The following views are those of Lauren Rabaino. I do not speak on behalf of my employers or other associations. I just speak for myself.

Today ZDNet published a post that suggested Apple’s process of rejecting apps is somehow “curation.” Dozens of people are retweeting that link, probably because it’s about Apple and because it contains the “curation” buzzword.

However, there’s a difference between curation and censorship, and I wouldn’t even call it a “fine line” that separates the two. They are different things.

What Apple does with its app store is not curation.

I’m not claiming that Apple necessarily censors, but their app approval process is closer to censorship than it is to curation. Here’s a list of apps that have been rejected in the past few months:

• Michael Wolffe’s app — supposedly for frequently criticizing Steve Jobs
• iSingle player — for being too politically charged (allowed users to call their reps about health care reform). Although an update shows it’s since been approved.
• Chess Wars — for the chat bubbles looking too much like the iPhone SMS chat bubbles
• Converterbot — for an icon looking too similar to Apple’s recent calls button

These are just a few examples, of course. But none of these examples have anything to do with Apple wanting its users to have a “high quality experience”  as Mr. Foremski suggested in his ZDNet post.  These examples show that Apple is self-interested and controlling. If Apple wanted its users to have a high-quality experience, they would have approved the Google Voice app, for example.

5/3/2010 Update: Here’s another example. This week Apple rejected a Programming Language for Kids app (hat tip to Greg Linch):

[...] it’s an indication of the challenges of working with products by companies like Apple, where one of the world’s great programming languages can’t run on one of the world’s most popular platforms.

Curation is about choosing the best of the best. Curation is about finding the signal in the noise. Apple does this by having a “featured” apps section on its homepage. That’s where curation should happen. If Apple let through all the apps which met the basic technical and aesthetic requirements (of which should also be made public, not based on random whims of the Apple team), then users and Apple could curate. That curation would manifest in the hand-picked “Featured” apps panel and the “Top 25″ page of the app store that is based on user ratings/downloads.

Furthermore, Mr. Foremski’s comparisons between Google and Apple are totally off.

In his ZDNet post, he implies that because Google doesn’t curate content, their process is somehow less valuable than Apple’s:

Comparing the two companies’ strategies, it can be seen that the Apple approach requires more work but earns Apple 50% more in revenue share. It also results in an excellent customer experience because Apple actively curates iPad/iPhone content.

Google doesn’t care if the Internet user comes across a spammy site carrying Google ads, it doesn’t care if an Android app is great or bad. That hands-off policy can also be seen with YouTube and the trouble it got into in Italy, where an Italian court convicted Google execs of publishing a video showing the abuse of a handicapped child.

Google does care. That’s why Google has an algorithm. Their algorithm strives to ensure that quality content makes its way to the top. Although the process is automated, Google still has an interest in quality. Then users can layer curation on top of the algorithm, say, using a tool like Publish2 (yes, I’m allowed to plug my own company).

And finally, my last gripe with this ZDNet piece is that he makes financial claims that aren’t backed:

And Apple’s approach has created tremendous value for its shareholders. If you bought AAPL stock on the same day Google went public you would be far richer today than buying GOOG. AAPL recently passed MSFT in terms of market capitalization.

Apple is creating more shareholder value than Google because of its active curation of its platforms.

Active curation creates value.

Really? Shareholder value is a direct result of “curation?” APPL stock is worth more than GOOG because they arbitrarily accept/reject apps? I’d like to see the proof of causation on that one.

The Apple approach can be seen elsewhere, such as on Facebook, where people choose which content to share, what to publish on their pages; it can be seen in Twitter where the content is hand selected by humans (mostly); it can be seen in people’s blogs; it can be seen on Techmeme where 6 editors choose the content.

Active curation creates value.

And where do users find that content from whence to begin curating? Google. Curation is valuable in these contexts because content is being curated collectively by our social circles. In the case of Facebook, content is curated by our friends and family. In the case of Twitter, content is curated by the professionals we follow. In these cases, we choose who we let into our circles because we trust them.

If we don’t like the way our social circle curates, we can unfollow them or defriend them. We can find new curators to balance out the biases. We, the users, have control of the curation, and that’s when it’s valuable– not when it’s some patched up game of business that happens behind closed doors.

