Category — Journalism

[originally posted on Merrill on Multimedia blog]

One of the biggest questions that keeps cropping up at the ONA convention is certainly not new: how do we make journalism sustainable?

Tina Brown, in her keynote Friday, was double sided when evangelizing that our industry needs innovation, and journalists should not be afraid to start new ventures. But when asked specifically about her own project’s business model, her demurred answer seemed predicated on the fact that she’s part of a very large media conglomerate — and that’s how she says her venture is going to survive.

I’m sure Leslie will share her own thoughts on this, as she and I have been kicking this idea around for a bit, but we need to remember who is in the best position to be leading this innovation movement: our current media companies who are so under fire today. [Read more →]

[originally posted on Merrill on Multimedia blog]

The Online News Association annual conference is kicking off this weekend in Washington, D.C. and one of the pre-conference workshops was J-Lab’s J-School Entrepreneurship workshop. Listening to the presenters from other journalism schools and organizations started me thinking about our own curricular discussions at Merrill.

We have been working over the last few years to infuse multi-platform and multimedia skills throughout the curriculum and not segregate these skills/mindsets into just the “online” classes. But let’s take a step back: why do we even have “online” classes? [Read more →]