In this episode, hosted by Jenna Miller, Business journalism professors Karen Blumenthal, Andrew Cassel and Keith Herndon share their tips for engaging students in class. These instructors explain the creative way they encourage students to interact with businesses they don’t already have a connection to and the importance of reading other business stories, especially in their own communities. They originally shared these tips during Reynolds Week 2016.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Jenna Miller: How to Cover Money: Tips for teaching business journalism.
Andrew Cassel: In courses, I tried to do at least a weekly current events quiz. And after floundering around with that for a couple of weeks with kids embarrassing themselves with how little they knew. I said, “Look, I’m going to tweet the stories that I think are the most interesting, and I’ll put a link to the story. If you just follow my Twitter account, you’re going to pass the quiz. I can see them looking at Twitter frantically just before class.
Miller: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center How to Cover Money podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Jenna Miller, today’s host of the How to Cover Money podcast. Today we hear from business journalism professors, Karen Blumenthal, Andrew Cassel and Keith Herndon. The three professors share tips they had learned teaching business journalism and give some examples of successful assignments and some that didn’t quite go as planned. These six tips were originally shared at Reynolds Week in January of 2016. Tip number one isn’t about article content, it’s about what’s an appropriate word count in today’s reporting climate. Karen coached her students to cut down the lengths of their stories.
Karen Blumenthal: And I want to add one thing about the year-end story, because some of you say you do 2000-word stories, and I respect the academic process, but most journalism organizations are not running 2000-word stories anymore. I wrote a column for five and a half years for the Wall Street Journal. I started in 2008 I finished at the end, so just two years ago, at the end of 2013 and it started at 1200 words and then went to 1000 and for the last four years it was 800. So I think 2000 words is lovely, but not realistic. So to me it’s really important you can write 1000- or 1200-word story, and you know, I actually think the challenge of writing something more realistic is important, because I think that’s unless you’re an investigative reporter and that’s a pretty skinny part of the business these days, you’re going to be writing much shorter and more thoughtfully, I think. So that’s my approach.
Miller: Andrew talked about process and on what students should realistically be graded, not just their first draft.
Cassel: I decided early on that it didn’t make that much sense just to have them submit a story assignment and give them a grade and let that be done. I said, “Okay, well, I will give you an edit just like in a newsroom. You give me a draft, I’ll give you an edit. You make corrections, and I will grade you on the second submission. It will be a combination of how well you did in the first place, plus how well you responded to the suggestions that I made.
Miller: Another crucial skill for journalists is getting out of their comfort zone. Karen opened her classes worldview by having them talk to both otherwise, wouldn’t
Blumenthal: I did interviewing a minimum wage employee, and that was a really successful assignment in my group. They had to find somebody who not a relative, not a sorority or fraternity person, not somebody they already knew. They’d interview somebody who was working full time for minimum wage. I mean people they interviewed were landscapers and the guy at the 711 and it was super successful. It was eye opening to them, because TCU was a private school, maybe less so in the state school, but it was a really successful way. It was also just a first interview kind of story, so that I made sure they knew, we talked about questions ahead of time, they helped develop the list. But it was very successful. So I think I will do that again.
Miller: Keith used his community connections to give students insight into a world most were unfamiliar with, manufacturing,
Keith Herndon: I feel it’s very important, particularly in the types of jobs that our students will be moving into. In many cases it’s small to medium markets: television, radio, newspapers. Economic development stories are very important. And many of our kids are from suburban Atlanta, where their parents have been in service industries, the idea of a factory, they have no idea what that is, but they also have an outdated view of what a factory is. So one of my assignments this semester is that we’re actually going on a factory tour of the Caterpillar plant in Athens Clarke County, and explain what robotics are and what that means, and that half of the jobs in the Caterpillar plant are logic controller operators. They program the robotics and they’re doing logic control, and they have to understand how to program in Rockwell logic control languages. These are not your typical blue collar factory positions. And our students don’t get that. And so leveraging that factory tour and going in there, and then one of the plant managers is going to come into class later and do a press conference. So they’ll do the plant tour, then they’ll come in and they’ll have a press conference, and they’ll write an economic development story using that angle of the factory locating there as a hook.
Miller: But Andrew found that with some assignments, it’s important to give students strict direction.
Cassel: So we also did a bunch of stuff that I wasn’t so happy with. We did a series of small business profiles. I asked them to go out and find a local company, give me a profile. And part of my mission had been, I was supposed to work with a local paper in State College, to somehow be a bridge between them and the journalism, business journalism program. So anyway, I got them. I got these things published. There they were just little profiles. If I were doing it again, I would be much more explicit about kinds of companies they could and couldn’t do. Everybody went out and talked and talked to people in restaurants and coffee shops and clothing stores. And they all kind of read alike, and I kept thinking, “Well, doesn’t somebody want to talk to an accountant or a construction firm or find a manufacturer somewhere?” But anyway, we got, I mean, as far as getting doing these, I was not crazy about the results, but the kids really, I think, got something out of seeing their stuff published. So that was there was some benefit to that.
Miller: Andrew also discovered that his weekly current events quizzes were a challenge, until he resorted to Twitter.
Cassel: In courses, I tried to do at least a weekly current events quiz. And after floundering around with that for a couple of weeks with kids embarrassing themselves with how little they knew. I said, “Look, I’m going to tweet the stories that I think are the most interesting, and I’ll put a link to the story. If you just follow my Twitter account, you’re going to pass the quiz, cause you’re going to have the answer to every one of these questions. And that improved performance. I can see them looking at Twitter frantically just before class. At least they were, maybe reading a couple of the stories.
Miller: Thanks to Karen Blumenthal, Andrew Cassel and Keith Herndon for sharing how they keep business journalism students engaged and thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode of the How to Cover Money podcast. If you’re in need of more business journalism training, the Reynolds Center can help. Visit businessjournalism.org to find articles and self-guided training, download our free eBook: Guide to Business Beat Basics, or sign up for our monthly newsletter. The newsletter will keep you up to date on training opportunities from the Reynolds Center year round. If you enjoy the How to Cover Money podcast, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud, and while you’re there, leave us a rating or review to help make the podcast more visible to other business journalists. Support for the How to Cover Money podcast comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Join us on the next episode of our podcast we’re welcome Gerard Ryle and Bastian Obermayer about their Barlett and Steele Gold award-winning investigation, and the largest piece of investigative journalism in history: The Panama Papers.
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