Yes, this post is a bit delayed, but now that I’m on a flight home to Cali, I finally have a moment to finish it.

My BCNI experience finished with a bang thanks to Major Highfield‘s roundtable discussion on news site design and mobile news design. For those of you who don’t know Major, the former newsie is now the mobile tech lead for ING Direct. His roundtable was an open discussion about what works and what doesn’t in current news design, and a look forward at new ideas and trends.

He identified the following most common types of design we see in news:

Column Design (NYT)

Very reminiscent of print design, “column”-based news sites have thin vertical modules. The most well-known example is the New York Times.

Grid view (CNN)

The grid news design has less emphasis on hierarchy and gives equal balance to story display. Although Major used CNN as the example, I’ve included Newser as a more ideal example of the grid layout.

Buckets (MSNBC)

Bucket designs group stories by topic beneath a main header.

Lists (Digg)

Timeline view or “river” view are also common terms for a list layout which is as it sounds: A list of headlines, like Digg.

Combo package (Toronto Star)

The Toronto Star combines these different possibilities by offering the user different modes of viewing news, although Major noted that this isn’t ideal UI. The Toronoto Star manages multiple layouts from which the users can choose their favorite:

Major said you should push out the best user experience and not force the user to choose. Based on the heavy emphasis the Star’s designers put on evidence-based design, I’d venture to guess that they’re collecting data about which display is used most often in preparation for something radical. But that’s just a guess.

Combining advertising with editorial design

Traditionally, display ads thrown into random columns and headers of news sites was the preferred advertising style online, as adapted from a print model. The new type of advertising comes in the form of embedded ads (i.e. ads displayed inline with the rest of the editorial content). We see this manifesting in LA Times’ decision to sell keyword ads within articles this week. A bad example of this can also be seen on CNN.com:

A good example of embedded advertising is in the free desktop version of Tweetie:

I think the reason CNN’s embedded ads fail is because CNN isn’t being honest with its customers. Tweetie clearly labels its ads as such and implements them elegantly into the design of the app. It also helps that the ads are very targeted at the user. CNN’s embedded ads try to look like editorial content and it’s deceitful. They’re also not very useful or pretty.

Takeaways

So the point of all this is that news sites still suck. One nugget that really stood out was in our conversation about news site navigation. We still categorize stories under sports, arts, news, opinion, etc. because this is how the print product was laid out. But is that what’s relevant to readers? I know that when I browse news, I don’t care about the topic. I care about the timeliness and its relevance to me, no matter what “section” it falls within. I don’t necessarily want to read about crime and sports, but if it’s happening within a three block radius of me, then I do care. So maybe instead of categorizing news sites into traditional categories, we can make the main navigational elements more relevant with categories like “time” and “location” (see the Spokesman Review for a great example of this).

One revelation that came about for me during this discussion (which might ironically deem this entire blog post irrelevant) is the fact that news design doesn’t matter at all when we’re all subscribing to news via RSS. Is there really any type of news site experience that will be more convenient and relevant? Am I ever going to want to visit 40 different sites each day, all of which are designed differently, and hunt down news that’s relevant to me within each of those sites? Or would I rather leave my Google Reader extension active in the browser, open in it in between tasks, quickly be presented with news I already know is relevant to me (distraction-free), and carry on with life? The latter is the news consumption pattern that fits best into my daily routine and allows me to consume the most news in the least amount of time. The fact that Google Reader’s social features push me the most relevant news being shared by the people I follow only increases its relevancy.

So maybe the question we should be asking ourselves as news designers isn’t how to make our sites better, but how to create an experience that surpasses that of the Google Reader experience. And maybe that’s the topic of another post. Stay tuned…

Howard Weaver was at BCNI to talk about a new news model in Hawaii from the Honolulu Civil Beat (an outlet from Peer News) that wants to challenge the notion that “people won’t pay for content” (disclosure: it is a venture to which he was a consultant and he now has a diminishing role).

The site will focus on community news in Honolulu and charge a $20/month subscription fee to access content. There will be a few-dollar fee to even access the site because the founder, Pierre Omidyar, believes in a capitalist economy that won’t be sustainable if you give anything away for free from the start.

All Howard’s opinions were his only. He does not represent Peer News or the Civil Beat, although he was a consultant for them.

