McCormick Journalism Calendar of Events

Check out the Journalism Program's calendar of events for activities and programs that may be of interest to you.

If you have events to suggest or add to the calendar, please send us an email with your information and we will post it as soon as possible.

We look forward to seeing you at an upcoming event!

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ICFJ Releases Two Guides on Coverage of Disaster

Just weeks after a 7.0 earthquake rocked the island nation of Haiti, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) has produced two guides to help reporters better cover disaster and deal with traumatic situations. Please share these guides with colleagues. They come in both English and Spanish.

Some features:

• Practical guidelines for delivering news responsibly while staying safe;
• Tips for creating a disaster preparedness plan for your newsroom;
• Ethical suggestions for journalists working with grief-stricken survivors;
• Tips for journalists dealing with post-traumatic stress; and
• Links to other online resources for journalists.

These two guides, sponsored by McCormick, build on ICFJ’s crisis reporting program for U.S. Hispanic and Latin American journalists. To view them, see links below:

“Disaster and Crisis Coverage”

“Journalism and Trauma”

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Director's Notes: Government help?

• Bailing Out. Government has always subsidized the press in this country. A Columbia Journalism Review editorial reminds us that the process started with 1792 legislation that established below-cost mail rates for newspapers. With the near collapse of the traditional advertising-supported media model, an increasing number of news producers now are looking for an Uncle Whisers-funded stimulus plan they can call their own. The fires were stoked after President Obama's recent offhand remark that he would be "happy to look" at congressional proposals to boost the fortunes of ailing publishers. CJR concluded that "if we don't get beyond the rational but outdated fear of government help for accountability journalism---if we just let the market sort it out---this vital public good will continue to decline.
• Necessary? David Westphal and Geoffrey Cowan of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism take a pragmatic and innovative look at public subsidies for news organizations, as reported in the CBC article "Government cash for the US media business? It's already there but shrinking fast." Their recent paper on government assistance for the news media poses perhaps the key question in the debate: Is a new form of government intervention prudent and necessary to ensure that Americans have access to the kind of information they need in a democracy?
  

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Join the Discussion: Protocol for Free & Responsible Student News Media

On February 8-9, 2010, the McCormick Freedom Project and the Illinois Press Foundation will convene a group of crucial stakeholders from across the state and country with the goal of creating a protocol that will serve as a national model for scholastic journalism. The conference will bring together more than 50 representatives from local and national organizations specializing in the First Amendment, scholastic journalism, and school governance, including students, teachers and principals, who are the first to encounter these often tense situations inherent to scholastic journalism, along with superintendents, school board members, and other affected parties.

The Freedom Project hopes that you will join in the discussion through the Twitter hash tag #studentnewsmedia and through the Ning group on the Five Freedoms Network.

Freedom Project and Journalism Program staff will be tweeting and posting some questions this week to get the discussion going and will live tweet periodically from the conference. Some of the discussion posts and tweets may become part of the final conference report.

Look for Journalism Program staff who will be moderating discussions. Director Clark Bell will give remarks at Monday's dinner.

Thanks and we hope to hear from you on the Web or see you there!

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"NUF Said" Youth Polling & Reporting Project Begins

The Chicago Youth Voices Network (CYVN) kicked off its first collaborative project this past weekend at Columbia College. Some 40 Chicago-area youth representing Beyondmedia Education, Community TV Network, Columbia Links, Free Spirit Media, North Lawndale Community News, Open Youth Networks, Radio Arte, Street-Level Youth Media, True Star Foundation, Young Chicago Authors and We the People Media attended the two-day social media training workshop and project orientation event. CYVN's project, the Youth 2.0 Recovery Reporting Project, later was renamed NUF Said (Network, Unity, Future) by Beyondmedia Education youth leader Crystal Jackson, who won a Flip video camera  for coming up with the creative title.

      On day one, youth engaged in brainstorming sessions with local issue experts. Together, they developed polling questions on crime, housing, environment/health, education and employment, that will later be used to gather data reflecting the real-life experiences of Chicago youth during the economic recovery. On day two of the training, youth participants learned new social media skills, such as how to engage their friends and classmates in a Polldaddy.com survey, the online polling application that will be used to poll Chicago youth.  The event also included speakers Natalie Moore of WBEZ, Alex Moffett-Bateau of the University of Chicago’s Black Youth Project and Jacob Colker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries.

      Congratulations to CYVN on a great start and kudos to Tom Bailey, NUF Said project coordinator, and Mindy Faber, CYVN project coordinator, for their hard work in the past months. Stay tuned for news about the first wave of polling and resulting reports, articles and online media projects for analysis of the results.

There are many ways to follow the progress of NUF Said over the next year:

• See NUF Said’s photos on Flickr.

• Follow @CYVN on Twitter.

• Become a fan of NUF Said on Facebook.

• Read their bookmarks on Delicious. 

• View CYVN's project website for NUF Said updates.

About CYVN
The Chicago Youth Voices Network is a collaborative of youth media programs, professionals and organizations working together to strengthen the youth media sector in Chicago. By gathering leaders together for peer learning, advocacy and joint projects, the Chicago Youth Voices Network works to strengthen the organizations that amplify the voices of our city’s young people, their families and communities. Founding members of CYVN were all McCormick Foundation Journalism program grantees.

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Director's Notes: Defending Press Freedoms in a New Media Environment

• First Amendment defense. "The First Amendment is a wonderful and powerful thing," Associated Press president Tom Curley said in a recent speech to the Kentucky Press Association, "but it doesn't enforce itself. Perhaps the reluctance of journalists to fight openly for laws that better reflect the spirit and intent of the First Amendment was partly responsible in the years following 9-11 for easing the way for new laws that allowed government to put more and more of its activities behind closed doors." Curley also noted a topic that concerns the McCormick Foundation Journalism Program. With the severe cutbacks in news organizations, there are fewer resources to defend freedom of the press. "Whoever the angels of the First Amendment are destined to be in the Digital Age, they aren't likely to be showing up in significant force for a while."
• The Public Sector. The Northwest Herald scolds Illinois politicians for messing with the state's new Freedom of Information Act. The General Assembly's passage of a bill that exempts teacher, principal and superintendent evaluations from public scrutiny is a slap for anyone interested in open government. The teachers' union-friendly bill was quickly signed by Gov. Pat Quinn barely two weeks after the new FOIA became law.
• Boom in New Media Research Tools. An overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media for their research, according to a study released by George Washington University's Program in Strategic Public Relations. Nearly 90 percent of the journalists surveyed use blogs for story research, according to a report in the Columbia Journalism Review. About two-thirds of the journalists used social media sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. About half use microblogging services like Twitter. The biggest surprise was that only 61 percent admit to using Wikipedia.

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