Archives for November 2016

Turning Students into News Junkies

By Raluca Cozma,
Associate Professor and Director
of Undergraduate Education,
Greenlee School of Journalism
and Communication,
Iowa State University
rcozma@iastate.edu

 

 

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, November, 2016 issue)

During introductions at the beginning of each semester, I ask my students to share who their favorite journalist is. In recent years, more often than not, students can’t name a journalist they admire, not because of a shortage of greats in the field, but because they don’t consistently follow the news. As we celebrated the third annual News Engagement Day this October, I thought I’d share classroom strategies we can use to make students realize that, in order to become successful writers and effective producers of content, they need to appreciate and consume others’ work.  These strategies go beyond the habitual current-events quiz, which often inspires fear more than passion for the news.

Showcase the best. In my reporting classes, I routinely assign reading or watching award-winning pieces across news platforms. Students then get together and dissect the strengths of each piece and articulate what strategies they could emulate in their own storytelling. At the end of the semester, one of their most common comments is how much they appreciated being introduced to inspiring stories they wouldn’t have otherwise invested time in. I’ve noticed dwindling interest in long-form stories like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” but showing a short video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab0rt_QokBI) about Gay Talese’s writing bunker where the reporter explains the meticulous process involved in his gathering and organizing of hundreds of interviews helps students appreciate the man behind the work. They then seek out the Esquire piece on their own, although it’s unlikely that Ol’ Blue Eyes himself is on any of their iPod playlists. Equally awe-inspiring are several (creative-component) mini-documentaries produced by former master’s students that I play in class. They showcase storytelling techniques of some of the most successful local journalists. Watching them in class not only introduces students to professional role models but also to academic work examples for those considering upgrading their credentials with an advanced degree.

Personalize the news. When behind-the-scenes videos or mini-documentaries are not available, I invite guest speakers (be it young professionals who graduated just a few years ago or veteran journalists with decades of experience under their belt) to share their storytelling techniques and tricks and to share their favorite and most-challenging professional moments and assignments. I find that meeting and hearing from these mentors help students internalize the concepts introduced in lectures as well as become more appreciative of news and news work.

Encourage peer learning. Many reporting instructors create and maintain news blogs to host enterprise stories produced by students over the course of a semester. This increases accountability and makes reporting assignments feel more like a real job than homework. When pitching their story ideas, I ask my students to verify that someone else in the class has not already covered the story they have in mind. For extra credit, after each set of stories is published, I ask students to read at least three stories on the class news site and leave meaningful, constructive feedback.  They are exposed to new stories, get to wear an editor’s hat, and also receive useful comments on their own work.

Nurture appreciation for news in non-reporting courses. In the past couple of years, I started requiring a digital New York Times subscription in my international-communication seminar. For $1 a week (adding up to $16 for the semester), in addition to getting access to the newspaper’s digital archive (which begins in 1851) and its daily coverage of various foreign news events, students can also use resources, such as the Topics section, to conduct research on the country assigned to them. Students’ response has been overwhelmingly positive, and many reported that they kept their subscription after the semester ended.

Play to students’ strengths. Meeting students where they spend most of their time – on social media – is an effective way to encourage engagement with the news. In many classes, I ask students to “tweet their beat,” whereby they need to curate pertinent news content from credible sources in addition to promoting their own stories. Even in my graduate seminar on political communication, I dedicate one weekly class session to theory and research and the other to analysis of media performance, as exemplified by stories students need to find and share on Twitter using a class hashtag. This allows students to perform ad-hoc case studies of the concepts discussed in class and forces them to read several news reports until they find one that perfectly exemplifies a mass-communication theory. I’ve noticed the most impressive impact of this type of assignment on new international students who, by the end of the semester, can expertly discuss differences in various types of U.S. news media and platforms. This type of knowledge then translates into increased ease in formulating research problems for their master’s theses.

These are just a few strategies to engage students with the news. AEJMC’s webpage links to a New York Times piece that lists 50 more ways to teach with current events (http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/50-ways-to-teach-current-events/). To share your own strategies, please drop me a note at rcozma@iastate.edu.

Teaching Corner

Social Media and Social Change:
A Lesson in Biased Product Development and Collective Action

By Jennifer Grygiel,
Social Media/Assistant Professor of Communications,
Syracuse University
jgrygiel@syr.edu

 

 

 

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, September 15, 2016 issue)

Editor’s note: This column showcases the winning entry in the AEJMC Best Practices in Ethics in an Emerging Media Environment Teaching Competition.