“Why is a Facebook beer worth more than your news story?” Howard asked in a recent blog post. People pay for fake gifts on Facebook, but won’t pay a dollar for a news story. This is a problem. We first have to answer it before moving on to charge for content.

The basic premises for adopting Civil Beat’s model:

1. It has to be an online newsorg that has no production costs
2. The news has to be a niche product, an “elite” niche
3. As a result, there’s a need for hyper-efficiency
4. There has to be a focus on technology (only 5 reporters, but two programmers).

What is the atomic unit of journalism?

An atomic unit was a “news article” in the past. But an atomic unit of journalism is going to change radically in the new era of journalism. News can’t be “articles” but a service. The Civil Beat is drastically changing the way they view the final product.

The atomic unit of journalism is tied to co-creation.  We see evidence of their mindset in the fact that the job title for their staff members is “reporter hosts”  (because reporters are servants in the process of gathering the news).

An important part of the news site is the living story. Although Google launched “living stories,” Howard noted that they were really like topic pages. Peer News wants to approach stories realistically. For example, if there’s a new zoning law, it’s based on something initiated 10 years prior. A traditional news aritcle throws in background information in a few grafs, but the living story doesn’t assume the reader will do his/her own background research. The living story is fully contextual.

Why he thinks it will work:

• Small staff is hyper-efficient on open source tools, so the production costs are drastically cut
• They’ll be reaching a unique, elite niche for which professionals like real estate agents will want to and be capable of paying

Some people in the audience were skeptical about the paywall. A few questions that were asked:

• How can a democratizing force also be sustainable financially? If you charge, is it still democratizing? Howard made the comparison to broccoli (deep, investigative, valuable stories) and curley fries (fluff, generic, cheap, reporting). We can’t babysit society and ensure that they’ll read what’s good for them, but we hope that they have strong enough judgment to know that it’s good for them.

Plugging into the already-existing blog network

Although the Civil Beat doesn’t intent to include advertising, Howard’s suggestion to them would be to connect with local blogs and build an ad network. The Civil Beat will cover elite topics, but not nightlife and food and entertainment, etc. If local blogs can fill that space and they can share advertising, everyone would profit.

The site will launch officially with full content May 4.

What are different types of thinking we use for journalism currently? How should we be thinking in a way that informs our journalism better? These are the questions my colleague Greg Linch addressed in his 11 a.m. BCNI session entitled “Rethinking our Thinking.”

Spurred by his recent interest in computational thinking, the idea of his session is to balance larger view concepts and how they can be applied to the news process.

Before diving into the topic at hand, Greg asked the 50-person audience to arrange our seats into a circle. We each went around the room and introduced ourselves.

Warning: these notes are all over the place because this session was all over the place. There was no structure. It was brilliant.

Types of thinking we brainstormed

• Analytical
• Linear/non-linear
• Critical
• Curiosity
• Inductive – start with small point and expand
• Deductive – start with larger point and look for the smaller picture
• Computational
• Visual thinking
• Brainstorming/visioning
• Episodic
• Stream of consciousness
• Narrative
• Philosophical
• Conventional
• Relational

After brainstorming a list, we identified the top “best practice” thinking as analytical, critical, computational, visual and relational thinking to come up with definitions. The following are the definitions we created and our subsequent analysis of those forms of thinking. (I did not attach names to each person’s comment simply because I could not keep up with everyone shouting over each other )

Analytical thinking: Gathering data, scientific thinking, testing a hypothesis, evidence, context.

• How we can improve analytical thinking? We have the day-to-day, but we don’t step back.
• We shouldn’t be scared of finding  ”right answer” to questions
• To be better analytical thinkers we need continued “liberation” of journalists from the old way of thinking and the physical model (deadline structure, form of the workday)
• The process informs the way we think
• We’re being trained in the “AP” style of thinking, don’t draw conclusions, don’t put your own analysis into it — people aren’t interested in reading that anymore
• The comment that the AP should die was followed up by a comment that maybe we need a better AP
• Identifying questions sufficient to a full story – the need for immediacy can’t distract us from covering a story fully (answering all the questions, identifying a hypotehsis, etc.)
• Hypothesis, method:

Critical thinking: Questioning face value

Computational: Using computing and applying it to other areas. The computer scientists in the room defined computational thinking as using user interfaces as a way of solving human problems in the world. Greg described it as abstraction vs. automation

