My mentee, as a journalism student, is about to take over the world. To publish stories, to get known. I wish I had someone to mentor me as I started, I might have made better informed decisions.

From help with selling an article, to setting up a business plan and designing a website. I’ll be keeping track of my mentee on a monthly basis. Hopefully at the end of this mentoring programme, which is in October, she will be able to start her own business in journalism. With a list of publications to proof.

EvN Media believes in entrepreneurs, people who are willing to take a chance and are not going to wait for a job and get stuck in an office. Adventure awaits. EvN Media promises to mentor at least one student a year who wants to grow his or her entrepreneurial skills and knowledge. They might one day make for good, healthy competition!

For me it is time to get ready for what is now publicly known as a circus. This one does not involve tigers, elephants or horses but just a whole lot of clowns, acrobats and jugglers. Its our own media circus in the African Media Matrix building at Rhodes University.

CueBlog
Cue Media is an amalgamation of media platforms that report on Festival. It is the ultimate real-life learning experience for newspaper, TV, radio, photography and online students.

Its now my third year of involvement and I have to admit that these ten days are marked in my calendar with rainbow colours and some festive, albeit childish, balloons and flowers. I’ll be editing CueBlog, the latest edition to Cue Media.

The idea of CueBlog originated in 2007 and comes from Prof Peter Verwey who lectures at the Dutch School of Journalism in Utrecht. It started as a convergence project, to see if it was possible to merge the separate existing newsrooms to make them more efficient. Why not re- and pre-purpose material? Why not use photographs from CuePix as a slideshow with added sound from CueRadio? Well, CueOnline is set in its own ways so we conjured up a whole new platform to show that we are able to converge all the different media and still do our own additional reporting.

Convergence Challenges
And so CueBlog was born in 2007 and with the help of Dutch students and a group of Highway Africa News Agency reporters we were off to a quick start. We didn’t foresee some of the challenges. The daily converged diary meetings did not work as well as we hoped and there was a lack of understanding from the other platforms. Why do we need a blog, don’t we have online already? Are they just going to use our content and that’s it? Do they really need a space in the newspaper to show off their most read posts?

Moving Forward
In 2008 the relations changed dramatically. It was the same-old challenges for the first two or three days but after some well-thought over chitchat with the other editors we finally felt as though we were becoming part of Cue Media. First of all, we got our column in the newspaper, secondly we also received National Arts Festival goodies, thirdly we managed to get some of our stories linked to stories from the newspaper and vice versa, we also sold three advertisements (a clear indication that we are taking this blogging seriously and we are also able to add to the pot).

For this year’s edition of CueBlog we have decided to start on the right foot. We are not in competition with CueOnline and will therefore this year collaborate more closely then ever before. One Dutch student from the blog will team up with one online student on a daily basis and make a multimedia production for both platforms. This exchange of skills and knowledge should be an important underlying characteristic of the whole project, just as testing the boundaries of convergence is.

It’s back!
This year the much-loathed daily converged diary meetings return. But for now we’ll just call it the “editors teatime” as to not enforce that scary word ‘convergence’ into anyone’s mind. It does not make sense to run separate newsrooms that are under the same heading without knowing what everyone is doing. Off course a CMS would sort this out but with no funding for that we will continue working with the good-old folder based system.

We have also purchased Cue Media shirts, just to visually become a part of the circus.

I’ll be posting updates on the NaFest CueBlog project on this site as we go. In the meantime, if you have any enquiries or comments about CueBlog you can get in touch with me.

Cheers,
Elvira

Evaluations
During the final lecture of each course the students fill out a self-made evaluation form. Completely new for me was teaching blogging within a School. The fourth-year students work in a crossmedia lab, using mostly radio and television, and had to now integrate Campusblog.nl in their schedule.

Some comments:

“Blogging is not scary at all, I can actually do it myself”
–
“It was very cool to hear about Web 3.o, as a person who is interested in Internet-related news I didn’t realise what impact it has”
–
“Blogging is not just for people who like to write about themselves, you can use it as a journalist. I think I’ll start setting up a blog with my work soon”

Freelance theory evaluations
Another course that was new to me is Freelance Theory. As a freelance journalist myself I had to now tell about 60 eager-to-learn third and fourth year journalism students about the mistakes I’ve made, how I survive financially and how I cope with doing my own administration. Luckily I had tons of guests and a great book to help me out. See my previous blog post for more.

Some comments:

“I now know how to get started. I really need to work on my network”
–
“I really loved listening to all the anecdotes and practical hints and tips, this was very useful”
–
“Before these lectures I didn’t know if I wanted to take the risk and start my own text writing company. I was worried about the financial side and the administration. Thank you for clearing up a lot of the questions I had”
–
“It’s really not that difficult as I thought. You just need to DO it and not just THINK about doing it. I will become a freelancer, I’m 100% sure now”
–

Buzz buzz
I did learn that all students apparently need a break between the hours during every lecture. It was normal for me to keep on going for two hours in a row but today’s climate is more relaxed then it ever was, which means coffee at the start of the class, during the break AND afterwards. Buzz buzz

Tight deadlines
Other students first complain about the tight deadlines I set, only realising later on that it helps them get through the course. Others find the assignments difficult, but challenging a student can be very rewarding. Many students now realise that being a freelance journalist doesn’t just mean having as many holidays as you want.

I hope to continue lecturing at the end of this year and I will obviously take all the comments from the evaluations with me.

