Back to Journalism School: Better, Faster and More Coherent

By Al Giordano

I’m old enough to have learned how to type on one of those museum-piece contraptions pictured above: a manual typewriter.

Over the years I learned how to use an IBM Selectric, later a word processor, later to put those texts on the fledgling Internet through a dial-up connection (before it had images or photos it was just a global village square for typed words). Later came cell phones, still later cameras and video through them, high speed broadband and wireless connection, Blackberry and iPhone, and today anyone with some of these tools – no longer just a company TV network or major daily newspaper or wire agency – can launch a viral video or a well-structured written narrative or image on a Monday and hurtle it around the world via Internet by Tuesday, recapturing a news story from its top-down distorters.

We’ve seen in recent months, from Iran to Honduras, how civil resistance movements are increasingly utilizing these peaceful weapons of speech to defend and advance the struggles for human rights, authentic democracy and, of course, a free press. More and more, major international news organizations are dependent on the authentic media from below to use as the basis for their reporting. We’ve got them where we want them, but what we need now is to construct a larger, better trained, army to fully seize this turning point moment in the history of media and the press.

Since 2003, this newspaper, Narco News, and its School of Authentic Journalism have been training journalists and communicators of talent and conscience throughout this hemisphere to be better, faster and more coherent at this work. This coming February of 2010, we’re going to do it again, offering scholarships to a couple dozen communicators to join an equal number of professors (many of whom are themselves graduates of the J-School) for ten days on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula for an intensive training and boot camp – in Spanish and English - in how we can all be better, faster and more coherent at doing the work of authentic journalism.

Beyond the training we give each other in the nuts and bolts of journalism and communications – so that a news reporter will know how to produce and upload video about a written story, and so that a documentary filmmaker will know how to craft a powerful journalistic narrative – perhaps the J-School’s more important impact has come from its creation of shared ethics and mutual solidarity among so many doing this vital work. That is the essence of what we do. We form and build ranks.

In the coming days and weeks I and other members of this international news team will be quite busy with the tasks of composing this year’s scholarship application, course descriptions, faculty biographies and other pedagogical materials so that we can announce the promote the scholarships by the middle of this month. And if that means that we do somewhat less news reporting and analysis, well, that just underscores the absolute necessity of forming and building the ranks of those pioneers that do the daily work of the Authentic Journalism renaissance.

Stay tuned for greater detail on how to apply for the scholarships, how you can support the school and its students from afar, and if you want to make sure that you don’t miss the opportunity of a lifetime to be part of it, make sure you are subscribed to our free email alert list in Spanish or in English.