• Dan Berko of the New York Times said the data is not the end all of itself to tell a story. Data is just one source of information that can lead you to different conclusions
• Will Mitchell of Washington City Paper said that looking for relationships (domain modeling, for example) in any set of data is where he starts with any problem when building a system
• Mitchell also said to look for outliers, look for points in a set of data when the assumptions break down. One example is a “best of” issue of a newspaper that’s produced once a year. How do you map a print-based product into something usable online?
• When a political reporter comes to him (Mitchell) with a set of data he wants to analyze, he first looks for relationships within the data, answers relatively simple questions that need to be answered. From that it evolves into a process of finding trends (what he calls “domain knowledge”).
• Greg says there’s a need to find the balance between human thinking and computational thinking
• Before we can think computationally, we have to relate to each other as human beings first
• There are parallels: modeling vs. storyboarding, algorithms vs. editorial structure
• Similarities between object-oriented programming vs object-oriented journalism
• The point: there needs to be a middleground
• Educators say that students aren’t coming out of education with a new way of thinking. Worried that we’re not in school telling students its OK to melt the two ways of thinking — you can find these students with these kinds of thinking, not the ones in journalism programs.
• Independent thinking is important to journalism because education is institutional

(We didn’t get to jump into the following modes of thinking because we got so caught up on computational thinking:)

Visual thinking: Mapping, images, patterns, visceral

Narrative: Description, telling a story, inverted pyramid

Relational thinking: Linking, connecting

Drew Geraets of American Public Media led a session Saturday morning at BCNI Philly about customer relations management for journalists. In a nutshell, the tool — called The Insight Graph — is a way to tap the insights, knowledge and expertise of the news customers (i.e. sources, readers) to create deeper, more relevant news coverage.

Their network currently has 85,000 sources among the 12 partners.

The problem The Insight Graph is trying to solve is how to quickly discover and access insights from diverse sources– beyond the “standard rolodex.” The solution takes form of what they call  the “audience insight repository” (i.e. a searchable database). The inquiry process for gathering information about sources looks like a form that feeds into a databse:

They want to give information access to the data so that it’s  a two-way process– the information doesn’t get locked into a database and lost forever, but becomes usable and collaborative. The two-way aspect comes in the form of users being able to log into a separate interface where they can see a history of the forms they’ve filled out and follow the trial of where their data was used.

The new challenges The Insight Graph is addressing:

• Share insights
• Better tools for sharing
• Sources can update profile – Through an interface called “myPin” sources can see which sources they’ve responded to, which of their submissions have been used on the web, and have the ability to follow individuals’ responses
• Sources determine access
• Instantly publish insights
• Create credibility systems – how do we know who is going to be reliable? The editors deciding?
• Create a better UX
• Integrate with existing sites

This is what the AIR (audience insight repository) looks like so far (prototype):

The dashboard lends itself to collaboration. Different newsrooms can access the info, leave comments on different inqueries, submit pitches, etc.

You can also drill down into the source database with multiple layers of filters, save those filters to “bins” and export them:

If this all seems too abstract, here here’s the system in action on MinnesotaPublicRadio.org:

At the bottom of some stories, there’s a “Your Voice” box that gives users the option of filling out the form  (“help us cover this story”).

Drew didn’t immediately have numbers about how many users stay engaged after the initial signup.

One important critique from an audience member:

cherylam: Can we expect community to share personal info when many won’t even identify selves in comments section? #bcniphilly

Other concerns brought up from audience members:

• How do you keep information up-to-date after the initial inquiry is submitted?
• How do you protect privacy?
• How will it eventually map to data within the CMS itself? – Daniel Bachhuber
• Will it be pluggable into other data tools? – Adam Hemphill

Eventually after AIR is fully-developed, there will be an API and it will be open source. This is good news.

If you want more info, contact dgeraets@mpr.org, @publicinsight or @mprinsight.

I wrote a post Tuesday about a new collaborative called The Climate Desk that is grabbing much attention in journalism circles.

Ad Age hailed it the “revolutionary” future of journalism. The CJR questioned whether it would work.

I believe that yes, it is, and yes, it will — but there are still some rough edges that need to be worked out.

