Unlike most of the other contributors, I'm not working at a college or university, and we are teaching not only students, but also young professionals in the first years of their career and postgraduate journalists. Furthermore we offer trainings for reporters or newsroom editors with a 10 or more years professional experience, which in fact is the most difficult subject: to teach people who know everything. Or, at least, believe to know everything. So some of my perceptions and reflections may differ from yours, but reading your postings I nevertheless had many moments of recognition.
Journalism Academy ("Akademie fuer Publizistik, to give you the correct title at least once) is a small, private institute, founded in 1970, located beautifully near a big lake in the middle of Hamburg, capital of northern Germany. We proudly present a great tradition of print journalism and a long and successfull history of teaching investigation and reporting for paper journalists.
We have a small staff of two fulltime professors, three half-time assistant professors (one of them is actually introducing himself to you as the writer of this posting) and many adjunct professors and lecturers with fulltime jobs at the country's most famous newspapers, magazines and national broadcasting systems.
We have a fully equipped multimedia classroom, we have a small TV-studio and an even smaller audio production unit, we have five cameras with all the corresponding equipment, we are cutting video with AVID and preparing sounds with Audacity - and we just started last year to develop multimedia journalism a curricular theme. First in October, 2007, I installed a classroom-blog with my four-weeks-basics-course of young professionals. Nothing less than a non-guided adventure-tour passing technical thunderstorms and journalistic shelves. (see at www.voloblog.wordpress.com, but warning: unfortunately it's german language based!)
I don't know, how far it works, but I'm lucky enough to have started it working, accompagnied by my colleagues sceptizism votes. We offer, first time this year, a twelve-bricks-modular system for online journalists, starting with internet basics, teaching web writing and multimedia storytelling as well as working with audio files and video editing and storytelling. We complete this with a change management seminar for newsroom editors, with a hands-on experience seminar, titled "paper meets web", and with a children-at-the-web-and-in-the-paper-seminar.
At the end of this year, I hope to have my first only-online-course for young professionals, what means a complete change of program, curriculum and staff - and in fact still lots of work to do.
What is missing? Quoting Sue I could say "common mission" and "cohesiveness": having more of this at the academy would ease my work.
