabwe and Thailand, where she did research, taught journalism, and prepared for her comprehensive exams, Melissa returned home.

This adventurist is now an Associate Professor in the Journalism Department at California State University of Northridge.

Melissa believes her travels across Asia and Africa changed her for life. "It made me much more empathetic to people from other countries," she explains.

Here's Melissa talking about her life journey.

- Nahed

Nahed Tantawy -- from commodities to convergence

A new assistant professor at High Point University starting this fall, Nahed Tantawy started her journalism career with Reuters news agency in Cairo. A political science/economics grad from American University in Cairo, she specialized in reporting about stocks and commodities, specifically wheat.

She found herself in Atlanta -- "homesick" at first -- and working to complete an unfinished M.A. back home in Egypt. She defended her thesis by videoconference and joined the Ph.D. program at Georgia State University. Her dissertation was a discourse analysis of US news media representations of Muslim women post 911.

-Melissa