Patrick Beeson

I began my first lecture of the semester for JN 422: Managing news Web sites on a cautionary note. The news business was changing, I said, and while everything you learned about journalism prior to this class was still useful, you need to know a thing or two about the Web if you want to go far.

Little did I know that by the last lecture of the semester, mainstream media would be considered by many to be teetering on the brink of a complete meltdown (with the rest of the market), Web skills or not.

But despite the economic meltdown of late, I believe my students ended on a positive note: They now know more about managing a news Web site than most folks working in the industry today.

My goals for the class

My iteration of JN 422 examined concepts and issues involved with online journalism, and specifically, news Web sites. We reviewed key areas of knowledge applicable in real-world scenarios. These included:

• Using a content management system (CMS) to publish content to the Web
• Familiarity and understanding of Web advertising, and the online business model
• How to measure the Web audience
• Fundamentals of presenting information using HTML and CSS
• Managing the Web community, and engagement with social networks and blogs
• Search engine optimization (SEO), and how to play nice with Google
• Writing for the Web, and why it's different than print
• Multimedia: News in video, audio and interactive packages

All students were expected to have a fundamental understanding of journalistic knowledge and practice.

I taught the class more like a graduate class. We did not report stories. We examined and discussed issues they would face in the hard-knock world of online journalism and Web site management. There were exercises such as writing SEO headlines and entering stories into a CMS, but I was more focused on familiarity and understanding of concepts.

Class structure

I devoted each week of the semester to a different topic, beginning with a discussion of how the industry is changing and ending with how to get a job in online media, despite the tough market. In between were topics related to the previously mentioned key areas of knowledge.

For each topic, I pulled from a variety of readings and live examples. For instance, Holovaty's opus "A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change" paired with his efforts on Everyblock. There is no textbook that covers this material, which tends to change monthly at times.

Weekly quizzes helped ensure students actually read the material. There were also two tests: a mid-term and final.

But some of the most effective parts of the class were the exercises:

• Find three Web sites presenting information in an innovative manner, and briefly explain why. Would this work for a newspaper Web site? (Note that these don't need to be newspaper sites.)
• Taking into account the readings and class discussion on what works for the Web, use your judgment to chose from five stories those that are most relevant to your users, and edit them for the Web (include suggestions on multimedia, interactivity, etc if needed). Briefly explain you actions for each.
• Markup this story (HTML/CSS exercise)
• Edit and publish this story for the Web using a CMS and HTML/CSS
• Rewrite the provided headlines to perform better in terms of SEO.
• Create a blog using Google's Blogger service, and post an entry using the concepts from our class discussion.

As you could probably assume, the HTML/CSS exercise was the most challenging for the students. Most had only flirted with using these technologies before this class. But I'm confident all left with more knowledge than your typical online producer.

The CMS exercise was also challenging, but in a different way. I had written about this in a previous entry title "How to create user-specific admins in Django".

I wanted each student to take a story, mark it up using valid HTML, and put it in the CMS. I also didn't want students to see stories others had added, prompting some additional code.

Everything worked out in the end, and students had experience using a CMS not that removed from the system in use at all of Scripps' news Web sites.

Student performance

Nobody failed the course, despite the relative difficulty in learning many concepts quite foreign to most students.

The aforementioned HTML/CSS knowledge area gave students the most trouble, followed by the SEO headline writing exercise.

I lucked out with a few students having worked at, or were currently working, in the online side of a media outlet, such as Knoxville's WBIR or knoxnews. These students tended to score better obviously.

Many students came into the class not knowing, or using, RSS, blogs, or common Web applications. I hope most left with a better grasp of these, especially after local blogger and Scripps coworker Katie Granju lectured to them the importance of owning their name as a domain (and blogging).

I would estimate that, based on student knowledge coming into the course, few, if any, classes at the University of Tennessee or it's School of Journalism covered the topics touched on for this class. Fortunately, there are changes happening in the program here that will hopefully spread the wealth.

I won't be teaching this course next semester due to Tennessee's enormous budget crisis. But I am willing to guest lecture not only at UT, but in other journalism programs as needed -- just send me a message using the contact form, or post a comment on this entry.