Here are the final minutes of the tele-meeting that the committee held on Aug. 19, 2010. A draft of the minutes had been circulated by e-mail; this version incorporates suggested changes.

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Minutes of telephone meeting of the SPJ Journalism Education Committee, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009

The meeting began at 4 p.m. EST. The following people were present for all or part of the meeting:

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From today’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The College News Network isn’t much: a bare-bones Web site, expenses totaling $17, and a single advertisement that covered every penny.
 
But the Ohio University undergraduates who founded the college-journalism content-sharing cooperative hope the new wire-service-style Web site can help fill a hole in the student press.

The Web site is Dave Hendricks and Ryan Dunn’s answer to the demise of UWIRE, a popular service that had aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country before it went mysteriously silent this fall.

Here’s the entire Chronicle article.

Prosecutors in Illinois have subpoenaed the “grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages” of Northwestern University journalism students who investigated whether a man convicted of murder three decades ago had been wrongfully convicted.

According to a story in The New York Times, the prosecutors want to know whether the students, part of the Medill Innocence Project, were offered grades or other incentives to turn up evidence in favor of the man’s innocence.

The Cook County (Illinois) Circuit Court is scheduled to hold a hearing this month on the issue.

On Tuesday, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications said it “strongly urges the judge responsible for this case to quash the subpoena and direct prosecutors to investigate the evidence uncovered by the journalism students in a timely and unbiased way.”

AEJMC said the prosectors’ request for subpoenas was is inappropriate for three reasons:

1) The Medill journalism students should be protected under the Illinois state shield law;

2) If the court grants the prosecutors’ request, journalism students involved with similar projects would think twice about criticizing governmental actions if personal information, such as grades and e-mails, could become public; and

3) Journalists should not be treated as instruments of the State.

Robert Niles had a provocative piece in the Online Journalism Review last week:

Eight things that journalism students should demand from their journalism schools

Those things were:

Role models
A mentor
Employment contacts
A place to hack
Work experience
Deep knowledge of a field other than journalism
Getting your name out there
Passion, not excuses

Minutes of SPJ Journalism Education Committee telephone conference meeting, 4 p.m. Eastern time, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009. (Compiled by Jeff South)

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Journalism Education Committee
Annual Meeting
August 28, 2009
Congress I Room-Westin Hotel
Indianapolis, Ind.

MEETING SUMMARY

Meeting was called to order by George Daniels at approximately 10:50 a.m.  
Members Present
Bonnie Stewart
Mark Butzow
June Nicholson
George Daniels
Neil Ralston (ex-officio)

Others Attending
Ronnie Lawler (San Francisco State and Incoming Int’l Cmte. Chair)
Elissa Sonenberg, University of Cincinnati

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This week’s discussion about the The Free Flow of Information Act brings up the ongoing debate over just what is a journalist?

As our SPJ President Clint Brewer explained in his letter to Senator John Cornyn, it is best to “remain fluid” when defining a journalist.   It’s a matter of function rather than title (i.e. newspaper, television, radio, online reporters).

For journalism educators, this is a wake-up call for us as we define our classes, curricula and language in introducing the profession to our stuents.

Are our students still thinking when they sign up for Introduction to Journalism that they will get an introduction to newspapers, magazines and other PRINTED media?

To what extent are we conveying to our students this “fluidity” of which Brewer is speaking in his interactions with lawmakers?

With the passage of the Free Flow of Information Act (and we know it will pass eventually), we have some codifying of this concept called journalism.

I wonder how many journalism teachers are even making their students aware of the current definitional debates as they relate to the shield law?

As we prepare our syllabi for the upcoming fall semester (I’m working on mine as we speak), I think we ought to engage students in the same debates that the lawmakers are engaged.   Leave room for an exercise that exposes the “messiness” of defining of our profession even as it’s changing before our eyes.

Introducing journalism to a whole new generation in 2008 is not like introducing journalism in 1998.  I know it’s a cliche– but it truly is a whole new world.

And, we journalism educators are charged with taking our students by the hand and ushering them in it.

The graduate journalism schools at Columbia University and the City University of New York will improve their new-media programs with a total of $8-million in grants from the Tow Foundation, the charity announced today.

Columbia will receive $5-million, and CUNY $3-million. Under the terms of the grants, Columbia must garner an additional $10-million in donations within 18 months, and CUNY must raise enough to double its grant. Leonard Tow, a co-founder of the foundation, said the grants were a response to his “serious concerns about what is happening in the world of journalism.”

“I thought it was time for us to think about addressing these new-media opportunities so what we as citizens receive from them is more an accurate reflection of what is going on in the world than some opinion,” said Mr. Tow.

Columbia will use its grant to establish the Tow Center, which will build on the journalism school’s existing new-media curriculum and prepare students for careers in digital and online journalism. The school will hire two full-time faculty members to lead the center. The school’s dean, Nicholas Lemann, said the grant had already made an impact: Bill Grueskin of The Wall Street Journal, who two weeks ago was hired as the school’s academic dean, wanted to be involved in the new-media center, Mr. Lemann said.

“Big changes are afoot in journalism, which makes the role of journalism schools vital in a way that it hasn’t been before,” Mr. Lemann said. He added that the center would better position the school to influence the future of journalism.

CUNY’s grant will create the Tow Center for Journalistic Innovation, which will serve a purpose similar to Columbia’s Tow Center. CUNY’s journalism school was established in the fall of 2006 with a heavy emphasis on new media, and at the Tow Center students will develop and put into play journalistic enterprises and business models.

“The old model is under great pressures, some would say crumbling in mainstream media, and there is not enough innovation,” said its dean, Stephen B. Shepard. “This is meant to be a spur in innovation.” —Allie Grasgreen

announces a site created for students preparing to enter the job market. Called  MediaJobPod, the site provides online / broadcast news and production majors with practical job search advice.
Here is the URL for the site ~ http://www.mediajobpod.org and the page with the MediaJobPod logos for sites to download/link: http://tinyurl.com/6l7vxf