In an Iron Chef-like match up, a team of developers from each CMS had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team would appear face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival. I had the chance to attend the face off and found it to be very fun to watch.

It was a battle to the end. With a mix of good humor and serious competition, leaders from Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress met face to face during a Monday session called “The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny” at South by Southwest. The panelists included Steve Fisher (Joomla!), Colleen Carroll (Drupal), and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and led by George DeMet of Palantir.net. The room was packed full of CMS fans, with a heavy emphasis on WordPress. You could hear a small group of men chanting for their favorite CMS before the event got underway. The mood was festive but there was an air of competition brewing as each person threw CMS taunts at each other.

DeMet came up with the idea and explained how each team of developers were given the task to build a website for a community leadership program in Elgin, Illinois. The developers were asked to use a number of web-based social networking and collaboration tools. The end goal is to build websites that are general enough to be able to be downloaded by organizations and communities to meet their needs. All of the specifications are listed on Palantir.net’s blog or available in a PDF format. The teams were also expected to stay true to a site design created by Mark Boulton who is well-known for his web design and book, “Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web“. Developers could only use freely-available software to build the sites and function on a shared hosting space (Linux/Apache/MySQL).

A lot of time was spent talking about how the teams worked together on the site creation and the effort it took to build the sites. The Joomla! team never met face-to-face. Developers spanned across the globe and spent most time talking over Skype or conference calls. The Drupal team started with a face-to-face sprint to get the site started and then they worked together to finish the rest of the work. You can follow how Mullenweg’s WordPress team completed their tasks by visiting  a site they built to keep up with the project. Here is a comparison of how the sites came together under deadline:

DeMet mentioned how most validation errors were minor. But Carroll said the Drupal Community learned a lot from the discovery of those errors and they were able to put in a number of new patches to help improve the overall CMS. Mullenweg and Fischer said this project helped in similar ways. Mullenweg talked about how his team had a great time outside of the development by adding Zoolander-related content. The added fun was not a requirement. The Drupal and Joomla! teams added filler to populate their sites.

The crowd seemed pretty disappointed when it became clear there would be no live demonstrations of the websites. All of the sites can be viewed from the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny website. They did get to hear reactions from Boulton and Senior Program Officer Marybeth Schroeder from the Evanston Community Foundation. DeMet had worked with the organization before and used its needs to launch the competition in the first place. The crowd enjoyed watching her reaction as she looked through each versions of the website. Schroeder had no CMS preference before looking at the sites, a perspective that was not easy to find in the SXSW session. There was an attempt to record how she used each site. In one screen capture video, you could see her trying to figure out the WordPress dashboard. In the case of the Joomla! site, Schroeder had a hard time adding a location for an event.

From the designer perspective, Boulton said he favored the WordPress and Drupal sites for how they stayed true to his design. He gave Joomla! a hit for not following all of his typography. Fisher countered that they made that decision because the Joomla! team didn’t like it. Boulton did not say anything specifically about the usefulness or user experience of the sites.

In what was expected to be a dramatic end to the competition, DeMet asked the crowd to vote on who should win. Many people yelled out how they felt they did not have enough knowledge of the sites to pick. Others yelled out the CMS they already supported. That indecisiveness let to a draw. DeMet announced all three CMS won and tried to figure out a way to share the belt-buckle award.

There may be no defined answer on what is the best open source CMS. It was clear this project helped motivate the open source communities to team together and come up with products that can help non-profits launch a website that meets their needs. Each development team will make their work available for anyone to use. The Joomla! and WordPress teams even created help videos on the showdown website. The event at SXSW was also a great way to talk about CMS and get open source products more play among a large and growing population of tech-minded people who are looking for a new way to share information online.

DeMet plans to talk about the showdown again in April at a pre-conference event for the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois.

A couple of fun things came out during this session. First, the WordPress song is TOO funny. Also, you can enjoy this Drupal song. There was a Joomla! song but I can’t find it online, plus it’s instrumental and a bit boring compared to the other two!

