This Flickr map has more than 120 photos, taken by me and some Arizona State University journalism students, at last week’s Phoenix “First Friday Art Walk” — a monthly, self-guided tour of a downtown-Phoenix district that contains a number of galleries and craft-oriented shops.

Putting this together was absurdly simple: We combined the capabilities of the Google/T-Mobile G1 smart-phones and services provided by the photo-sharing site Flickr. (Note: Google provided us with the phones and its carrier partner, T-Mobile, gave us airtime.)

The G1s are the first in a line of what Google hopes will be lots of devices using the Android operating system, which is considerably more open than Apple’s iPhone and has, in my view, roughly equal potential. The G1s contain, among many other capabilities, digital cameras and GPS (global satellite positioning radios that tell location within a few meters).

Each of us shot a dozen or so pictures at various places along the Art Walk streets. After snapping each picture, we sent it by email to a special address at Flickr, using the name of the gallery or other location as the subject line and adding some body text to describe what we were looking at.

Embedded in the JPEG photo files created by the G1s is a critically valuable bunch of zeroes and ones: the location as determined by the GPS. Flickr reads that location data as it imports the picture files, and then places the images autormatically on a map.

In other words, the map was being created in real time, as we walked the streets and snapped the photos.

Now, this is not a new idea by any means. And we could have done a much better display of the pictures with a bit more time; Flickr’s mapping display to the general public is very crude compared with what it could do (the image above, much better than the one you’ll see if you click this public link, is available to the account holder of the map, but not to other people) Moreover, sending pictures via email was a crude way to handle the images; there are applications for the iPhone and Nokia’s GPS-equipped phones that upload to Flickr much more efficiently than anything written so far for the G1.

Still, it was trivially simple to set this up and make it work, using tools that already exist and are, for the most part, easy to use. We’ll be doing much more with the G1s over time (including, I hope, creating applications that more fully explore the devices’ potential).

The point is that some events take place over time and space, and are made to order for this kind of treatment. Journalists are actually quite late to the party. Flickr and other sites are displaying crowd-sourced such events via user-created tags.

We’re planning to open up this page to others in the Phoenix community, so that over time people create a rich photo set of First Friday. We’ll help people sort by dates, not just location, so that we can see how the monthly event changes over time, too.

We are planning a series of other experiments with these phones (and others), and would be grateful for ideas on how we might take best advantage of these incredible devices. Our goal is simple: testing ideas that will help create valuable community information resources and services.

Google is pointing from its home page today to a page about World Tuberculosis Day and that, in turn, points to the Stop TB Partnership, a nonprofit organization. A worthy cause, and good for Google for pointing to it.

Consider the power of this endorsement. I suspect that with this single link, Google is channeling more money to the organizations that want to end TB than the sum of all their previous campaigns. This is power of a breathtaking kind.

Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar value; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great value. Still, there’s no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student’s future.

Even if McNeil overstated the case, however, his words should inspire journalism educators to ponder their role in a world where these programs’ traditional reason for being is increasingly murky.

Our raison d’etre is open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I’m teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn’t nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques

For media creators (after incorporating the above):

• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency

(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I’m a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they’re important.)

The principles underpin everything I believe about modern media consumption in general — entertainment being the major exception — and journalism in particular. Especially for the creators of media, they add up to being honorable.

If the principles are the foundation, the practices and tactics are an evolving superstructure. Journalism education needs to deal with both.

This applies not just to students studying the practice of journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting results.

As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.

Still, the experiments are growing in number, in scope and in potential. What’s more, they’re involving not just newcomers to the journalism education ranks, but faculty members who’ve been on the job for some time. The News21 Initiative, funded by two major foundations, is an example. We’re working on entrepreneurship as a core mission, and so is Jeff Jarvis at City University of New York, among others. Rich Gordon at Northwestern University’s Medill School is helping computer science students understand the value of journalism, and how they can help create tomorrow’s version. And so on.

But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We’re not turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data — some of it bogus and much of it irrelevant — has never been so difficult to handle.

One experiment, at State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won’t go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students, not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of the way to what I’d like to see in journalism education, but it’s a very useful start.

Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I’d start, again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and entrepreneurially focused.

