UPIU brings real-world journalism to the classroom

Professors: Want to motivate your journalism students? Help them get their work published.

UPIU student contributors regularly get published not only at UPI.com, but by other national media as well. Just ask Geri Alumit Zeldes, assistant professor of journalism with Michigan State University, one of whose students had a UPIU story picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Wall Street Journal Online.

It’s one of the primary benefits of working with UPIU — getting students “connected to the real world of journalism,” said Rosa Fadri-Francisco, journalism professor with the University of Philippines Los Banos.

UPIU offers mentoring, editing, feedback and other services to journalism students around the globe. Students publish their stories on the UPIU website, and then work with UPIU mentors to bring their copy up to snuff, and possibly get published at UPI.com and elsewhere.

Other ways UPIU can help your students plug in:

Professional expectations. Students must meet tight word counts and deadlines. No excuses. “The word limit alone is a huge help. Six hundred to eight hundred words helps students make their writing more focused and concise,” Zeldes said.

Tough edits. UPIU mentors push students for better sourcing, solid news judgment and tighter prose. And they don’t pull punches. If a story doesn’t measure up, the student is given plenty of suggestions and tips, and sent back to rework both their reporting and writing. Mentors will work a story through five or six iterations, if needed.

“Students …are given a very intern-like experience where they get to see … how the professional news world works,” said Nicholas Bowman, assistant professor for communications studies with Young Harris College.

SEO training. Mentors teach students to make their copy more SEO-friendly with everything from meta-tags to careful use of keywords.

“[Students'] ability to write for the web improved significantly. They’re now writing tighter copy, with more web-friendly terms, and are learning how to exist in the new media world,” said Dan Reimold, assistant professor, University of Tampa.

Improved story ideas and sourcing. Students bounce their ideas off UPIU mentors in a pitch session, and learn how to find a local angle for a national news item, narrow down too-broad topics, and identify news tie-ins for feature stories.

“Students came away from the … session with a strong understanding of why their stories weren’t ready for publication — mainly because they lacked a strong news element,” said John Temple, associate dean, P.I. Reed School of Journalism, West Virginia University.

As part of the pitch, students walk through their sourcing strategy, too. It has “increased the number and quality of sources,” overall, Bowman said. “Students are looking for off-campus sources when covering events on-campus, and are not simply talking to just one student or administrator as their only attributed source.

There’s even a bonus for educators. UPIU is “a highly practical arena [in which] to judge whether students are applying what has been taught in class,” said Surhita Basa, journalism professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.