There are too few occasions where journalists stop and ask themselves why. Not just “why” as one of the five “w”s, but more broadly.

Why am I writing this story? Why is it important? Why is this whole area important? Why are things as they are?

I’m guilty of not asking “why” enough. Most journalists are, too.

It’s time to ask myself: “Why the Students’ Union?”

Why is it important? Why does it exist? Why do the people involve get so worked up, one way or the other?

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, having started a mind map outline back in early January. Mike Hodges wrote an article that may sound similar, but this will be cover more ground, and try to provide some answers to the questions raised above, and in his piece.

People and perspective

Unfortunately it’s necessary that I start by stressing that this is not about the individual people involved.

As far as I’m aware, everyone involved in the SU is sincere and believe they’re genuinely working to help their fellow students.

People may have grievances against individual officers. They may believe they’re incompetent, or lazy, or whatever. That doesn’t matter. It distracts us from the real issues at stake: the place of the SU as an organisation.

We shouldn’t think solely in terms of “this person’s doing a bad job” — though since the full-time officers get paid that is a legitimate concern.

Instead we should take a step back and get a broader perspective.

The main reason I was so cynical about the SU elections is that it really doesn’t matter who gets in. While the elections may have been important for the individuals involved, since it would have a considerable effect on their lives, they meant nothing in a wider context.

By concentrating on the elections, the back-and-forth, the campaigns, we helped make the whole thing legitimate, without really asking what it was all about.

What is it?

Let’s start with an overview of the SU.

It claims to be the “representative” body for students at the University of Lincoln, an institution which they say they are independent of.

It is an opt-out organisation. All students are members of the SU, unless they ticked a box on the back of their enrolment form. Very few students (~15%) vote in the SU’s elections.

The SU is staffed by a team of elected, full-time, paid student officers (six in 2009/10, four in 2010/11), who are assisted by elected part-time student officers, and some (non-elected) paid staff.

It is almost fully funded by the university, which gives the SU a grant of around £350,000. They also cover room costs, maintenance, utilities, and staff salaries.

(The SU’s staff mysteriously disappeared from their Companies House filings, going from 7.4 full-time equivalent staff to 0. This happened when it changed from being a co-operative to a charity limited by guarantee (essentially a private company). The only salaries taken out of the block grant are those for the full-time student officers. Therefore it is safe to assume that the university covers staff pay.)

Most students’ involvement with the SU will probably result from them being part of a sports team or society, which are managed and partly funded by the organisation.

The more “political” side involves the SU’s interaction with the university, in an attempt to influence the institution’s policies. The people most responsible for this are the full-time team, particularly the president and the vice-presidents for education and welfare.

It’s this role that I’ll be looking at here. Since the sports and societies aspect is mostly administrative, I have no real problem with it. Shane Croucher has said that this function may as well be taken over by the university. I don’t disagree, but I will not make that argument in this post.

So what is the issue at stake?

Power and representation, and claims to power and representation.

The SU claim that they represent Lincoln students. This claim comes from the vast majority of students at the university being members of the SU. But the amount of people who actively participate is far lower — just look at the election turnout.

The SU don’t have a mandate. They don’t have the support of the students. The students of the University of Lincoln are boycotting the Students’ Union.

This is why I’m so cynical and dismissive whenever an officer says they’re trying to do something for, or on behalf of, the students here.

It’s just ridiculous. It has as much grounding in reality as me standing up and saying that I’m going to do something for the people of West Parade. I could get a few people to support me (maybe even 10% — more than what Chris Charnley got when he was re-elected), but the idea that I somehow represent those living on West Parade, and know what their preferences are, is just absurd.

It gets worse

As mentioned earlier, I have no reason to doubt the officers’ sincerity, but what they believe — about their work, about the SU, and about Lincoln students — has little connection to reality.

Matters get worse when you consider the control the university has over the SU, and that the primary task the organisation has set itself is lobbying the university.

How do you think the recent BASSA strikes against BA would have gone if the union was about 95% funded by the airline? Differently.

The Students’ Union is not a union

No action is required to become a member, members do not get involved in any significant way, and the organisation is almost wholly funded by the institution it’s attempting to influence.

I’m not saying that the issues the SU is trying to address should be ignored and no action taken. I’m not saying that students should not work together to influence our university, or higher education more generally.

