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Journalism students at the University of Wollongong in Australia recently submitted their stories to UPIU. One story, Gary McDonald’s feature on his country’s soccer aspirations, was published on UPI.com. Click on the media player to listen to UPIU International Coordinator Harumi Gondo and UPIU Senior Mentor Krista Kapralos discuss the stories.
We were really excited to start UPIU’s Going Global program with student journalists from Beijing’s Peking University. The students of Professor Kun Li’s English News Writing course joined us in a video conference during their weekly class session. Over the course of one week, nearly two dozen students submitted stories that were fresh, fun and informative. The stories revealed a China that many non-Chinese readers don’t hear enough about. Some interesting stories that the students posted:
Xixi, Charis, Jie and other students had a chance to discuss their stories during a wrap-up video chat our Senior Mentor, Krista Kapralos, conducted with the class last Wednesday. A major discussion topic was the use of anonymous sources, which were included in most of the stories from Peking University. Krista explained that anonymous sources are rarely allowed in many U.S. publications, and Peking University students shared that it’s difficult to get people to talk on the record in China, where fear of the government is an everyday concern. Krista and the students agreed that the old rules of American journalism don’t always work in other countries. Look for more courageous stories from Peking University on UPIU.com! There are people on the other side of your screen and they want to network, teach and just plain party. Here’s a few tools to help you join in on the fun. Monitoring for events and activities can also provide reporters with opportunities to write articles about what is going on around town. Event Search
If you’ve reserved a ticket for an event through the internet, there is a pretty good chance you’ve used Eventbrite. The service allows easy event creation and billing that has been irresistible to pretty much anyone. What you may not realize is that Eventbrite has a very easy to use search feature that allows you to view all the events in your location. From the Eventbrite main page you can type in a location and watch as all the events pop up on your screen. Take the opportunity to check regularly and you’ll often find fun things to do.
Once you’ve added all the cool people as friends, you can monitor what’s going on by subscribing to your Plancast home page’s RSS feed.
Plancast is a relatively new service, so it may not have caught on in your area, but if it has it can be an immensely useful tool for finding out what’s going on. Once you sign up for a Plancast account (I highly recommend Facebook Connect, as it syncs in your Facebook events) you can find your social media friends through both Facebook and Twitter. You can also do a search at the top of the site with your location. This allows you to see all the events occurring in your area, but it also allows you to view users who list your location as their home base. Subscribe to them through Plancast and you’ll see whenever a fellow local intends to go to an event.
Do a search for your location on Facebook and click the Events tab on the left. What pops up is a list of all the events visible to you, sorted by date, that list the search terms as their location, or as part of their name. Another great list, many Facebook events are created or attended by students and provide opportunities for coverage on a college campus.
Meetup is a community of communities online. The site is based around local groups that throw local events and the best ways to plan and publicize them. You can search by the name of your location or your zip code and find all the groups in your area that use Meetup.com as a base of operations. Another click on the upper toolbar allows you to view a list of events, sorted by distance from you and date occurring, an incredibly easy way to hunt down opportunities to network and have fun. Once you start signing up for events and have a Meetup account of your very own, make sure you put your location into the info. You can then sign up for e-mail alerts when someone starts up a group near you. After you’ve joined a few groups, you’ll want to subscribe via RSS to your home feed, allowing you to see event updates for your RSS reader.
It’s not immediately obvious when you first log in to Google Calendars, but you do have the option to search all the public calendars on the system. Once you’ve logged in with your Google account, click the “Show search options.” Type your location into the third “Where” option and make sure you’ve selected “All Calendars” from the “Search” option on the bottom. Hit the Search button and see hundreds of events line up for your viewing. Join ListsIt can sometimes feel that mailing lists are a thing of the past, unused on today’s internet. However, that cannot be farther from the truth. Mailing lists are going strong and are often used by local groups to keep in touch. Joining one could be your way in to fun events in your town or city.
L-Soft is the company that created the software many ListServs use. They also provide a page to search all listservs that are visible through their software. Type in a few variants on your location and you’ll see a few local listserv groups pop up.
