So far, I’ve tried to avoid reading anything about the Iraq inquiry, essentially because it’s a massive sham, a distraction, and will not lead to any kind of change, or any kind of justice for the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Iraq war.
But because I follow people like Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Channel 4 News, and occasionally check in with the mainstream media, I haven’t been able to completely seal myself off from everything.
This evening I spent an hour subbing one piece of copy for The Linc’s website. Not because it was spectacularly bad, but because the HTML formatting was just horrendous.
The solution basically involved me having to go through and strip all the existing HTML code from the article and replace it with stuff that actually made sense. (I think the copy was pasted into the visual editor from a word processor, and was just bizarre and horrible.)
This was an exceptional case, but it made me think about how much code student journalists need to know.
The more I think about it, the more it seems that the main suggestion I was making for how the Lincoln School of Journalism should improve its online teaching — adopting WordPress in all production modules — conflicts with my assertion that students don’t need to know HTML.
Recently I wrote about how the Lincoln School of Journalism was still getting it wrong when it came to blogging — something I’d already pointed out during the summer.
In the comments on that post, Dave Lee wrote: “Blogging – and online journalism as a whole – at Lincoln has been seriously lacking.” I can personally vouch for this. Whilst there have been some encouraging developments, much of the practice and teaching is still rotten.
Across the course, a serious look needs to be taken at every aspect of how online journalism is taught, what the flaws are with the current situation, and what can be done to improve things. I offered Bullet Magazine such a review of their website at the end of December, and I’ll take a similar approach here.
Part of what drove me to create LSJ bloggers in the first place was the stupid approach the Lincoln School of Journalism took to introducing students to blogging. I’ve argued that it does nothing to create interest, and at best just serves to familiarise students with the tools.
An academic year later, and it doesn’t look as if anything’s changed.
It’s been over a month since I put LSJ bloggers into hiberation, and as the new year approaches I’m considering what to do next with it. The initial response was incredibly poor, with very few people contributing — only about a third of the people who submitted links to their blogs got involved in some way. It seems appropriate to take another look at LSJ bloggers, and look at what can be done to improve things — even if it means a total overhaul of the concept.