Given recent growth in social media technologies, it is increasingly difficult for journalists, educators and students to keep up with ethical issues that arise from product development. It is important to be critical of how technologies come to market, and to be aware of technological bias and its impact on journalism and mass media communications.

This class activity explored bias in the development of digital technologies used to represent skin color. The activity draws on use cases from the early days of Kodak film to issues surrounding Twitter’s new “racially diverse emoji,” and how students can collaborate to make change.

Teaching Activity
The class activity was designed to expose students to the presence of bias in product development, specifically issues involving skin color and technology, and how bias impacts communications across various industries (e.g., journalists, marketers, advertisers, etc.). The activity draws on use cases from the early days of Kodak and biased color film, to issues surrounding Twitter’s new racially diverse emoji (Chowdhry, 2015) (“diverse emoji”), and how students can collaborate to raise awareness of ethical issues in communications and make change.

The activity began with a discussion of how some products that come to market are biased and not inclusive of people of color, starting with Kodak color film. To process color film, the company created a Shirley card, which was a photo of a white woman, to assist color lab technicians with developing color film. Kodak did not have cards for people of other races, which made it difficult to correctly print photos of people of color (Ali, 2015). We then discussed contemporary issues around bias in facial recognition, such as web cameras that lack sufficient technology to properly work for people of color, to illustrate how biased product development is not just a thing of the past (Albanesius, 2009).

As the number of white-skin emoji increased (Newton, 2014), celebrities and influencers began to raise ethical issues around the lack of diversity in emoji (Perez, 2014). In response, Apple released diverse emoji in their iOS 8.3 update on April 8, 2015 (Chowdhry, 2015). These emoji are created by applying an emoji modifier based on the Fitzpatrick Scale—a well-known scale for classifying human skin color based on how it reacts to ultraviolet light—to a default emoji (Warren, 2015). With this new release, the Unicode Foundation, which governs the release of emoji, has made efforts to standardize the default skin color as yellow, which caused some issues in the Asian community (Warren, 2015). On December 3, 2015, 232 days later, Twitter still had not updated their desktop computer application (“desktop”) to display them correctly. I presented students with the observation that Twitter’s desktop application was not able to properly display the new skin tone emoji that Apple released.

The rollout of diverse emoji was not coordinated amongst major companies such as Apple and Twitter, which resulted in people of color being marginalized. When non-white people created Tweets with diverse emoji on their mobile phones, they were frequently represented by a white emoji (not only the new standard default yellow) plus the skin tone swatch that they chose, when viewed on desktop. For example, if an African American person selected a new diverse emoji on mobile, it would display a white emoji plus a new Unicode Fitzpatrick swatch of their selected skin tone on desktop prior to the new iOS release.

People of color were further marginalized beyond the Twitter desktop application as journalists frequently embed live Tweets in major publications. Due to the interconnectedness of Twitter and digital publishers, any publication that embedded diverse emoji would have displayed them incorrectly as a base white/yellow emoji plus a new Unicode Fitzpatrick swatch to their desktop audience.

The lecture portion of the class reviewed how product development roadmaps and timelines may differ due to what companies prioritize, as well as how social media companies and journalists are interconnected.

In this class segment I also covered how social media are used for social change and highlighted a new product called Thunderclap.it, which amplifies messages by allowing large groups of people to post messages on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.) at the same time. At the lesson’s conclusion, the class was invited to participate in an optional Thunderclap campaign where students had the opportunity to ask Twitter to prioritize updating their desktop application to display diverse emoji.

Rationale
As journalists and product developers in training, students should be aware of how social inequalities are reproduced in products that we use, how this marginalizes people, and how ethical issues in one industry can impact others and reinforce issues such as institutional racism and oppression.

Outcomes
Students developed critical thinking around biased product development and Twitter’s product development priorities. For example, one student raised the issue that during the time that Twitter did not address the skin tone swatch issue, they prioritized changing the Favorite button from a star to a heart, an arguably trivial change for users.

The Thunderclap campaign called on Twitter to prioritize emoji equality and garnered more than 45 supporters, including many students from the class, and achieved the potential to reach 56,928 users on social media with our message.

Before the campaign ended, Twitter updated their product in line with the goals of the campaign.

Teaching Corner