(You can see a similar version of this post at CMSwire.com)

It’s so interesting to be around so many people who understand technology… A conversation I’ve heard a lot is how these web and interactive-based ideas we are talking about are often not supported by higher management. It’s the case in industries across the board. It’s not just a problem for journalism. But watching another newspaper fall today (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) is more reason for me to feel the need to dump my ideas on how to change the way we teach journalism students of today. The P-I is doing things a little differently than the Rocky Mountain News closure. In Seattle’s case the “paper” will live on in a web-format only. That means many traditional journalists will have to turn their thought process completely around and put web as the priority. Sure, many newsrooms are starting to put that priority out there. This is the first time in a long time where the change in priority is about to be come the only priority. Journalists need to think web first.

So how do these long-standing journalism schools do it?

I have an idea that I’ve been working with for a while and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For years journalism students have been taught how to get dropped into a story (it can be breaking news, developing news or just feature stories) and be able to become “instant experts.” A general assignment reporter for a broadcast station is sent from story to story with no over arching purpose beyond covering the community or city. A general assignment reporter for most newsrooms follows a large beat on a city or education or entertainment (you get the drift)… But no one is specifically focused on one topic and tasked with building a community and understanding the existing community surrounding that topic.

Jane Stevens is working on fixing that challenge as part of the Reynolds Journalism Institute. She’s working on creating a web structure that will help journalists do good journalism even if they don’t have a traditional newsroom to back them up. It would basically be an out-of-the-box tool for community building and focused research and journalistic work. She’s leading a project to create what she calls a “health shell.” It’s a web structure were individual journalists can collect data about various aspects of the health issue and collaborate online with a website where you can share a community of people who care about that topic. It’s exciting to watch some of my students get to really know an element of health that they find important. Some current topics are fitness, senior health literacy and mental health. The student journalists are learning what it takes to gather sources and get a solid understanding of a niche. But here’s the trick: when the student wrap up this semester, some are going to graduate, others are going to run off for the summer. How can we keep this project sustainable within this higher education environment?

That got me thinking about journalism school curriculum.

Here’s my idea. I kind of base it off of how we make the radio-television sequence work. In the first semester you learn the foundation of skills. In the second semester you refine those skills and get good enough to work in the newsroom. In the third semester you are a regular reporter each week. For a community-based website, you could do something similar. In the first semester you learn the foundation of skills it takes to be a multi-media journalist and how to gather data and collect information. In the second semester you are an assistant to the lead community journalists for a specific niche website. In the third semester you are a leader of the community. It requires something different. Instead of becoming a general assignment reporter, you learn how to be a niche reporter. You learn what it takes to grow a connection with your community and get to know it well enough to be a legitimate presence online. The challenge: students would have to pick a niche during the first semester and stick with it. If they hate the niche by the end of a year and a half, then at least they know what it takes to gather up enough sources to really get a niche website rolling. Then they know what it takes to find another niche and get a job doing it elsewhere. That research and community building can be taken into so many directions after graduation. I think it would be amazing. Plus, the niche websites at the Missouri School of Journalism would continue to rock.

Ahhh. It feels better to let that out.

I have attended all kinds of sessions and I’ll try to write about some here and there as I go but I really felt like I needed to get this one out there as soon as possible!

There are currently a number of tools that help journalists do things differently. But we are so early into this process that none of us can fully wrap our minds around what it looks like. What most of the journalists I’ve talked to are saying is we need to make some pretty radical changes. I’ve also had time to work out how I envision a change in journalism curriculum. It’s taken the last week of conversation – but I hope to spend some time today writing it out for all to see!

But first – I’m going to head to the SXSW convention center to learn and talk!

I’m headed to Austin, Texas to take part in the monster South by Southwest Interactive festival (SxSWi). It’s days and days and days of networking, conference sessions, product testing and social gatherings. Heck, I’ve even found a group of people that runs each morning. I hope to take this time to meet hundreds of people who are involved in thinking big and thinking social online. I hope to meet dozens of people I’ve met on Twitter. I hope to learn about ideas and ways journalists can better tell stories. I hope to learn about new tools that will help journalists be journalists even if they don’t have a newsroom. It will be a heck of an experience and it can be pretty overwhelming to even figure out a schedule.