What I’m saying is that the Students’ Union is not the way to do it. It is fundamentally flawed, and I’m not sure there’s a way of having a Students’ Union that isn’t, at least in the way they are currently constituted.

Mike Hodges asks in his article:

The second question that needs to be asked is do we really need a Students’ Union as currently constituted? In my mind, a Students’ Union should be run much like a conventional union. For the protection and support of its members during times of crisis. Do we really need a Vice President of Activities, a Vice President of Welfare and Diversity or even a Liberation Officer? Should anyone be paid for their work, apart from covering expenses? When I was as a union representative (UNISON) I did not receive payment but was expected to work for nothing.

Is it time for the Students’ Union at this university to take a good look at itself? Ask some hard questions concerning its organisation and its relevance to the student body? Possibly consider cutting itself down to a streamlined organisation, staffed purely by volunteers, who concentrate on acting as advocates for those students in need of help?

The Students’ Union cannot “take a good look at itself”, and “cutting itself down to a streamlined organisation” would not address the central problems.

Maybe there’s a case to be made for establishing a more conventional-style union for students. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that such reforms can be achieved within the present system.

If we’re serious about campaigning against fees, for example, let’s get a group of people together who are dedicated to doing the boring, day-to-day work of campaigning, spreading the word, and organising on a grass-roots level.

Let’s not try to do this through an organisation funded by an institution dependent on fees for its survival.

If we’re serious about this, students need to start afresh.

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.

Contents

This post is really, incredibly long. 3,000 words long. To help if you want to skip through, here’s a linked table of contents:

• Summary
• Defining “online journalism”
• Current online teaching at Lincoln
  • The introduction is ill
  • Broadcast is best
  • Pathetic print
  • Online on its own
    • Second year
    • Third year
• How to improve “online journalism” at Lincoln
  • An improved introduction
  • Better broadcast
    • Doing more
    • Setting strict standards
  • Preferable print
  • Oust online
    • Journalists don’t need to know HTML
• Conclusion

The short version

Because the real thing is so long, here’s the short version. (Skip this if you’re going to read the whole thing.)

“Online journalism” teaching is in a bad way at the University of Lincoln, with different production modules teaching different things, and the existence of a separate and useless “on-line journalism production” module.

Students aren’t taught anything meaningful in their first year, and online is dismissed as “blogging”. Meanwhile, the second- and third- year print modules’ online aspects consist of a static Dreamweaver template. The second-year online module also focuses on Dreamweaver. There seems to be no consistent approach in the TV production modules, for any year.

Radio production is the most advanced, and the other production modules should take their cue from Gary Stevens’s work. He has set up a WordPress site that students post work to. Unfortunately, this is not used as comprehensively as it should be, and most content is posted by the third-year radio students.

To improve matters the separate online modules should be scrapped. Very few students take these. The useful material should be taught to the first-year students, and an emphasis should be placed on teaching them the basic of online — including using WordPress. Students should be encouraged or even forced to use this as a way of breeding familiarity with the tools and techniques required.

This will then support more advanced and complex practices in the second and third years, where production modules should adopt WordPress and have students publish all of their production work online. Increased familiarity will also help students contribute to current debates on online journalism and its uses — hyperlocal news websites, for example.

The importance of the internet to today and tomorrow’s media requires that a robust and thorough online journalism education program be implemented. The current situation cannot be allowed to continue.

Open the Oxford, crack the Collins (A definition)

When I talk about “online journalism” I’ll be specifically referring to production, and nothing else. There is a lot of stuff that you could include with “online journalism”: just look at all the topics covered by Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog.

In this post I am solely concerned with getting students’ stories on the web.

Current online teaching at Lincoln

Right now, the approach that the School is taking is in a bit of a mess. Different specialisms get taught different things. Depending on the modules students take in their second year they’ll get taught different things, and there’s still a separate online unit.

Because of how compartmentalised this is it makes sense to go through each part individually.

The introduction is ill

There isn’t much of an introduction to the basics of online journalism, and what’s given is poor. In the first year students are set a blogging assignment, mentioned above. In a comment on my recent post about it, Charlotte Reid recalled the lecture given by Bernie Russell, the tutor in charge of the online module, on the topic.