The other major e-mail group service is Google Groups. Go down to the second search field on the main page and type your location into the “Search for a group” field. The results should be a number of local groups. Monitor the streamThe real time stream can provide a useful glimpse into what people are doing, but it can be difficult to isolate your view to just one physical area, in order to find relevant events.
TwitterLocal is an Adobe AIR app that allows you to watch all of Twitter for posts geo-tagged with a certain location. The application is very useful for seeing what is going on in your area. Keep an eye out for events here.
Location-based services have become the next big thing in social media circles. Don’t underestimate their usefulness for showing what areas get the most activity, when people are gathering, or what locations have become hotspots. Keep an eye on your local check-ins, use the services yourself, and just generally monitor the streams for useful information. In Gowalla you can search the Spots tab for places near you. Foursquare’s search localizes based on your specified or IP location. Brightkite allows you to search for specific places. All these services are just the start for seeking out events and off-screen opportunities. Don’t forget to keep in touch with the people you meet. Never undervalue a good Twitter or Google search either. Most of all, don’t forget to have fun!  State of News Media Panel Panelists at the State of the News Media event hosted by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs said they’re bullish on the journalism market, despite nonstop layoffs and shuttering newspapers in recent years. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism said his research shows that media has a revenue problem, not an audience problem. People still want the news, he said, but these days they’re going to more than one source to get it. Consumers are more interested in public discussion and debate than ever before, he said. Modern journalism is as much about soap boxes as original reporting, he said. An all-star panel of out-of-the-box thinkers debated the pros and cons of paywalls, aggregation, multimedia and other issues that have arisen from a focus on online journalism. “We’re firing on all cylinders,” said Tina Brown, founder of The Daily Beast. Jim Brady, former WashingtonPost.com editor , declined to announce details, including the name, of his forthcoming local news project with Allbritton Communications. Allbritton also owns Politico, the must-read for Capitol Hill staffers and everyone else who cares about how their tax dollars are being used. But Brady did say that he won’t charge readers who want to view content on the news site. No news model should be built around the idea that consumers “should” pay for news, he said. Web sites won’t likely pull in the big bucks, he said, but programs for phones and other mobile devices could. Brady also plans to partner with other local media. “We’re not going to act as though we’re alone in this ecosystem,” he said. Charles Sennott, executive editor of Global Post, said his reporters, who are based around the world, aren’t forced to shoot video or do other multimedia. If the story is best told in video, and the reporter is competent in that medium, Global Post will publish it, he said. But there’s still room for solid narrative writing, he said. Antoine Sanfuentes of NBC’s Washington bureau said his agency offers news when readers want it. “We’re keeping up with ‘now’ journalism,” he said. “If you missed something, you can watch it instantly.” Susan Page of USA Today said the poll results predicting disaster for news agencies don’t scare her. “I don’t find these poll findings to be descriptive for the future,” she said. ————– You can also find an archive of the hashtag of the event. Article by UPIU mentor Krista Kapralos. Photo by Aram Zucker-Scharff. 
Image by doctorious via Flickr One of the mainstays of the college media world in the US is the College Media Advisers conventions. This week is the Spring 2010 convention. You can follow the convention and comments from both students and faculty with the #cmanyc10 hashtag. The convention is mostly workshops, with a daily keynote and a few panels thrown in the mix. If you couldn’t make it, I’d highly recommend you check out the hashtag, as people are tweeting some very useful stuff out of the workshops they are attending. If you are at the convention, UPIU is having an informal Tweetup today at 6:35pm. It will just be a great opportunity to hang out, talk to other student journalists from all over, and relax. You can tell me that you are coming to the Tweetup by putting your name down on the Eventbrite event. If you couldn’t make it to CMA NYC 2010 or just missed a Tweet, here is an archive of the hashtag from the first day and pre-convention sessions. There are some great folks tweeting. Then there’s me, probably sending out too many tweets for my own good. #cmanyc10 Twitter Hashtag Archive [March 13-14] ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=98bde27f-13e1-4b38-9581-8200d80aaaf1) |
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