Digital journalism center takes hold in Guadalajara with new leadership

Una versión en español se encuentra aquí.

On a Saturday in December, the 15th class to pass through the Digital Journalism Center in Guadalajara, Mexico, had its recognition ceremony. It was also my last day directing the program begun in 2008 by the University of Guadalajara and International Center for Journalists.


Participants in the last class came from Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and various parts of Mexico. 
 
Each participant in the Public Service Journalism course had spent five weeks studying online.  The best were invited to Guadalajara to begin work on a final project. For example:

• Elizabeth Estevez, agricultural reporter for El Diario in Bolivia, is planning a multimedia report on the shortage of wheat production in her country.
• Luis Daniel Palmillas, a radio and print reporter in Rio Bravo, Mexico, on the U.S. border, is working on a website that would allow citizens to lodge complaints about city services, track the response and hold officials accountable.
• Carlos Andrés Valencia Masso, who lost his father in the armed conflict in Colombia, has plans to expand his web-based reporting on movements of peaceful resistance to violence.

In Guadalajara the participants received hands-on technical training in use of video, audio, mapping, marketing and other techniques of online publishing. I was impressed with their commitment to serving their communities.

Journalists from 22 countries participated

Over two years, the Center, a project of the Knight International Journalism Fellowship program, offered 15 online training courses in Spanish to some 430 journalists from 22 countries as well as in-person technical training to 279 of the best performers.

My job was to get the Center started and turn it over to the University, which is now in the process of selecting a successor. For 2011, the five courses on the calendar include "Writing for the Web," "New Financial Models for Journalism" and "Digital Tools for Public Service Journalism."

Innovative course: entrepreneurial journalism

The Financial Models course mentioned above is really about entrepreneurial journalism. I taught journalists how to run a publishing business online. They had to propose a media project, create a marketing plan, business plan and then a prototype.

They learned concepts that are foreign to journalists who work in traditional media, such as sales, branding, customers and profits.

The course attracted a lot of attention. I gave it three times online and was invited to give a seminar version of two or three days in Chile, Colombia, Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico.

Webmaster Luis Fernando Gonzalez Fernandez and administrator Norma Lilia Cerda Martinez, both employees of the University, are keeping things running until the new director is announced.

My wife, Cindy, and I headed back to the States for the holidays and prepared for the next chapter in our wandering life, which will probably continue somewhere in Latin America.


Designing courses for professionals

When I arrived in Guadalajara, the University already had an established distance-learning program but there were no online courses in journalism.  I worked with Carmen Coronado, one of the University´s experts in designing courses for virtual platforms, to prepare courses for the Center.  She helped me understand how to create engaging activities and lead discussions in the online environment.

Experienced professionals need a different kind of learning environment than college students.  We made every participant´s work visible to every other participant, and they had to comment on each other´s work.  This kind of feedback from peers was at least as important to participants as my comments.

In all, I designed six courses in Spanish for the Center and taught them online. I  invited experts in digital technologies to teach the in-person courses.

In the process of participating in the course forums, I learned a lot of colloquial Spanish.  Each country has its own version of newsroom slang. But journalists are pretty much the same anywhere in the world: irreverent, smart, funny, committed and passionate about their work. I love hanging out with them, even when it´s just online.

Sustainability: Online master´s degree in digital journalism

Manuel Moreno Castañeda, rector of distance learning at the University of Guadalajara, urged me to create an academic team in the second year of the program to assure sustainability.

We invited professors to participate in the courses, and a team of a half-dozen academics also helped design a master´s degree in digital journalism.  This master´s, which has a heavy emphasis on participants creating their own digital media, will be one of the few online programs in digital journalism in the Spanish-speaking world. (Descriptions of the proposed courses are here.)


Safe practices for journalists covering violence

Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practice journalism because of the linked interests of druglords and corrupt public officials.  Reporters and media outlets that reveal corruption put themselves at risk.

As a response, the Digital Journalism Center, with grants totaling $55,000 from the U.S. Embassy, created an online course on "Safe practices for journalists" for 95 Mexican journalists and then held three in-person seminars.