Broadcast is best

Thanks to the work of Gary Stevens¹, a radio tutor, the broadcast modules include a good level of online publishing. Radio newsdays publish their work to lsjnews.co.uk, accompanying their audio reports with small bits of introductory copy, and occasionally with pictures.

The work of the third-year radio students, “CityVibe@5”, is currently the only content that is regularly uploaded. In another comment Charlotte Reid explained the situation for the second-year radio students:

The first few weeks of radio newsdays we did the online part. As radio is influenced by Gary Stevens we used wordpress and did upload audio, pictures (that we’d taken ourselves) and copy. But our radio group is so small that it was dropped, even the required element in our portfolio.

Also, some work from the television students is also available on the site. The videos are hosted on an associated YouTube account, and embedded into posts. There are only eight video posts up, so it seems as if this isn’t a consistent practice. Even so, the arrangement is there and the only work left to do is export, upload, and post the video packages.

Charlotte Reid again:

TV in year one we would upload the video to Youtube and link it up to some copy etc on wordpress. From the sounds of it though they don’t in year two because of copyright issues.

The site is a little rough around the edges, but nothing that cannot be easily fixed. I’ve told Gary in person how impressed by it I am, and as such the recommendations below will be minor.

Pathetic print

In the second- and third-year print news module there is an “online” component, but it barely deserves being described as such. Students are required to fill out a Dreamweaver template with that day’s stories. “Fill out” is exactly the right description, as it’s more like filling out a tax return than publishing journalism on the internet.

If you take a look for yourselves, you can perhaps appreciate how dire the situation is. Some “standards”² are applied — each headline must be six words long, and each excerpt 15 — but it is not enough. Particularly annoying are the wildly different picture sizes. Let’s go through the stories and look at the sizes, from top to bottom: (All sizes are in pixels, width first and height second.)

1. 200×100
2. 105×116
3. 101×100
4. 100×100 (The six bottom stories’ pictures are this size.)

Because of the way the dreamweaver template works, the pictures have to be cropped and resized before they’re imported. If you insert a larger picture the box will expand and destroy the layout.

What’s even worse is that, since these are the same stories that appear on the tabloid page, there are usually only about three pictures. This means the less ridiculous 100×100 image boxes often don’t get used.

The “online” requirement — which doesn’t require the person filling out the page to be online — is a joke, and clearly an afterthought (and as such is an afterthought during the newsdays). I expect there was a meeting where it was discussed how to incorporate online journalism into the module, and Roger, Tim, or Bernie suggested this.

I don’t do the magazine module, but it seems that things are just as bad that side of the fence.

Due to the laughable state its in now, the suggestions are more extreme than for broadcast.

Online on its own

Separate to the online journalism teaching included (or not) in the other modules, there is a “On-line journalism production” option. In the second year this combines with a 12-week photography unit to form a whole-year module, while it’s a full, two-semester module for third-year students.

Second year

Put simply, it’s teaching the wrong things. Fundamentally, it is approaching the subject from the wrong direction.

The actual production involved in the unit is focused on producing static content, and much of what’s learned is in aid of that. From the unit handbook (.pdf), one of the five “expected learning outcomes”:

At the end of the semester, you should: […] * be able to design and mark-up a web site by writing HTML, and by using a web authoring program;

Students are introduced to content management systems (CMS), but only briefly. The focus is on Dreamweaver, and that’s what is taught. Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver.

I have no opinion on Dreamweaver as a program. I’m not a web designer. But it’s not a good fit for “on-line journalism production”. It produces static pages and static websites.

The WordPress codex says: “[t]he problem with purely static pages is that they are difficult to maintain.” And a site made out of them just doesn’t work when you trying to get news up quickly and easily.

Thankfully it is not required that the assessed site be created in Dreamweaver (my group’s site was done on WordPress). But Dreamweaver is what’s taught.

Each group has to “design and build a Web site covering a particular area of interest as part of a group project.” If you’re thinking this could mean a whole range of things — a site all about horses, for instance — then you’re right. (Last year, one group did create a site all about horses.) There’s very little that’s journalistic about the whole thing.

Third year

Things get a little more sensible for third-year students that take the online module, which runs through both semesters. One of the “expected learning outcomes” is that students “should… be able to use a content management system to host, manage and display your material”. This is encouraging.