I hope to twitter the experience throughout the week… And attempt to summarize one or two “aha” moments each day. If I have enough time, I’ll also try to share bits of video and photos. If there is anything you’re interested in learning about the event – please let me know. I’ll ask questions and meet people for you if you can’t attend the festival in person!

I’ve never attended a DrupalCon before… and I have to say, it’s fantastic to talk to people and learn about what’s going on with this open source CMS. But the best things I’ve learned have come from side conversations and small unofficial sessions called Birds of a Feather or BoFs. I’ve been able to meet other wonderful journalists and media specialists who really care about the industry. I’ve also learned about a fantastic initiative the Knight Foundation set up called the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI). It was a very quickly set up initiative where the Knight Foundation recognized the flexibility and potential of Drupal… and how a bit of funding could help this open source tool improve dramatically. One of the initiative’s first grants went to Addison Berry who wants to build up to date handbooks so more people can understand how to use Drupal. I’m really excited about Berry’s plans. I attended her “Documentation is Hot” presentation yesterday and I think she’s doing an incredible thing for Drupal and the community people who know Drupal is powerful but we can’t figure it out on our own (like me!).

I had a chance to attend the KDI BoF (like how I used all of the acronyms in one sentence?) yesterday where participants and organizers talked about what could happen in the future. They’re unsure if they’ll hold another KDI grant process again. I really hope they do. During this conference I’ve had a chance to talk and scheme with a wonderful Twitter user named Margaret Rosas (@mrosas). She’s out in Santa Cruz doing wonderful work for public media (with the help of a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant). We understand each other and I love her cause. She explains how she hopes to align an Army of Geeks on the MediaShift Idea Lab. I think the KDI could help her extend this vision to locations beyond Santa Cruz. I would love to help build a Drupal community in Columbia, MO. There really isn’t one… And my time here has helped me learn about the Drupal Groups site and how many journalists are building community there. I didn’t even know! So I am now a member of Drupal Groups. You can find me here and watch as I join more groups and find new ways to learn about Drupal. I will never stop learning so I can continue to teach the best I can. I really to do want to arm Mizzou’s future journalists with an arsenal that will allow them to be good journalists who can do good work AND eat under a roof.

By the way – my attempt at holding a Mizzou J-School alumni meetup was a success last night. There were six former students who came from a range of graduation years between May of 2003 (right before I started working at the journalism school) all the way through December 2008. It was wonderful catching up, drinking a couple of beers and giving alumni members a chance to meet each other. Hooray last minute gatherings set up over Twitter and Facebook!

I’d love to hear what other folks think about CMS and portability.

Also – Since I’m in DC, I’m setting up an impromptu gathering for Mizzou alumni and any of my Twitter/blog followers if they’re interested:

It would be great to hang out, enjoy a beer in a hipster kind of place.

McGerevan said the New York Observer takes a lot of the essential elements of Drupal and uses them in the newsroom. The newsroom operates in a way where most things are published to the web and then changed, improved, repackaged and put into the print publication. He says the news product more native to the web in its workflow. But they haven’t built any custom workflow into the CMS. They have customized Drupal for editorial needs. They found templates and ways to package content to do the things they need. In their recent relaunch of the site, they have editors applying a weight to a story. That determines how much prominence it has on the site. No more scheduling of the story items. It’s a thought process that is more web native. I really like that!

McClatchy’s workflow is rapidly developing. When they first started experimenting with the CMS, they were looking at standalone builds. They saw a lot of instances where affiliate IT departments were using Drupal as a back end or adding widget items into existing CMS. The Drupal commenting system is the only thing they would use it for. But as McClatchy newsrooms gain more knowledge, they’re using it more. Some newsrooms want to use it as a primary data entry site to feed the content into their core CMS and eventually use it to the print product.

