Wednesday's Talks toward a Future Web Presence

Today we had four unique speakers.  All spoke to digital media and its affect on high school journalism.

Dan Gillmor explains the Credibility Scale. Negative credibility exists.

Dan Gillmor's presentation hooked me in when he started talking about how journalism's role changed from the distribution of news into the entity that lets people know what's out there.  He also said that our role is to make sure that we instill future journalists with the idea that journalistic media needs to inform and is not used to persuade or manipulate.

So that's unlikely to happen overnight.  But what I think I can use immediately as an adviser is to lose the fear.  I fear that students may know what is going to get published in the paper.  He said The Guardian posts tomorrow's news headlines today for consumer input.  If these larger publications are unafraid of reveling stories, why should I be afraid high school newspaper topics being released will change the news? Our newspaper only publishes once a month, so the stories are old news anyway.  

Kristy Roschke highlights popular social media that can be used in the newsroom.
(photo illustration)

That leads into our next presenter.  Kristy Roschke talked extensively on how we can bring our publications online.  This is too daunting to accomplish my first year as an adviser.  I will 'mess with it' on my own time.  However she did mention that it programs need to make a digital presence, and it could be as simple as using anyone of these on the projector.  My editors want to use Twitter.  Well one easy way to do this is to incorporate Gillmor's idea of foreshadowing of story topics.  We could get followers, traffic and interest just by starting there.  Maybe we can get more student participation, more interviews and maybe even letters to the editor.

Dean Christopher Callahan talks to the dangers of an angry social media presence.

Dean Callahan talked to the responsibilities we need to teach our students how to be aware of their social presence.  Just ask a simple question, "Are you friends with our parents on Facebook?"

Steve Doig discusses all the ways to use Google.

Steve Doig is a Google Guru.  He talked to us about the "even more" available from Google.  We learned about Google Trends, Google Groups, and Google Alerts.  He expanded our knowledge of what is out there for resources.   He said there is a tremendous amount out there to do research, "Get them out away from the computer and get out into the real world."

Brandon Michaud
Winnacunnet High School
Hampton, N.H.