I just returned from a three and a half-day stint as a multimedia story coach at the Fall Workshop sponsored by Syracuse University for more than 50 undergraduate and graduate students in the Multimedia, Photography, and Design (MPD) departments of the Newhouse School. This year, the students documented life in the nearby town of Skaneateles, New York, recording audio, writing short stories, and shooting photos and video.

As we prepared for the VJ workshop at Brooks Institute I had multiple e-mail conversations with Paul Myers, a professor there. We discussed a theme for my individual talk and overall aspirations for the project.

In the past two weeks, I have been on both coasts looking at the impact of job losses in journalism created by the current economy. Last week, I worked as a story coach at a multimedia workshop for out-of-work newspaper visual journalists and students, hosted and organized by faculty and staff at the Brooks Institute. This week, I have been attending the annual conference of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication in Boston.

Working in Prague on July 4th with college students on a cross-cultural multimedia project, I think about the future of journalism in the United States.  The aspirations of our Founding Fathers were encoded in key documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Among our cherished freedoms, articulated in the [...]

The recent delay between blog posts has been due to our daughter’s high school graduation, followed by a mid-week overnight flight to Prague as a prelude to a three-week multimedia project in the Czech Republic. I will be working with a faculty team from the University of Miami led by Professor Rich Beckman. We will be supporting students from Czech universities and the University of Miami who will be reporting on a variety of environmental topics.