Based on my current impressions of The Climate Desk, collaboration primarily takes place at two points in the editorial process:

1. Brainstorming
2. Distribution

That makes sense. Those are the easiest two points at which collaboration is possible. But those aren’t the most important points. What about all the in-between? Sharing sources, sharing data, reporting together, editing together.

If the collaborative model is going to scale for newsorgs, we need better tools for storing and sharing data.

If I work at newspaper x and I want to work with newspapers y and z about climate change, how would I go about sharing the data I’ve already collected?

If I wanted to find all the data about climate change based on coverage my newsorg has already done, the process would look like this:

• Do a Google site search of “climate change” at [mynewsorgsdomain].com
• Find the dates those articles about climate change were published
• Go back through some date-structured folder system on my newsorg’s server to find contact sheets, notes, drafts of said article
• Email those files to the other newsorgs collaborating to report on climate change
• Everyone shares their contacts, someone puts together a Google Spreadsheet to combine the data we found and make something functional out of it — an overall picture of sorts

This process isn’t ideal for finding and sharing data because it doesn’t structure that data in a way that would be more usable the next time the newsorg wants to collaborate around climate change. If we collaborate again in six months, I’d have to go back to that spreadsheet, copy the data that is useful for me, then start a new spreadsheet titled “Climate Change Resources Oct. 2010.”  It’d be redundant and inefficient.

This ties into Daniel Bachhuber‘s upcoming discussion for BCNI about knowledge management systems. He asks:

[...] what I mean by this is how news organizations manage all of the data they’re privy to that is either stored in structured format or could be stored in a structured format if they had the tools to do so.

I see two of topics that Andrew Spittle brainstormed as being directly related to collaboration:

• Cross-platform tracking of information
• Role of KMS in on-going coverage

If we can figure out how to store data in a way that’s transferrable across multiple platforms and in on-going coverage, collaboration not only becomes easier, but becomes the next logical step in knowledge management.

A few thoughts:

The structure can’t be owned by anyone. It has to be native to the web

There needs to be universal markup for certain kinds of data — markup that’s native to the web like HTML, but not owned by any one brand. I want to be able to tag something as <location =”12.9982348 14.23423423″>home</location> and have that data be transferrable to any maping platform, whether it be Google Maps or Mapquest. The same goes for time. I want to be able to tag something as <time =”15:32 PST”>time of the event</time> and then be able to filter all data on the web related to that exact minute.

If we have a standardized structure for all types of metadata, then we can begin to organize and reuse that information on a large-scale and in new ways.

A CMS that builds layers of data on top of each other

Crowd Fusion has always stuck with me as a good baseline for a knowledge management system. Crowd Fusion is the CMS built originally for tech product review sites on top of wiki, blogging, RSS and social networking tools. The creators understood that databases are good for information and blogs are good for news, but there’s no way of connecting all those pieces. My thoughts when I first discovered the CMS in Sept. 2009:

This CMS created by Brian Alvey reminds me a lot of the CoPress connection engine. The concept is dynamic, combining databases, blogs, RSS, social networks and wikis to give the user an all-in-one experience. I wish a newspaper had developed this software and I wish it was open source. I could see a new direction for newspaper websites. [Update: Apparently now there's an open source beta. Yay]

Built into the CMS are features for both data management and collaboration:

• Workflow
• Group feed reader
• Assignments
• Database
• Wiki
• Team-based permissions
• Applications that work on top of the data
• Topic-based user experience

More about it here (worth the watch, I promise):

I’d be interested to see a newsorg adopt the software and start to build more interactive applications on top of data generated from back-story research and interviews– plus combining it with user-generated content and collaborative reporting from multiple newsorgs.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Let’s continue this conversation at BCNI Philly, to which I am hopping on a plane at 10 p.m. PST and arrive in good ol’ Philadelphia at 6 a.m. for the 9 a.m. conference. Who needs that sleep thing, anyway?

I love doing creative projects on the weekends both as a way of expressing myself and as a way of keeping my creative energy high. This iPhone cover was one of those just-for-fun projects I did for myself to fulfill both of those needs. It represents all the things I love in life.

Last week I had somewhat of an identity crisis.

As I briefly contemplated redesigning my website, I threw together a quick mockup in Photoshop. The nameplate across the top read: Lauren Michell Rabaino: designer/journalist.