Aster said Mother Jones used to consider itself as a magazine that happens to have a website. Now they’re working with the belief that they’re a 24 hour news agency. That thought process started changing when they introduced blogs two years ago. The web-focused workflow is more relaxed and once people realized that is a better process, the use of Drupal was welcomed. This process also created a less complex approval and permissions process to get articles and blogs published to the site.

The first thing that came to my mind was whether the newsrooms are working on any Agile development concepts using Drupal. Apparently McClatchy used Drupal to build a mom community in only a week and a half! I think that’s amazing. If I was able to build a functioning community site in that short amount of time, I could have four or five test projects running! Okay. Maybe three.

It was interesting to see where the conversations were going with the session. There was more culture talk and workflow talk than an actual discussion in how Drupal functions. I kind of really wanted to talk about Drupal functions. But the discussion turned to how did the newsrooms change culturally to become web-focused. The one thing that stood out from all three men was how all three newsrooms have an open source environment. They all said it made sense to work with an open source product. That was so great to hear. I’ve hit snag after snag from cultures that don’t work with Drupal’s flow.

The one workflow item that I really enjoyed hearing about what how Mother Jones is using Drupal’s features to create more of a community through online readers and potential contributors. Mother Jones wants to be able to share investigative journalism online where the community can help steer the conversations into solutions. The magazine added two little flags in Drupal where the comment can be a recommended solution or a documented result on behalf of the problem.

In the end, I got the feeling that the room was full of people bursting to talk about journalism and how we can find really great solutions for the industry… and the possibility that Drupal is one of those solutions. One person asked if Drupal was a fad… I mentioned that statement on Twitter. Ben Shoemate, who I finally met in person after talking on Twitter, mentioned to me that he felt that question was a bit dramatic. The real question is this: Do these newsrooms all expect to switch content management systems every two years? That’s when I really figured out why we’re doing all of this.

We are looking for solid CMS that is flexible enough to do what we want it to do today and what we’ll want it to do tomorrow. And if it isn’t flexible enough tomorrow, it needs to be able to export all of its data easily to prevent an ugly CMS divorce. That’s what matters. It doesn’t matter if Drupal or WordPress or Django are the fads. What matters more is if we don’t like the CMS, we can export, get out and move on without losing data.

So that’s where the question of output of web content that can go right into the print system becomes very important. If you can export web content to go into a newspaper, then you can export all of your content into archives or into an alternate CMS.

I’d love to hear what you think!

There are 1400 people attending this event!

First and foremost, Drupal is a content management system. It helps you manage a website built onto a framework. Drupal was made to be flexible to do what you want it to do. The CMS framework that makes it so flexible are constructed from APIs (Application Programming Interface). It does all kinds of bits of code that let you do tasks so you don’t have to hand code your website. It’s wrapped up in a nice little package for you. Drupal has a ton of APIs that are built as “modules.”

Here’s when the discussion gets deeply nerdy. If you aren’t interested in code… Here’s what I learned. There is a step by step process that helps Drupal function. It looks for all of the things you want to happen with the site and then it delivers that content to the site’s look or theme. If you think through what you want, the code comes together for you. If you build it and then try to make changes on top of your structure, things break. Also, the theme is more powerful than the actual code. It can trump the code… or the theme can fight the code. I’m pretty sure that’s another problem I found during my Smart Decision ’08 experience.

The sites folder that comes with a Drupal install is what you would probably mess around with. But the includes folder is actually worth looking into. It gives you the lay of the land and tells you what you’re working with. (http://api.drupal.org information is all in this file. It’s your own reference to explain things for you.) You can learn about the common functions of Drupal code. These functions are a little machine.

Drupal has a concept called “hooks.” It’s a naming convention. hook_* where hook is replaced by your module name. It lets you create a system where a module defines the system and another hook can connect with another hook.