I’d also direct the alumni relations director to find out who attended the journalism program and then went onto great things in non-journalistic fields. To the extent that McNeil is correct about our offering such a useful program for students of all kinds, surely we’ll find plenty of accomplished graduates in other professions and crafts. Take a look at the Cronkite School’s “Alumni Hall of Fame” — a listing, begun in 1993, largely comprised of former students who are now employed by traditional media organizations. They are all worthy honorees. Sixteen years from now, I hope, this list will offer a much broader cross-section of affiliations.

Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:

• Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
• Create a program for people in the community, starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic media activist course at every level of education — not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.
• Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real.
• Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and they’d be better off for the exercise.
• Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part of their missions, but haven’t yet realized why, namely that their own trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped people understand these principles — not to mention the enormous value of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own conversations with their communities of geography and interest.

All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. We’re not the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped. If we don’t, someone else will.

Lasantha Wickramatunga: And Then They Came for Me. No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces – and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been burned, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories, and now especially the last.

Wickramatunga was the editor of the Sri Lankan Sunday Leader, newspaper that crusaded for honor and against corruption. Please read his final column to remember why journalism remains a vital, and sometimes noble, craft.

NBPC New Media Institute 2009: The National Black Programming Consortium and its National Minority Consortia partners invite you to participate in the 4th Annual New Media Institute (NMI). The NMI is a unique professional development program working to transform producers of color from television producers into media-makers who can work seamlessly between various digital platforms. NBPC, a national, nonprofit media arts organization, has been the leading provider of Black programming on public television and a great resource for training Black media professionals for nearly 30 years. In association with the NMC, The New Media Institute was developed out of a need expressed by the producers we serve. Building upon last year’s theme of social networking and active citizenship, NMI ’09 will explore mobile journalism.

Beginning with the 2009-10 fellowship year, the program will put a new emphasis on journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

These are among the premier journalism fellowships in the U.S., and the changes — among other things, non-traditional journalists will have a better shot at the program — could have a positive impact on journalism over time. (Note: I was on the task force that helped Stanford re-evaluate the fellowships.)

Take a look, and consider applying.

I’m dazzled by some of the things I’m hearing, however. The level of innovation is just as high in Africa as anywhere else, even if Internet usage is considerably lower. (One organization with which I’m quite familiar as an advisor, the superb Global Voices Online has several folks here including Georgia Popplewell, managing director.)

This is my third trip to South Africa and this conference, which is now in its 12th year. The first time was in 2001, as part of a small group of foreign journalists. We were on our way back to the airport when we got news, by mobile phone, of the Sept. 11 attacks.

African journalists live and work amid some of the most difficult conditions on the planet. The optimism and grit of the ones I’ve met here in these visits stays with me.

We have an opening at Arizona State for someone to work with me at the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. Here’s the official listing (feel free to pass it around):

Business Development Coordinator, Digital Media

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication seeks a business development coordinator for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The center, which was established this year, is devoted to the development of new media entrepreneurship and the creation of innovative digital media products. It is funded by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The ideal candidate will have experience as a new media entrepreneur and possess a solid understanding of business planning and principles. He or she will work closely with the Center’s director, Dan Gillmor, and with students from journalism, business, engineering and other schools, singly and in teams, to plan, prototype and, if possible, launch new-media projects. (This is not a fundraising position.) The business development coordinator will report to the director of the Knight Center and will hold the faculty rank of lecturer in the Cronkite School.

Minimum qualifications: Bachelor’s degree and experience in the business development of digital media.

For more information on the Knight Center, click here.

To apply: Submit cover letter, resume and three (3) professional references and contact information to:

Search Committee – Knight Center
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism
PO Box 871305
Tempe, AZ 85287-1305

Applications may also be submitted via email at jjobs@asu.edu.

Applications must be received by 5:00 PM, March 1, 2008.

Arizona State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

Just learned this is not to be blogged…

Journalists, it turns out, go off the record as much as anyone else.

There’s reason for this apparent madness, though I don’t entirely agree with it. Conley says:

First, “You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.” He means the Web culture.

Second, he says, “When the fighting begins, the training must end.” Here he means that it’s too late to start getting journalists web-savvy.

On the second point I could not disagree more. Soldiers train in between battles, to stay sharp and learn new tactics.

The first has more logical appeal, but even here I can’t go along. Some people don’t realize they’re naturally part of a culture until they see it close-up. I didn’t know I was going to gravitate online until I’d tried it.

A provocative piece, worth reading…