Then I paused. Wait– am I still a journalist? Was I ever really a journalist? Hell, what is a journalist?

And, like any other intellectually conflicted moment in my life, I tweeted.

I received a lot of responses from the twitterverse, but the general consensus is that yes, I am indeed still a journalist. The responses from twitter can be categorized into two types:

1. The people who share the same sense of distance from the act of reporting, but still call themselves journalists.

“I still call myself a journalist and I don’t even work in the field anymore.” - P. Kim Bui

“I haven’t written in a year, but I still consider myself both a designer and journalist.” - Leo Post

“Definitely still a journalist. we have to broaden the definition. I havent reported in a while.” - Gabriel Sama

2. The people who tried to rationalize why I could still be considered a “journalist.”

” You still care more about journalism than half the people I know in the field. I think the title fits.” -Juana Summers

“If you apply journalistic practice to our work, you’re a journalist. Applies w/ design, online, producing, etc.” - Brian Manzullo

“If you were a newspaper designer you’d consider yourself a journalist. Why any different designing for a journalism app?” Scott Karp

But none of these reasons seem good enough to me. Does caring about a topic make you an expert and professional of that topic? I care about climate change, but I’m not an environmental scientist. I also apply ethics to my work, does that make me a philosopher?

The reason all the people in the first set of responses consider themselves “journalists” is because at some point in some capacity, they’ve all worked/written for a news publication. Traditionally, that’s been a good determinant (and the only determinant) in qualifying whether someone is, indeed, a journalist. But now, contributing to the finding, organizing, and distribution of news can take many different forms (like, for example, building a news app used by journalists).

This might start to sound like a discussion on citizen journalism, but it’s not (although it is a related tangent). I’m not addressing this discussion at the bloggers out there who have no affiliation with a traditional news outlet and questioning whether they are journalists. I’m directing this conversation at the people who have worked at newspapers and been trusted reporters — when they stop reporting, do they still get to keep the title?

My answer, after much contemplation, is yes. As long as we stay committed and passionate about the act of journalism, we can keep the title.

I am a journalist — not as a profession, but as a way of life.

It’s a way of life for many of us. Increasingly, society tweets happenings that are relevant to others or take photos of crashes from the driver’s seat with an iPhone.

But that’s not what I mean when I say journalism is a way of life for me; it’s embedded deeply into the way I think and approach news consumption.

After working at my high school newspaper, a few local papers, my college paper, as a radio reporter, etc., there is a journalistic nature to my thought processes that I will never lose. It’s a trait that distinguishes me from a “citizen” journalist. I think about leads and transitions when I read a news story, analyze use of sources, think of missing gaps. Although this process is not unique to a trained journalist’s news consumption habits, in my case, my habits are defined specifically by my background in journalism. And at any point, I would be able and willing to jump into investigative reporting, sifting through court documents or transcribing hours of notes.

But that’s not to say that the random dude on a metro with a video camera who records a murder isn’t a journalist; I would most certainly consider him one too. Would I expect him to put “journalist” on his Twitter bio, though? Certainly not. And that’s where we get to the next point of discussion…

The journalist spectrum

So what is a journalist these days? There are many answers to this question. I’m a different kind of journalist than the on-call beat reporter for a local TV station, and she’s a different kind of journalist than the kid with a Flip Cam.

There are different kinds of journalists now.

Initially, I was inclined to place them in a hierarchy as follows:

But there’s a problem with categorizing journalists into any form of hierarchy; you imply that there are journalists who are more valuable or credible than others. This is an entirely false assumption.

In shaping a new definition of “journalist,” we need to place the different types on a spectrum. A spectrum accounts for the differences among the different kinds of journalists, but also gives them equal value:

Although still imperfect, the spectrum approach gives more clarity to the different kinds of journalist in the new era of news. Of course, there is tons of overlap among the different aspects (citizens can investigate; pros can capture news with their iPhones).

Under this spectrum, nearly everyone is a journalist because everyone has something valuable to bring to the table. Trained, experienced, traditional journalists can curate, contextualize and investigate, and that job is enhanced by bloggers, tweeters and YouTubers. There is a need for both, but we’re still working on finding the appropriate balance.

What does “journalist” mean to you?