How do you set up, create and sustain a professional network? How do you pitch a story, find new clients and keep in touch?

Other topics involve the Chamber of Commerce, paying tax and insurances. The students also make a number of assignments, they have to write a freelancer profile, make a business plan and visit a media cafe to network with fellow journalist.

Its necessary to teach students about being a freelancer in these financially messy times and to be able to survive on their own.

Guest speakers

We also have a number of guest speakers and so far we welcomed: Tom van der Leij, Bas Maliepaard, Sander Zurhake, Herman Spinhof and Ilvy Njiokiktjien who all shared their experiences in the freelance world.

Take a look at the slideshows of the first 2 lectures here and here. Please note that there are in Dutch.

Awesome book

Also, without the ‘Handboek Freelancen 2008-2009‘ from Tijs van den Boomen and Wilma van Hoeflaken it would have been impossible to explain tax and administrative issues. The book is now required for each Freelance student in my class.

The journalism students are joined by eight media technology students who can help with the make-over and redesign of the blog. It’s a real life exercise in crossmedia journalism.

A lecture about blogging is for most students an eye-opener.  A weblog is not just a tiny space on the web where people write crappy diary-style stories. It’s also a place to show the world your work (a portfolio style weblog) and a gigantic source for journalistic stories.

Out of a group of 25 students only one is blogging and no-one uses Twitter or other microblogging applications. However, most of them are part of social networks like Hyves. Well…this situation will change soon. Within the next 6 weeks all these students will be blogging and thinking crossmedia.

All students produce items for CampusTalk (television and radio) as part of their study, adding another media like CampusBlog means they will need to think across three different journalistic platforms. Integrating or converging these media will take place mostly in the students’ minds. And that is where I come in: do not only make the students THINK multimedia but make them DO it. Only time will tell…

They translate Dutch words directly into English or make Dutch words sound English. It becomes even funnier when Dutch phrases and expressions are translated literally when their meaning is meant figuratively. A perfect book for another English lecture!

Let me give you two examples from the book of the type of ‘Dutchified English’ that is called Denglish by Rijkens.

The Dutch say: “Hij heeft er geen kaas van gegeten”, if you translate this expression directly it will say: “He did not eat any cheese of it” … What the Dutch person is trying to say is: “He doesn’t know the first thing about it”

Another example:

The Dutch say: “Je bent op glad ijs”, if you translate this in Denglish it will say “You are on glad ice”… What the Dutch person is trying to say is “You’re skating on thin ice”.

For the English lecture at the School of Journalism tomorrow I’ll compile a list of the funniest Denglish and promote the book a bit, I think many students need it.

It’s a bit of a challenge, lecturing English to first year Dutch Journalism students. Most walk in thinking it will be 2 hours of listening to boring present-tense and past-tense rules, maybe like it used to be in High School. Well, I have set myself a challenge.

During the first class we had to discuss the contents and structure of the course, which is obviously not very exciting, unless you start with some fun news videos from the BBC website. In the next class I’ll be using video from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, why not laugh out loud during class?

Besides videos it’s also fun to challenge each other and speak English in front of your class mates. To try and formulate answers, hear your own mistakes, to try a true English-accent.

We also practice our reading skills with articles from different magazines. I personally like NewAfrican, but they made loads of factual mistakes in an article about immigration in Holland (‘Holland – Blaming everything bad on immigrants’, June ‘08), even confusing the murder of politician Pim Fortuyn with that of movie director Theo van Gogh. Great for Journalism students to read how correspondents make mistakes and to still be able to find and understand the mistakes while its written in English.

It’s the first time I taught English but the two hours passed very quickly. Monday is the second class and I’m preparing another fun two hours, hoping to also get some feedback from the students. Hope they think this challenge is successful.

Before you realise it’s Friday and a whole week of publishing about fact checking is over. The first year journalism students in Utrecht were taught to work in a Content Management System, to phone journalists and sources to confront them with the facts from the articles, upload their post and multimedia onto the blog and interview guest speakers.

The week combined practical work, journalistic basics (fact checking) and multimedia blogging in one. Some of the findings are remarkable, like press releases that newspapers just copy and paste without checking  (also copying mistakes) and publishing graphics about the US elections with the wrong amount and numbers.

There are also newspaper articles with only one source (while we all know that one source equals no source) and articles were the opinion of the journalist is difficult to distinguish from the facts.

Most students are positive, giving responses like

“I couldn’t believe that we were able to find so many mistakes and write so many blog posts in just one week”

to

“I’m glad that I now understand how a CMS works, I can now post my own blog and that is good to know”

It was a great pleasure to work with about 25 enthusiastic, clever, first year Journalism students and to be able to pass on my practical knowledge and examples. I would also like to thank our guest speakers Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck who were all able to keep the students motivated and answered all their questions patiently.

These practical lectures can easily be adapted into a Master Class in journalism or be part of a media training for beginning journalists. If you need more information you can always e-mail Elvira.

This upcoming week the first-year students of the School for Journalism in Utrecht, The Netherlands, will experience their first Orientation Week.  The students have the whole week to get familiar with a certain journalistic medium, in this case new media.

We have organised a week around the theme ‘Fact Checking’, an important topic to deal with in a journalism department. During the week all students will research Dutch regional and national newspapers and check the facts. Guest lectures by Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck will give the students examples from ‘the real world’.

After one week of research the students will publish the results on our new weblog, factchecking.nl