Hook example: Think of Drupal of a train. It looks for a hook_perm function (each is a train car) in your module file. The API tells you what needs to go into it. Drupal searches through the whole site and grabs the items that have a hook_perm. Drupal grabs all of the cars (module perm files) and then it goes to the themes where you can snag alter functions. It’s a step by step process to get the site to do what you want it to do. Once it gets to the theme, that’s when it gets pretty. So once the site has all of the “look” and it delivers the content to a web browser. The hook system is why Drupal works… but it’s also why it can be challenging if you try to fight the hook process. If you work from the beginning to build a site following the hook process… then you won’t get in big trouble> Most troubles hapeen when you try to hook on extra stuff after you’ve built the basics of site. Ugly things happen… and that’s where I hit major snags with smartdecision08.com.

Menu function (in the includes folder as menu.inc) – Drupal needs the menu system functions that make it work. The menu system is not the menu module. The system works like a router – that’s how Drupal knows how to produce anything on your site. The menu system maps URLs to take you to that site. Without the menu system, the site won’t work. The menu module is not needed – it’s just the UI for you to graphically create navigation for a site. (most people don’t turn it off)

Form API (FAPI) – is a “thing of beauty” but most people get scared. The form API lets you build forms on your site. Drupal FAPI – form.inc has all of the functions in there. It handles the form, validation and submission. Instead of building it with HTML tags, it is just an element in the array – a big PHP array for every single thing. Drupal takes that array information and turns it into the HTML for you. Why would you let Drupal do it? It doesn’t just create a form, it does the security and verification for you as well. The idea is FAPI takes care of all of the security stuff. You just list out what you want in the form and Drupal takes care of it for you. Drupal has your own default and submission process. You can change it to have required and non-required elements. You have complete control when you build your own form module. When you’re trying to alter a form someone else built, you can go in it and tweak it (which is how I do anything in code). It’s great when you know what you’re doing… frustrating when you don’t. But once you get it, it’s a much easier way to build forms.

Databases – database.inc and database*.inc are in the includes folder. When you need a new table, insert new tables and take out tables, this will do it for you. This helps you securely pass and share information without a concern of breaking security holes (SQL stuff that I don’t know). You can just pick all the items you want for a database, it will build it for you. Just tell it what fields and tables you want and Drupal will do it for you.

Theme layer – is the last step. There’s an include files (theme.inc). It runs the entire theme system. It’s how Drupal gets output. Information runs through the theme to output to the front side of the web world. Drupal has a system module that has default tpls files (template files). Drupal by default has block, box and page template files in the system module folder. Blocks are a module – but the system has a block section as well. The core html output goes into a tpl file inside modules folder. If you want to change the tpl file – go into the system module, it will automatically change everything you want. page.tpl is what is most often changed. Anytime you want to modify html, see if there’s a template file to work on. Copy it, paste it and go.

In the end, themes rule. It controls everything in the end. Module output uses theme()
The order of priority is theme_function_name() (is there a theme function?)
phptemplate_function_name() (the engine of drupal)
mytheme_function_name() (final item that trumps all – it gives you total control of everything)
Copy and paste function into anything you want – change the logic, the wording… anything you want. It trumps anything the coders did for the site. Themers end up trumping the coders. When it comes to output the theme has control and this is probably where I’ve also hit snags. The code sometimes doesn’t agree with a theme. If you keep the module code really generic, it allows the theme to give it control on a lower level and the module can be used multiple times.

Yikes. I think I kind of picked up on the way Drupal actually works!!
Resources
Developer/Theme handbooks
Drupal source/api.drupal.org
Dev/Theme mailing lists (drupal.com/mailing-lists)
IRD:#drupal (#drupal-dev) #drupal-themes
Issue queues
Paper books: http://drupal.org/books

Those are my notes and I promise to go through that and improve what I’m trying to say. I promise.