Full Disclosure: I have been employed by Publish2 as a product designer since January.

My favorite Cal Poly journalism professor emailed me this week asking how he could use Publish2 in his journalism classes. Although this list of ideas is specific to Cal Poly’s journalism curriculum, it could easily be adapted to other j-school courses as well.

For those of you unfamiliar with Publish2, it’s a collaborative curation platform powered by journalists (i.e. a way of link saving and sharing powered by the most authoritative experts in the news field). Because all Cal Poly journalism professors and students are journalists, the service is free to them.

Before I jump into my implementation ideas, there are four general assumptions I am going to be making (or really, they’re standards I’m encouraging) for journalism students and professors.

1. All journalism professors should maintain a blog — either personal or for the courses he/she teaches.
2. All students should maintain a blog.
3. All students should subscribe to their professors’ blogs and vice versa.
4. All journalism students should be consuming excessive amounts of content (news, blogs, tweets etc.) — more on this later.

If Cal Poly wants to integrate Publish2 into its curriculum, every student should make an account in their first journalism class and continue to use it throughout their four years of college.

Journalism 203: Introduction to News Reporting and Writing

Introduction to the fundamental techniques of reporting and writing news articles from print and online perspectives. Extensive laboratory and field practices in

gathering and evaluating information. Writing basic news stories under close supervision. 3 lectures, 1 laboratory.

Back to my earlier premise that all journalism students should be consuming excessive amount of content: In an ideal world, this would be true. But as a recent college graduate, I’ve seen first-hand that many students don’t stay up on news. Making it a requirement for class won’t encourage it either; I’m against requirements as a form of habit-building. If you force students to read news, it won’t be fun and they won’t want to do it. If you give them an incentive to read news (discussing current events at the start of each class; creating a reward-based system for those who curate the best links), rather than assigning a grade value or quizzing students on news consumption, it will be more effective.

JOUR 285 Introduction to Web-Based Journalism

I was still at Cal Poly the first quarter this class was introduced. I helped write the syllabus and contributed to the lectures each week. From the course description:

Introduction to the social, editorial and technical issues surrounding the Web as a new form of communication. Fundamentals of gathering, writing and publishing content for the Web that includes using photographs, sound, pictures and video to tell a story. 3 lectures, 1 laboratory. Prerequisite: JOUR 203.

Although that sounds vague, the class actually had a very specific goal: each student created a blog and by the end of ten-week quarter, they were semi-experts in bloggings, curating, tweeting and amateur multimediography.

• Each student maintained a WordPress blog with a very specific beat (prime target for Publish2 usage)
• In addition to commentary, analysis and original reporting on topics specific to the beat of their choice, each student could curate a newswire of links relevant to their blog
• If some students’ beats overlapped (local music blog and local art critique blog, for example), the students could create a newsgroup and collaborate together.
• (This same process can be applied to JOUR 304 Public Affairs Reporting in which each student is assigned a geographic beat. Although they’re not blogging as a requirement to this class — sadly– they could still use newsgroups and save the links to Publish2 without publishing to a blog).

The ability to be an expert curator is a huge part of journalism these days when it comes to finding the value in context in an era of information overload and content pollution (more here, here and lots here). Finding the top news and tweets relevant to a beat is one of the best ways to learn curation (and even at the professional level, it’s what high profile journalists are doing — and they’re even using Publish2 to do it).

JOUR 303 Multimedia Reporting and Production, JOUR 410 Applied Multimedia Reporting

Showcase student work:

• One of my introductory assumptions at the start of this post is that each professor has a blog (Brady has a WordPress powered site for each of his journalism classes).
• If each student adds a link to his/her published work through a newsgroup as a result of class assignments, professors can easily display that work on the class site/blog along with analysis of how the assignment went.
• Because Publish2 gracefully integrates video into saved links, a multimedia class is a perfect use case

Department-wide usage

One of the key concepts Publish2 was built around is collaboration. So, naturally, the product would be more effective if its usage wasn’t only broken into silos for each class, but if journalism professors used it to curate news for the department to read. An even better situation would be if the entire department — faculty and students — were collaborating together. I’m sure plenty of other uses would arise once that collaborative network was initiated.

I’m open to any other suggestions for how Publish2 could be used in the classroom to encourage collaboration. Good luck and happy publishing.