Listen to 'Half the Sky' Authors Kristof & WuDunn

If you missed them on 'Oprah,' you can hear Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, husband/wife authors of the acclaimed new bestseller, "Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," on this wonderful hour-long Blog Talk Radio segment.

It's hosted by the South Asian Journalists Association, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and moderated by Newsweek International contributing editor Vibhuti Patel.

The trio address the book's theme: the emerging role of women in developing countries.



Kristof's topnotch New York Times videojournalism, often about women's struggles in Third World countries, has been frequently showcased on KobreGuide.

Here's a sampler:

* Acid Attacks
Women in Pakistan are being subjected to an alarming kind of terrorism, often inflicted by their own husbands.

* The Face of Slavery
Meet Long Pross, a teenager who was tortured and forced into sexual slavery in Cambodia. She's recuperating now, but how can we rescue other girls like her?

* A Dirty Job
Compared to scavenging in a toxic garbage dump, working in an oppressive sweatshop can seem like a cherished dream.

* My Personal Foreign Aid Program
Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof travels to the Dominican Republic to assess the merits of his Plan USA sponsorship of a local child.

Columbia J-School Digital Media Boot Camp

The Columbia University Journalism School's Continuing Education unit will be holding a Digital Media Boot Camp, July 20-24.

Sixteen participants will have the chance to learn the basics of video production, post-production with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop from New Media Coordinator and Assistant Professor Duy Linh Tu (class of ‘99).

Cost is $895 for Columbia Journalism alumni; $995 for all others. Financial aid is not available. More info here. Register here.

J-School Grads Are Getting Jobs .... Yours!

AOL's Daily Finance reports that, despite the miserable financial state of the media, enrollment in journalism schools is on the rise and, perhaps not unrelatedly, j-grads are actually finding jobs -- in journalism!

Columbia University and CUNY's graduate schools of journalism report that more than 60 percent of their recent alum have found employment related to their degrees -- many at those same institutions that are vigorously laying off veteran staffers.

And therein may lie the explanation:

My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It's a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as "restructuring," but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web -- and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year.

What Matters More: The Soup or the Bowl?

Excellent article in the N.Y.Times regarding the confused state of journalism education: "Professors are hustling to figure out how to teach journalism at a time when the field is undergoing a sweeping transformation."

The debate is no longer over whether the subject should be taught academically or vocationally -- it's over how to best prepare students for what could either be an extremely promising or dubious career choice, depending on which way the economic winds blow in the next few years.

Journalism students (and their departments) are hedging their bets with courses in public relations, advertising, and even the vaguely labeled "communications." Best part of the article is towards the end, addressing the extent to which new (and soon-to-be-outmoded) technologies should be part of the curriculum:

Fundamentally, J-schools are about teaching students how to be storytellers, says Tom Fiedler, the dean of the College of Communication at Boston University. He subscribes to the philosophy that “it’s the soup and not the bowl that provides the nourishment we need.” He adds: “We want to teach our students to make a great soup. What they serve it in matters little.”

Rich Beckman, a professor of visual journalism at the University of Miami and a guru of new media education, would beg to differ. The new media, he says, have required professors to revise their classes on media ethics and law. Multimedia reporters must know how to edit audio and video without taking quotes out of context, and to abide by copyright law when incorporating music. In updating a blog post, they must recognize when a formal correction is warranted. They are called upon to alternate between objectivity and self-expression — a new New Journalism enabled by the Web, for a generation raised on Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly.

Your thoughts?

Columbia J-School Panel: Future of Newspapers

Last week's panel discussion on journalism trends and the future of print media included Columbia J-School Prof. James B. Stewart; Steve Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers; and Norman Pearlstine, chief content officer of Bloomberg.



Stewart is the author of eight books, and writes "Common Sense," a column in SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com, which also appears in the Wall Street Journal. He contributes regularly to The New Yorker and was formerly Page One Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Stewart is the recipient of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Wall Street Journal articles on the 1987 stock market crash and the insider trading scandal. He is also the winner of the George Polk award and two Gerald Loeb awards.

Swartz is president of Hearst Newspapers. Under his leadership, SmartMoney won two National Magazine Awards and was named Magazine of the Year by Advertising Age. Under Swartz’s leadership, Hearst played a key role in founding the newspaper industry's consortium with Yahoo!, launching the industry's partnership with the online real estate company Zillow, and forming quadrantONE, a national online sales network co-owned by Hearst, The New York Times Company, Gannett and Tribune.

Pearlstine previously served as a senior advisor to Time Warner, following 11 years as editor in chief of the company's Time Inc. subsidiary. Before joining Time Inc., Pearlstine worked for the Wall Street Journal from 1968 to 1992, except for a two-year period from 1978-1980 when he worked as an executive editor of Forbes magazine. In 1992, Pearlstine resigned from the Journal to work at SmartMoney magazine. Pearlstine has been honored with the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award; the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism; the American Society of Magazine Editors Lifetime Achievement Award; and induction into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.