A news semester: time for second gear

Welcome back. Most of us in education are finally digging ourselves out of the rubble that comes with the first couple weeks of school. Administrative duties, forms to sign, students to corral, and all the other stuff that comes with a new term. For some reason I felt busier this time than I did last fall.

Mostly I’m settling into a role here at Lehigh that has been evolving here for the past year. I was brought in to help bring some direction to multimedia efforts here in the Department of Journalism and Communication, but that job hasn’t been so hard in part because all of my other colleagues are interested in this stuff. I have, of course, been working on curriculum changes and such that we need, but there has been no fight here.

JOUR 198 (Multimedia Reporting) is starting to encompass my other unofficial job as head cheerleader on new media. Nobody has told me this is my job, but it’s one I’ve kind of adopted. I have an excitable personality at times so this is a natural, but I see my role here as being the person to constantly extol the virtues of technology in our field in hopes that our students will catch the vision and embrace it.

Mostly I think there is the job of selling this new direction for us. I believe students need to see my passion and excitement for teaching them how to do these new things, and see my firm believe that journalism is by no means dead. The reason is that some of the tools I teach, such as social media, are new and weird for many and even to some who are educators in my profession. They aren’t making a lot of PhDs like me right now, although I believe that will not be the case for long. So there is still the issue that I am a bit unique in my own field and I have to sell people on why the things I do and think about are important.

Good thing I’m not alone. One of the coolest folks I’ve met here is , the director of ArtsLehigh. She and I work in different disciplines, but she gets the social media thing as being about a confluence of community, communication, and messaging. Getting to know her has been one of those things that makes being at Lehigh so much fun; I came in expecting collaboration mostly with faculty, but I have found that nothing gets ideas stirring in my brain around here more than conversations with Silagh.

So in the short term we’re talking about launching a social media club here on campus. Long term? Sky’s the limit, I say. Twitter is taking off here, as is location media. We’re inching toward that critical mass, and critical mass is when the cool stuff starts happening.

Building that critical mass is that unofficial part of the job I’ve taken on. I’m curating a list of Lehigh people on Twitter and working like crazy to link up the different folks on campus.

In my department, ironically, lies the big challenge. When I arrived, I knew of only one other student who was active on Twitter (the illustrious Andrew Daniels, who has since graduated and will someday be bossing all of us around). We got 11 more on Twitter thanks to J198, but about half fell off the wagon after the term ended. Now we have 10 more in J198 this fall. Even if I only keep half, the goal is to keep building that base. This isn’t Missouri, where freshmen all know they better get on Twitter and get to blogging before they hit their first class. We may not want to be there given our program’s aims. But more is better, I am convinced. I’d at least like them to get to the point where they see that knowing this technology is vital to their career goals, and that knowing it means using it – even when professors like me aren’t looking on.

The reason for the slow change is that these social media tools are as much about community as they are about journalism itself. They’re media tools that can be used for many things, but to make them work well you have to have that community mentality. Our students don’t always have that, in part because our program is built largely around having a student newspaper that mostly covers campus issues. So if social media use isn’t high here at Lehigh (and other than Facebook, it isn’t), it’s hard for them to “get” the community framework upon which these tools are built.

This is a main reason why we cover off campus issues in J198 and learn the tools from the point of view of the larger Lehigh Valley community. It gives them better context and also a better experience.

And the ones that keep using these tools after the semester ends, there’s your true believer. The best advice I ever got as a student was to go into journalism because I needed to, not because I wanted to. The ones that keep blogging and tweeting, keep producing multimedia when a grade isn’t on the line? Those are the ones who need to produce, need to tell stories, need to connect.

So that’s where we need to be: mentality. I think we’re building it. Liz Martinez and Debbie Pearsall, two Multimedia Reporting alumni from last spring, are running the student newspaper this semester and trying hard to work multimedia into the system along with new multimedia editor Anya Bingler. There is a moment to seize, and we have people now to provide that kind of leadership.

Another semester of J198 this fall, and another in the spring, will help. I want to start bringing back alumni from the class, eventually, to talk about how the skills they are learning directly translate to careers.

I’m overseeing J12, the class for students who want to get credit doing video work for the Brown & White. This gives me another outlet to teach this stuff, evangelize for its value, and maybe attract more interest in what we’re doing in our classes.

Lastly, I’ll be doing a seminar on new media this spring. We’ll look a lot at the culture of the Web, how what’s happening online is something new, and how people are using it to change their communities. I want them to live and breathe this stuff. That’s how you get mentality.

We also get mentality in our students by modeling it ourselves. I love that my department chair and I both have iPads. Another professor, Jack Lule, just got his first smartphone this summer. We don’t have to all immerse ourselves in the technology, but we do have to demonstrate that it’s important. We play and work with it, and the hope is the students pick up on it.

Don’t pick up any of this post as negative or critical. I absolutely love my  job, and the role I play here. I don’t feel burdened by the idea of being the new media cheerleader. I amuse myself at times trying to picture my other PhD colleagues trying to do this. Many if not all of them could, but would they want to? To want to build and cheer people on takes a certain personality type, I really don’t think it’s for everyone.

I get that. Some want to work to improve an existing framework rather than create one from scratch and often on the fly. When I was on the job market, I quickly realized that wasn’t my passion.

So this M.O. I’m building here at Lehigh is totally for me. My first year was amazing, and I expect the second year to be better. It’s fun to see how far we’ve come in a year, but it’s time to shift into second gear. Next stop, the freeway.