In an attempt to give students a taste of what it’s really like in a newsroom, journalism professors at St. Michael’s College in Colchester are trying a new, unprecedented teaching technique — they’re laying off their students. This year the kids are getting pink slips instead of report cards.

Ha! Kidding. 

The profs are making a change, though, according to What’s Good blogger Tyler Machado, a junior at St. Mike’s who’s studying journalism.

St. Michael’s College is served by a pair of student news publications: The Defender, a traditional print newspaper, and The Echo,an online magazine (for which I served as tech editor this pastsemester)…. This is about to change, though, as thespring 2009 semester will see The Defender and The Echo produced by onemerged staff…

Themove is largely designed to provide journalism majors with the widerange of media experience they need to graduate into today’s journalismworld. No longer is it good enough for a reporter to know how to takegood notes and write a print story on deadline. The trend now is for”backpack reporters” — journalists who can write, record audio, takepictures and video, and craft a full media package for a story for aprint setting and for the Web. 

Click here to read the rest.

Seven Days — giving you the full media package since 1995. New slogan? What do you think? Ok, so we didn’t actually have a website until 2000, but still.

This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2008.

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Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at...

3 replies on “More Media News — From St. Mike’s”

  1. Cathy wrote:Seven Days — giving you the full media package since 1995. New slogan? What do you think? Ok, so we didn’t actually have a website until 2000, but still.If 7Days is truly still an alternative newspaper er, independent voice, why does it even need a slogan, at least beyond the one just quoted?Particularly within the commercial or business world, slogans are much like mission statements and, are merely token words, hardly ever reflecting reality and therefore without true merit or meaning.It would seem to serve both 7Days and its readers better to simply continue to do what it does best and, leave the slogans and the mission statements for the dying breed of traditional news media types, whom just cannot manage to get it and continue to think it is everyone else who doesn’t.The best rule as far as a business model goes is to keep things simple as well as sticking to the basics and what is most important. Don’t further confuse or complicate things more than they already might get on their own.Beyond cash flow of course, when it comes to news media of any type and its readers, what is most important?Maybe its credibility?If one is focusing too much on slogans, catch phases and mission statements, what does that mean and say about being credible?The answer is that it would seem to indicate the word was changed from being a verb to being a noun, so-to-speak anyway.

  3. Actually, I had thought so Cathy, yet decided to answer the question as if it were seriously posed anyway, particularly if there are those who are taking either the paper or themselves too seriously; which sometimes seemed to have been the case, especially within the last year or two. And, just to be clear, I am not joking either.:-) [smile]

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