Prof. Shanahan Explains Her Daily News Diet

How do you obtain your dai­ly serv­ing of news? Do you set aside time each day to read print­ed news­pa­pers or mag­a­zines or watch TV news broad­casts? If your answer is “not real­ly,” then we have a lot in common.

I’m Prof. Marie K. Shana­han and for the next few months I’ll be your guide as we dive deep into the emerg­ing field known as “dig­i­tal journalism.”

My dai­ly news diet con­sists of head­lines from Twit­ter, Face­book, RSS feeds pro­grammed into Feed­ly, email newslet­ters, and my own Google search­es. My news comes from many dif­fer­ent sources: rep­utable news orga­ni­za­tions, indi­vid­ual jour­nal­ists, blogs, fam­i­ly and friends. My iPhone, my iPad and my Mac­Book deliv­er a steady stream of infor­ma­tion to me on ever-chang­ing screens.

I still har­bor a great love for the writ­ten word. I pay for print ver­sions of a half dozen mag­a­zines and the Sun­day Hart­ford Courant, but I find myself reach­ing for them less and less. Web search and social media over­whelm me with lim­it­less, per­son­al­ized dis­cov­ery and up-to-the-sec­ond news updates. I’ve yet to pay for news online, but it’s com­ing to that. Since I spend a lot of time dri­ving in my car (and dri­ving and tex­ting is extreme­ly dan­ger­ous) I’m also a ded­i­cat­ed lis­ten­er of Nation­al and Con­necti­cut Pub­lic Radio. I rarely watch TV news.

The point is:  News can now be deliv­ered in count­less ways. If peo­ple are using any piece of soft­ware or hard­ware to com­mu­ni­cate, jour­nal­ism can hap­pen on that chan­nel. Can you think of a way to pro­vide news on Vine or Insta­gram? How about Snapchat?

How Is Prof. Shana­han Qual­i­fied To Teach This Stuff?

For 17 years, I worked in the field as a pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ist, with a dozen of those years as an online jour­nal­ist. I’ve spent count­less hours on my lap­top computer(s) and mobile phone(s), most recent­ly as a Con­necti­cut region­al edi­tor for Patch.com and before that as the deputy online edi­tor of The Hart­ford Courant.

Dur­ing the first five years of my pro­fes­sion­al career I worked as a print news­pa­per reporter at The Courant. My favorite sto­ries to write involved pro­files of inter­est­ing peo­ple. My least favorite sto­ries to write were about crime, espe­cial­ly when the vic­tims were chil­dren.

Nev­er was I expect­ed to take pho­tographs or shoot video with my sto­ries, although occa­sion­al­ly I’d record an inter­view with this piece of tech­nol­o­gy.

When I vol­un­tar­i­ly joined the newspaper’s online staff, my print jour­nal­ism peers react­ed to my career choice with dis­ap­proval. Why in the world would I want to sit in front of a com­put­er all day and mess with HTML code and Pho­to­shop? Most of my print jour­nal­ism col­leagues turned up their noses at the web as a place to deliv­er jour­nal­ism and treat­ed me like a pari­ah. The Inter­net, at the time, was clunky and obscure, and it was giv­ing away the news for free. Online jour­nal­ism, they told me, was a bad career move.

They were wrong.

Tech­nol­o­gy changed the game.

To remain rel­e­vant, jour­nal­ists must adapt and oper­ate as part of this mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion “net­work” — cre­ative­ly telling and dis­trib­ut­ing sto­ries, inves­ti­gat­ing and eval­u­at­ing “truth” and “truthi­ness,” act­ing as guides and cura­tors of infor­ma­tion, join­ing and build­ing com­mu­ni­ties, and engag­ing in “con­ver­sa­tions.” We need to fig­ure out how to pay for the good work of pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists in a sus­tain­able way. Dig­i­tal jour­nal­ism is both exhaust­ing and exhil­a­rat­ing. It offers some­thing new and unex­pect­ed everyday.

Fall 2011 marked my full-time return to UConn as an assis­tant jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor. I pre­vi­ous­ly taught dig­i­tal jour­nal­ism as an adjunct pro­fes­sor at Quin­nip­i­ac Uni­ver­si­ty, the same insti­tu­tion where I earned my mas­ters degree in Inter­ac­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. I’ve also had the plea­sure to serve as a region­al judge for the pres­ti­gious Liv­ingston Awards for Young Jour­nal­ists and the Soci­ety of Pro­fes­sion­al Jour­nal­ists’ Sig­ma Delta Chi Awards, which I hope you will all attempt to win someday.

You can find me on:
Twit­ter: @mariekshan
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mariekshan
Face­book: facebook.com/mariekshan
Google+: plus.google.com/u/0/105409763229487457994/about
Muck­Rack: muckrack.com/mariekshan

And, occa­sion­al­ly, in my office: OAK461.