Vanderbilt University hosted a journalism bootcamp for bloggers this weekend. According to Newsweek this included session on “learning how to access government statistical databases and analyze the material in them.” Wow, maybe they can get some “real” journalists to attend this thing next year. Especially the ones who work for Rupert Murdock.
Okay, now I need to get back to making this blog “unreliable, libelous or just poorly written.” Oh, wait, I never stopped! Then again, I never claimed to be a journalist. I’ve always been pretty comfortable with my media whoredom.
Forget bootcamps, I interviewed a University of Texas student the other day who’s a multimedia journalism major. Though he claimed not to like doing the “boring grunt work” of coding he was applying for a development job at my company in order to gain coding experience. You’d think one of the first things he’d have learned as a journalism major of any stripe is to tell only the truths that will actually help in an interview-type situation, but apparently not.
I see there’s an international symposium held on Online Journalism (initial caps oh yeah) in Austin, TX every year. Should we all be going?
Wow, talk about “blogger, blog thyself!” Considering there are three glaring typos in the very first post I read on the class blog, I don’t have high hopes for these future multimedia journalists. I would have thought “space after a comma” and “click spell check before posting” would have been taught first semester. The second post isn’t exactly standard English either. Down around post three we start to at least get something reasoned and grammatically-correct. Quick, somebody hire “allydragon.”