Whereas the second-year program is outdated, the third-year one (.doc) is far more up-to-date. But the question here is why is it on its own, away from all of the other modules? It teaches things that all students should know, not just the 20 people who choose to continue with online in their final year.

The king is dead. We’re all the king (Improving things)

Thinking about writing this post was hard. It was hard because I was thinking of how to change and improve the current set-up, a part of which is a separate online module in the journalism course. This is completely unnecessary.

Going forward, there shouldn’t be a separate module for teaching these skills because they should be taught to all journalism students. The internet — and publishing news on it — is just that important. No matter what they’ve decided to specialise in, all journalism students should know how to put their work online. There is no such thing as an “online” journalist. We should all be “online” journalists, and all students should be taught those things that are reserved for the “online” module — the parts that are relevant and useful, anyway.

Below I’ll go through each specialism again, looking at what needs to be done to improve their online teaching.

An improved introduction

Teaching online journalism needs to start with the course. The internet is incredibly important to all media now, and the first-year teaching should reflect that.

First-year student Jonathan Cresswell mentioned that there is a little of this at present:

As I’ve yet to be taught much online journalism, as I’ve only been here for one semester so far, (except in a lecture by Gary Stevens who was talking about convergence, and showing great examples of how online can be used to good effect)[…]

Gary deserves some sort of award. This is what needs to be done. But not only telling students, but teaching them too. Right now it is being dismissed as “blogging”. It’s not just blogging. It’s publishing.

The internet enables cheap (or free) publishing, allowing previously un- or underserved communities to share information quickly and easily. You know this. I know this. The LSJ (should) know this.

So why not act on what we know?

Right alongside their basic writing, first-year students should be taught how to publish on the web. It’s easy, so it can be taught quickly. And by getting in early you’re building skills that will be useful throughout the course (and throughout students’ lives and careers).

Start with WordPress. It’s a very simple and easy-to-use CMS. It is also very powerful — and by getting students to use it early on they’ll hopefully be tapping into much of that power by their third year.

Teach it as a tool. That’s all it is. Get students comfortable with it. You could even require that students publish their copy on WordPress blogs for assessment (and if there are any legal worries, just have them password-protected).

The important thing is first-year students are taught about publishing to the internet, that they are taught thoroughly, and they get familiar with doing it. These basic online skills underpin everything else that you could possibly want to have students do later on in their course.

Better broadcast

The broadcast people are already way ahead of everyone else. There are only two things they need to do: 1) more, 2) apply rigid standards.

Doing more

Everything needs to go up. For radio, save as an .mp3 and upload it to an audio hosting site. Embed the player, and you’re all set.

But more people need to be involved. From the author names on lsjnews.co.uk it seems like one person gets stuck with putting everything online. It’s a waste of that person’s time. Sharing the workload will probably be faster, and increases familiarity with the workflow. Everyone should be responsible for uploading their own content.

TV is a trickier one (as video is more time-consuming to produce and upload, and harder to work with). Early on, students should be made familiar with websites such as The Real News Network to show the possibilities for video on the web. With Vimeo and YouTube, the tools for hosting video content are well advanced, and embedding video is fairly simple and straightforward.

I’d imagine the time it takes to export the video as a usable format, and the time it takes to upload and be processed by the hosting website would be the hindering factor here. But getting the video news produced by students online should be an aim.

Setting strict standards

This is relatively straightforward. Whoever has the keys to lsjnews.co.uk should see what their current WordPress theme will tolerate in terms of headline length, excerpt length, picture sizes, picture requirements, etc.

This information should be used to draw up a set of requirements that each story published should meet (headline between 20 and 25 characters long, for example). This will help improve the consistency of the website, and sort out any visual problems there are currently.

Headlines and excerpts should be specified in character lengths, rather than in words (as it’s more specific; words can be long or short).

Preferable print

Use WordPress. Bang. Problem solved.

Well, sort of.

There should be no mucking around with Dreamweaver templates. I mean, just look how awful the newspaper one is! We have to deal with that every newsday.

It’s also really awkward, as one person gets stuck with it, and everyone has to either send over their stories or dictate headlines and excerpts to the person doing the page.

Everyone should be responsible for their own stories. So, here’s a thought: set up a WordPress site, give everyone an account, and have them do it themselves. A side benefit is that you end up with a working website, and not a rubbish-looking, completely-fake piece of static HTML.

