This week is the first of a new semester in my Public Affairs Reporting for New Media class — a journalism class in which the students must work 30 hours with a community partner over the course of the semester. Our goal this semester — expose the students to all of the journalism models that Len Downie and Michael Schudson outline as potential replacements for a decline in public affairs reporting at newspapers.
This semester, the 18 students in the class will be divided among four partners:
- the North Carolina Center for Voter Education, a non-profit funded largely by foundation money and private donations;
- OrangePolitics.org, a liberal blog about local politics run part-time by a single “citizen jouranlist”;
- N.C. DataNet, a newsletter of from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Program on Public Life, edited by a former News & Observer reporter and opinion editor;
- a public broadcast outlet here in North Carolina.
If any of these sources will be part of the reconstruction of American journalism, the students in the class will help determine how it’s reconstructed. At the very least, the students will be able to report back to the rest of us more details about what they find in these laboratories of post-newspaper news.
Stay tuned… and add your suggested reading for the class via the Delicious bookmark tag JOMC491-examples-s10.
