I’ll start.

First, a little about me. I’m journalist. I’m a student. I’m in graduate school at the University of Kansas, studying journalism. I am a reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World on weekends. I work for MTV News, covering Kansas this election season for its Choose or Lose Street Team. I blog (though I’m not very good at it, IMHO).

I’m a former public relations professional (though wondered today, wouldn’t I be called a PR agent, since I worked at an agency?). I studied journalism during my undergraduate years at Miami University.

I learned how to write a good news story at Miami. I began blogging in my PR life. I picked up (big) video camera for the first time at KU. I did my first multimedia piece and podcast for the LJWorld. I’ve continued to strive for perfection with that at MTV. But I want and need to keep learning. I’ve spent many hours in the classroom here learning about communication theory, ethics and why you shouldn’t burn your draft card (w/in the frame of 1st Amendment rights), but I’ve learned everything I know about the value of the Web and the vast potential out there from various blogs on the Interwebz. That needs to translate to the classroom. In fact, I’m fairly certain it does here at KU, which has prided itself on being a leader in developing a curriculum that features multimedia.

Here is a sampling of what I have not learned, and what I want to learn, and what I may just teach myself.

• How to build and maintain a microsite, such as Reuters’ Iraq package or Chicago Tribune’s glimpse at life as a soldier
• How the heck is Twitter a plausible news function?
• Newspapers: Breaking on the Web and Analyzing in Print?
• Why my videos suck, and do viewers really care?
• Yahoo Pipes
• Entrepreneurship: The values of our new media world
• Good blogs vs. bad blogs, and do readers really care?
• The next newsroom, and how you’ll fit in

This is just a sampling. But I’ve got a lot of questions. Come on, j-profs. What are you doing at your schools that can make us all better journalists, students and teachers?

What’s going on?

Today’s media is like an adolescent. It thinks it’s grown up, but it’s clear changes are happening and it is trying to figure out how to deal with those changes. The voice-cracking maturation of 21st century media is being debated at countless blogs, in newspaper boardrooms and in the classroom.

Journalism schools at Columbia and Northwestern are taking close looks at their programs, hoping that they can evolve and develop journalists who are ready to take on the challenges present in today’s markets. Other schools, like CUNY and DePaul, have opened the doors of new journalism schools, with the express purpose of teaching new media, entrepreneurship and how traditional reporting fits into the mold. Still other j-schools are stuck in the past.

What do I hope to do here? Very little. Instead, I want professors and students of journalism to tell the world what they are thinking. What’s working at your school? What needs tweaking? Are you doing anything groundbreaking?

This blog is meant to be a collaboration of many voices. Let’s see if we can begin to solve the problems facing our business.