From the send-off post at the old site:

“This new Center will serve as a resource to college journalists and their advisers by sharing information freely online and by providing practical training in the application of emerging media techniques at regional and national workshops.”

I like the sound of “practical training.” More than theory and handwringing and discussion about the curriculum, J-School students — and faculty — need to get their hands dirty with tools like Soundslides, video cameras, and blogs.

Otherwise, all the New Media talk in journalism departments is just that — talk.

Check out the first big post at the Innovation in College Media blog. It’s an interview with the editor-in-chief at the Campus Lantern, a student paper at Eastern Connecticut State University that recently converted itself into an online-only publication, but now is battling with student government, which has threatened to pull the paper’s funding if there’s no print edition.

The Lantern looks like a great case study for papers looking to move from a daily/print publishing cycle to a continuous/online news cycle, not to mention the political issues around taking funding from student government.

I’ve heard some talk in the hallways about changing the way SJSU’s Daily gets funding from students, and the Lantern’s struggle to maintain control of its format provides some strong warnings about what can go wrong when the student government pays for your press run.

So when can we get an Innovation workshop going over here on the West Coast?

Related Posts

• Questions for student media advisers
• More on the online skills study that made me say Wow
• More on student media server options

And by “party together,” I mean the masses can use all their social bookmarking/tagging/networking power to point to the stories they want to see covered more and/or better.

So instead of using all these great new Web 2.0 tools to let “users” point other people to the already-extant content they like (a la Digg, Newsvine, etc.), Jay is proposing we use the new toolbox to let “readers” be the assignment editors, pushing for the stories they want to know more about.

But more than that, now the “readers” get to play along at home, doing some distributed journalism of their own, for example, tracking the price of a prescription drug in their neighborhoods to figure out whether it’s being priced differently in different parts of the country. From Jay’s example:

The users help find out what a drug costs “everywhere.” It would be hard for a reporter to do that alone. Journalists are hired to get answers to questions developed by users, filtered through editors, who in turn enforce a certain standard of excellence, fairness and transparency that is indistinguishable from New Assignment’s reputation.

The masses of interested citizens drives not only story selection, but provides a paid journalist with information and ammunition to seek out the answers to their questions.

There’s plenty more of this in Jay’s post.

For even more, listen to the Citizen Journalism session from last month’s Bloggercon.

Related Posts

• Why Citizen Shovelware doesn’t work
• Don’t fear the user-created content?
• Your newspaper isn’t MySpace. Should it be?

Sounds like a great move, whether or not PodTech.net becomes one of the New New Networks or not. Why? Something I learned working retail: As soon as your boss calls you “indispensable,” it’s probably time to quit, because if they can’t replace you, they’ll never promote you.

Congratulations on the promotion, Robert. I’m looking forward to watching the passionate/authoritative videobloggers you’ll be finding for PodTech. Good luck.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s Postindustrialism 21 – Big Business 3.

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• Do your reporters have OCD or ADD?
• Journalism students need new heroes; Journalism heroes need new students
• Don’t get wrapped up in the ‘so-called pajama media’