LJ Digital

longreads:

Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors.

To help in this effort, we’ve teamed up with Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to help search for and share outstanding student work.

Students, writers, publishers, professors: We need your help to find and share the best work of the past year.

If you’ve read (or written) something this school year, just tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr, or email it to aileen@longreads.com.

Student publications are the easiest and best place to find college #longreads, like Mary Kenney’s account of an Indian sex worker, published earlier this year by Indiana University’s INSIDE magazine. Or Project Wordsworth, the outstanding new pay-what-you-want experiment from Michael Shapiro and students at Columbia University.

Sometimes a piece that a student writes for class, such as the one Syracuse University grad student Danielle Preiss wrote about high suicide rates among Bhutanese refugees, lands in a professional outlet. And of course, we’ll also tout good work produced by students as part of a fellowship or internship, like Columbia undergrad Jack Dickey’s investigation for Deadspin about Manti Te’o.

The only rules for #college #longreads are: Stories should be over 1,500 words and written by a student enrolled in a college or university at the time of publication.

Share stories worth reading by tagging them #college #longreads.

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Know of a writer or publication we should keep an eye on? Tell us about it in the comments below.

LJ Digital: Calling all literary journalism students! Check out this spectacular opportunity to submit your stories to Longreads.com! If you are unfamiliar with Longreads, it is a website that aggregates literary journalism pieces and is constantly posting new stories for you to read. There is NO deadline to submit and this opportunity is designed for students in our program so hop to it. Polish those stories up, get a few more pairs of eyes to read them, and SUBMIT! 

pulitzercenter:

Pulitzer Center grantee Sarah Neville:

The Financial Times’ Austerity Audit has proved a vehicle for some of the most innovative digital journalism the paper has ever done.

But the genesis of the idea was a piece of old-fashioned shoe leather reporting.

In November 2011, in order to write a piece about changes to welfare benefits for the long-term sick, I had visited Barnsley, in the former industrial heartland of the north of England, where large numbers were affected by the imminent shake up.

In passing, a number of people mentioned to me, in interviews, their concerns about the likely impact on local businesses and shops of a wider raft of welfare reforms which, from April this year, would reduce the scope of benefit entitlements and also the value of benefits.

It struck me that if we could find a way of calculating exactly how much money was being taken out of local economies – and the hit to spending power – we would have a truly original take on the austerity story and one which would have a particular appeal for theFT’s business readership.

… continue reading here.

chrishutchinson:

This morning, the Guardian released Guardian Witness. Described by The Guardian: ‘Share your view of the world - Your chance to have videos, photos and stories featured on the Guardian’, the website and corresponding app allows anyone to submit photos, videos, and text to the Guardian.

The editorial team at The Guardian will be suggesting ‘assignments’ (current ones include Views of tall buildings, The cuts get personal, and Syria refugees: your stories) that users of the app are able to contribute their own content to.

The Guardian have made it as easy to submit content to their assignments, as it is to tweet a photo from an event, or share a video onto YouTube.

Student media, often plagued by the inability to gather together good content and stories, should definitely take note. University campuses are now filled with thousands of students, most of whom have smartphones. When looking for the next big story, or photos and video from an event, it’s easy to see how an app like this, that connects the newsroom to the students, could be really useful. Not only would the newsroom have an abundance of content and material, but students would be able to get their photos and videos featured as the story develops, their own 30 seconds of fame.

Embracing students in this way is great for student media. It helps their image, encourages students to engage with stories, share stories with their friends (getting more clicks, reads, likes, and so on), and maybe students will start getting more involved in student media.

You can watch a video of the app in action here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/video/2013/apr/16/guardian-witness-promo-video

What do you think? Should people be giving their content away to The Guardian for free? Or are we doing it anyway on Twitter and other social networks, and is it a clever move by The Guardian to bring that content together?

LJ Digital: This is fascinating. Student journalists, check this out!