Jorge Luis Sierra (left), an editor with decades of experience covering border issues, designed the course. Another Mexican journalist, Darío Dávila (second from left), who reports for several international publications, gave the course online.

Both of them participated in the in-person training attended by journalists like Claudia Beltrán, reporter for the daily Noroeste (next to me at the recognition ceremony).

Participants in the courses created all the content for a website that contains tactics and strategies that journalists can use to reduce the risks of the profession while still providing useful information to their communities. They also created another website with current information about the risks journalists face.

After hearing the stories from course participants about the daily threats and dangers they confront, I was particularly gratified that we were able to offer them some help. 

Trained more than 200 journalists from 17 countries

This is the entire team of the Digital Journalism Center: Norma Cerda is the administrator, with more than 20 years of experience at the University of Guadalajara. Alfonso Fonseca, right, is a 25-year-old computer whiz who built our website and manages the technical part of our center.

Since coming down here in July 2008, my job has been to start and run a center that trains Latin American journalists in how to use new tools to publish on the web.

The idea was to offer courses online that lasted several weeks each with a hands-on training in Guadalajara at the end.

That meant creating the courses from scratch, in Spanish, putting them on a distance learning platform and then teaching them.

So far, I´ve created and taught six courses online, each of them lasting five to six weeks: how to run a digital newsroom, public service reporting, digital skills 101, environmental reporting, new business models for digital news, and how to write for the web.

The project is partnership of the International Center for Journalists in Washington and the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico´s second-largest.

Journalists from Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia edit audio during a course on digital tools for public service reporting.

Response has been great

We publicize the courses through various online channels, including our own website and my blog.

We get about three times as many applications for spaces as we can handle. Preference goes to people with leadership responsibility (we want to train the trainers), people who have already done something on their own and those with a compelling story.

So far, we´ve had more than 200 journalists through the courses from 17 countries, including Cuba. Probably a third are from Mexico, with the next largest groups from Colombia and Argentina.

Guest lectures and seminars too

In addition to these online courses, I´ve run shorter seminars of one to three days for easily another 200 journalists here in Mexico. Add to that a fair number of lectures and presentations in Puerto Rico, Spain, San Francisco, Monterrey, Mexico City, Puebla, etc. and I´ve been very busy.

These journalists in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico, run their own eight-week digital journalism training seminar each year. They do a lot with very little. The guy at bottom center, Isaín Mandujano, is a freelance journalist who makes it all happen. I did the last session, on how to start and run your own news site.

Demand exceeds supply

The big media outlets in Latin America have digital media offerings that are equal to the best regional newspapers in the U.S., but not at the level of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

Still, there are not a lot of journalists who have the basic training in producing online journalism. The demand is great, so anyone with skills is considered an expert.

Here´s an article about one of the courses we offered here.

Here´s a 2-minute video synthesis of a "conferencia magistral", or lecture, on the future of digital journalism that I gave at a university conference in Puebla, Mexico.



ABC newspaper in Spain heard about our program and did an interview.

Graduation at the Digital Journalism Center

Manuel Moreno, left, is the director of the online university at the University of Guadalajara, which hosts my online courses in digital journalism.

Esther Vargas of Lima, Peru, was one of the star students in the most recent course, Digital Tools for Effective Public Service Journalism. Her project is on making taxi service safer in Lima, where informal cabbies often commit crimes against their passengers.

A work group from the course plans a script for an audio slideshow. We had 22 students from 12 different countries in this course. Each of them planned a reporting project that would be told in multimedia format. We´re waiting to see how some of them did.

Alfonso Fonseca, 24, is the new webmaster of the Digital Journalism Center and is getting our site ready for launch. Norma Lilia Cerda Martinez is the coordinator of the center and has worked at the university for 20 years. She knows all of the people and, more importantly, how to get things done in the vast bureaucracy.

David Ramirez is a professor who teaches courses in digital marketing and ecommerce. He helped me understand some of the ins and outs of teaching online, such as how to write the course, how to interact with students, etc.