Even if you don’t overhaul the way print newsdays work (a topic for another day), this makes things far simpler and easier, and a lot more realistic. WordPress may not be like any news organisation’s CMS — I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never seen one — but I’m sure it’s far closer to reality than mocking up a static front page.

As with broadcast, there should be strict standards in place. The current template has a version of this, but they should all be scrapped, as they don’t make any sense and wouldn’t transfer over.

Oust online

Just bin it. There’s a fair bit of the current teaching that is just out of date and/or unnecessary. What is relevant should be taught elsewhere — in the other modules, or during the first year.

There’s not a lot else to say on this, other than it makes no sense to have it as a separate module. Doing so is actually detrimental to the online teaching that should be present throughout the other production modules.

Journalists don’t need to know HTML

A common complaint I hear from journalism students struggling with their law assessments is “if I wanted to be a lawyer I would have taken a law degree”. But law is essential for journalists, in the same way the highway code is essential for drivers.

If a student wanted to be a web designer they would have taken a web design course. Unlike law, knowing how to code a website is not essential for any journalist who wants to publish on the internet. There are suites of tools that come with either complete designs or automate the process.

I believe that students should know how to do basic things in HTML, but it is not essential, and often better results can be achieved with tools that don’t require such knowledge.

For example, this whole website runs on WordPress, and uses a template designed by someone else. I did not even attempt to build it myself. Even basic visual markup — <em>, <strong>, and so on — isn’t needed. I’m writing this in Markdown³, and WordPress includes a visual editor, which appears to the user to alter text in the same way a word processor does.

Here’s a comment from Mindy McAdams, whom I agree with on the topic. A brief excerpt:

[T]he amount of [CSS & HTML] that journalism students need to know is really quite small. I think we should aim more for exposure and basic comprehension[…]

And you may as well do that in the first year, while you’re focusing on something else. Perhaps while teaching the basics of how a WordPress theme is constructed, and which template documents control which user-facing elements.

Conclusion

The Lincoln School of Journalism need to radically overhaul the way they think about online, and the way they teach their students about it.

Online should be incorporated into the other production units, and students should be taught how to actually use the tools in their first year. This is extremely important because it is the foundation for doing anything more complex, and publishing on the internet is so important now that not teaching it straight away is inexcusable.

At a specific level, tutors should focus on using WordPress as the standard online publishing tool because it is free, quick to teach, easy to use, and immensely powerful. It should be thoroughly incorporated into the three production modules and used throughout the three-year course.

An academic year later, and it doesn’t look as if anything’s changed. In a comment on my post about blogging assignments Mindy McAdams wrote:

[I]f they treat it as a class assignment… they will never understand blogging, will they?

I have taken it for granted that assigning students to create and keep a blog is the best way to get them to under tand blogging. But maybe there is a better way.

I’ve got no idea whether any of the staff at Lincoln read that post, but I doubt it. Here’s what the “Journalism Skills” unit handbook for first-year Lincoln journalism students says on blogging:

***Blogging — You will be required to produce a blog with at least six entries. You will receive instructions on these requirements in the lecture devoted to blogging by Bernie Russell in week four (February 17). The blog will be handed in by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). You will hand in a copy of the blog address (the URL) on an A4 sheet of paper, which also also contains your name and student number, YOU WILL ALSO email the blog address and your name and student number to Bernie Russell and Roger De Bank by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). This represents 15% of your Semester B marks. [Their emphases.]

The comment I made about the requirements for last year’s first-year students still applies: “That isn’t blogging as self-motivated publishing. That’s work.”

I’d be very interested to hear what Bernie says in his February 17th lecture, but I’m not especially hopeful he’ll fill students with a passion for blogging.

Official announcement that John Pilger’s archive will be built and maintained by the University of Lincoln.

It’s a rough edit of the audio I recorded on Monday, and I’ve basically just cut out the spikes & normalised the volume.

In speaking order, it features John Tulloch, head of the Lincoln School of Journalism, Mike Saks, a senior pro vice-chancellor at the university, and John Pilger.

(Note: The reason why you can hear tapping sounds is because I was holding my phone underneath my shorthand notebook. If anyone wants the audio file, or a transcript, just email me.)