Professor's Corner | About

Created for j-school faculty and students, Teaching Tools links to stories culled from the pages of Nieman Reports and united by topic. Teaching Glimpses offers fresh approaches professors use to engage with students and links to their students' work. Digital Newsbooks provide up-to-date classroom resources on digital platforms, and Across the Web links to contemporary coverage of journalism with an emphasis on how it is being taught. On this page, we feature the current issue of Nieman Reports.
– Melissa Ludtke, editor, Nieman Reports (melissa.ludtke@niemanreports.org)

  • Let's Talk: Journalism and Social Media     Richard Gordon, who teaches journalism and directs digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, writes in “Social Media: The Ground Shifts” about his graduate students’ class project that resulted in the creation of News Mixer. By utilizing Facebook Connect, News Mixer enhances the social networking experience of sharing news and commenting on it.
  • Geneva Overholser, director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism, ruminates on how rarely people use the word “journalism” when they come together in forums to discuss new media. In “What is Journalism’s Place in Social Media?”, Overholser writes, “… we know that social media will become integral to what is taught in our journalism classes. Timely discussions of emerging examples of social media’s influence on journalism and vice-versa must continue, as well.”
  • In their article, “Engaging Youth in Social Media: Is Facebook the New Media Frontier?,” former University of Minnesota learning technologies researcher Christine Greenhow and NewsCloud.com founder Jeff Reifman, write about an experiment they did to find out if young people could be persuaded “to critically engage in reading news and conversing about it on Facebook.” Take a look the Web sites they launched—Hot Dish and MN Daily—to test this idea.