Author: megheckman

Multiple platforms, multiple interests: gender, technology and the future of journalism.
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High tech help wanted

Anyone who doubts that technology skills matter in modern newsrooms should check out this job ad for a position in McClatchy’s Washington bureau:

If you are a visual storyteller, someone who sees the narrative in numbers, and thinks in code, this is your opportunity to make a mark. Expect your journalism skills to be as important as your programming skills.  This editorial position will ask you to tell stories differently and inspire others to do the same.

The work will require advanced experience with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery); an understanding of responsive design and proficiency with interaction design and user interfaces; familiarity with mining and manipulating data and Web scraping. Light Ruby or Python helpful.  Responsibilities include producing daily and project-based digital journalism that will appear on the bureau’s McClatchyDC.com website and be integrated into other McClatchy desktop and mobile publishing products.

The laundry list of required programming languages and tech skills is eyeopening, but the most significant aspect of this ad is its edict to ” to tell stories differently and inspire others to do the same.” That should be a goal for all modern journalists, regardless of their job description.

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My (virtual) trip to France

Students at a middle school outside of Paris crowd in front of the camera. Photo/Meg Heckman
Students at a middle school outside of Paris crowd in front of the camera. Photo/Meg Heckman

Earlier this year, I published a video that explores the gender gap between j-school classrooms and newsrooms. My goal was to start a conversation about why women make up the majority of journalism students but are still the minority of working journalists. It wasn’t long before that conversation became international.

A week after I posted the video to YouTube, I received an email from Anne Belieres Chupot, an English teacher at a middle school outside of Paris. Anne had showed my video to her students and wanted them to hear more about life as a journalist in the United States.

For about an hour yesterday morning, I talked to the class by Skype. The students were in their early teens, so they were amused by the running coffee gag in the video — but they also asked great questions about the role of women in American media. We talked about digital storytelling and compared the New York Time’s Jill Abramson to Natalie Nougayrède, the new editor of Le Monde. 

Skype, we decided, was just one of the ways technology is changing how we communicate, which is why it’s important that students — and journalists — of both genders are technically literate.

Merci, gang, for a wonderful conversation.

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On Twitter, be suspicious of eggheads

Social media curation tools like Storify are great for some types of digital journalism — but they also create a host of potential ethical pitfalls.  I’ve written about social media verification at length here, but was reminded this weekend that, sometimes, the simple tricks are the best.

This tip — and many others — came from Hoftra journalism professor Kelly Fincham at the conference I attended last weekend. Fincham explained that modern copy editors are as likely to handle tweets, Facebook posts and other pieces of social media as they are traditional content. Here are the slides from her presentation:

https://twitter.com/kellyfincham/status/320657820695535616

And here’s a list of some of her work on social media and ethics.