College Media

Day 1: Rich Beckman speaks, misses mark

Apologies for the rushed post, but I needed to write something up! This week, I have the honor of representing The Daily Tar Heel at the annual Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers convention, this year in Kansas City, Mo.

I had the immense pleasure of tweeting up with a few of my buddies, most notably @greglinch, @anthonyjpesce and @polarscribe.

But the most interesting part of the day was the keynote address from Rich Beckman, now the Knight Chairman in Visual Journalism at the

University of Miami after spending a few decades at UNC.

He began his presentation very strongly. He laid out where newspapers went wrong 

between 2002 and today, most vigorously hammering on not training existing journalists in emerging skills and relying on inflexible structures and outdated practices.

But when he started talking about what we should be doing, he lost most of the audience. 

Now, I’ll admit that I never really liked Professor Beckman very much. It was never anything personal, and probably fueled in part by jealousy. Beckman never wanted to have anything to do with the DTH and, in fact, tried to lure people away from the local media organizations to particpate in his elaborate projects.

To the several hundred folks from college newspapers around the country, Beckman held up weeks-long trips to Chile and the South Pacific as what they should be doing.

Multimedia is easy with no deadline and an unlimited budget. I asked him where we should be looking for examples of good multimedia journalism that’s actually feasible. Noticeably flustered, he said we should look at The New York Times and The Washington Post. Again, not the most relevant examples, considering the WashPo multimedia works he cited were from Darfur.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. I mean, the UNC projects are frickin’ sweet (though I”ll hold up this year’s Andaman Rising as better than anything he did). But one But one of my biggest problems with academia is that it is so out of touch with reality, and Beckman did nothing but reinforce that for me. Especially for someone coming from UNC, which bills it self as the University of the People, I wanted this guy to show us how he has taken his classes to work with actual news organizations, training them and developing best practices for multimedia at real newspapers. Lord knows there’s a need for it.

Will have a post on today’s “Campus-gate” investigative reporting workshop most likely. There is just a few places to get free Wi-Fi, and it is uber slow. Sigh.