High-schoolers imagine the future of journalism
Inaugural summer camp is funded by subscribers
I was a little lost. And feeling kind of old.
Midway through the presentation by a group of students at our High School Media Innovation Summer Camp last week, nothing made sense. There was mention of X-Boxes and game consoles, multiplayer war games and Minecraft.
But the presentation wasn’t for my Pac-Man-trained brain. It was for their peers attending the two-week camp at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The other students got it.
The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com is sponsoring the inaugural Media Innovation Camp this summer. The idea is to combine budding journalists and techsavvy students to imagine what news creation and delivery will look like in the future.
No matter how it’s delivered, there will always be a need for watchdog reporting and fair and accurate journalism from legitimate news outlets. The savvy students at this camp will likely be the ones bringing it to us.
And for their parents, a bonus: The innovation camp is 100 percent free for all 22 campers, funded by Republic subscribers. How does it work? When you temporarily stop your newspaper delivery for vacation, you’re given an option to donate the value to our Media in Education fund. Expenses for the summer camp are paid with this fund.
Last year, we announced the creation of an investigative reporting fellowship at ASU to honor Don Bolles, the Republic reporter assassinated with a car bomb 41 years ago while reporting on mafia ties to the Valley. That, too, is funded with MIE donations.
We are honoring our journalistic past while focusing on the future.
(Want to support Media in Education even more? Text “journalism” to 51-555 to make a tax-deductible donation.)
We have no idea what ideas will emerge from the camp. The students from Winslow and Phoenix, Gilbert and Snowflake are also learning about virtual reality and 360-degree video storytelling. And how to “gameify” news reports to make them more interactive and engaging.
On June 30, final projects will be presented to a panel of professional experts. Watch this space for news about what they come up with.
Here’s hoping I’ll understand the winning projects well enough to explain them.