1) Working Journalists and the Changing News Environment
Moderator: Rem Reider (American Journalism Review)
Carl Stepp (University of Maryland)
Tom Fiedler (Boston University/Harvard University)
Philip Meyer (UNC)
Jennifer McKim (Orange County Register – Neiman Fellow at Harvard)

This was an interesting start to the conference. There were a number of very different opinions on the state of the professional journalism industry. It started with Carl Stepp talking about his belief that managers need to give journalists more freedom to think and invent. He thinks it’s possible one person in a newsroom could change the entire industry.

Tom Fiedler countered and said the business model will have to come from someone on the outside. He thinks the temperament of journalists is to do what they love and that’s gathering news. They aren’t going to be the people who are inclined to worry about a business model. It doesn’t fit their role.

Jennifer McKim (who is a Neiman Fellow) talked about how there are many demoralized professionals in the industry… But they have the passion and talent and want this industry to work.

Philip Meyer has a lot to say after the first three folks. He had an idea that has a lot of buzz in the room: Find a business model that is supported by the elites. A multi-step flow of information would eventually get that information to the general public. CCJ‘s Mark Carter mentioned The Economist as a possible model. There were audience members questioning if that was a viable business model on a smaller readership/viewership level.

2) Communication Research and the Changing News Environment
Tom Patterson (Shorenstein Center, Harvard)
Robert Entman (George Washington University)
Scott Althaus (University of Illinois)
Vincent Price (University of Pennyslvania)

I’d hate to bury the lead on the next panel but the highlight happened near the end. I’ll just quickly summarize this portion of the conference. The group talked about how there’s a discord between scholarly journalistic research and the practice of journalism. My favorite quote from Robert Entman was his thoughts on the state of the journalistic industry: “changing course may be the less risky path.” He may be right.

Scott Althaus showed how just a little knowledge of the past can give a ton of context to how we cover the news of today. He showed combat video from WWI through Iraq and the varying degrees of reality journalists showed through video.

Vincent Price talked about the mainstream media in perspective of the political season. He looked at what is new, what hasn’t changed and the effects changes have on news. His overall message: the mainstream media (MSM) operations are now working in a much more complicated environment. The interactions between the MSM and all of the current information sources (supplementary campaign information, web, audiences) will continue to change the way information is transmitted. He commented on how entertainment can bring the audience to MSM but its up to us to turn that into a teachable moment.

But since the overall message from the group was to encourage practicing journalists to use scholarly research, the most interesting comment was made. Ira Chinoy from Maryland asked the opposite of the researchers. He asked the question over whether it was possible for there to be a problem with scholarly activity. Then he offered a couple of suggestions. First is to have the scholars write for a general audience. He also suggested scholars take the time to conduct confrontation interviews before releasing studies with a one-sided result. If not, give an opportunity for a pre-publication review by some kind of representative audience. There were all kinds of murmur about that. Entman retorted that the current scholarly community looks down upon researchers who publish for the general public.

3) Citizen Journalism
Clyde Bentley (University of Missouri)
Jan Schaffer (J-Lab)
Ryan Thornburg (University of North Carolina)
Steve Yelvington (Morris Communications, Founder of BlufftonToday.com)

Clyde Bentley talked about his work with MyMissourian.com and research on citizen journalism (CJ). He likened CJ to cave drawing from long ago. He also compared citizen journalists to members of the national guard: a citizen soldier doesn’t want a career in the military, he or she just wants to help. Bentley also talked about how Martin Luther could be credited with starting citizen journalism. He opened the idea to the general public to question priests. He showed other forms of current CJ and the differences between how traditional journalists cover information while citizen journalists share information.

Jan Schaffer had some great thoughts on this topic as well. She showed so many ideas and projects that the J-Lab has sponsored. She talked about the trends and how the journalism of the future is the “architecture of participation.” Ordinary people become the “plankton” in the “media ecosystem.” In some ways, journalists would have the job to sift through the plankton to come up with a functioning ecosystem. Another thought that I enjoyed is how this “isn’t about covering community, it’s about building community.” CJs or as Jan put it, citizen media-makers are looking to make a different in tangible ways. Her idea is deputizing a person who has the job to network all of the citizen media in the community. An editor would have the job to figure out what topics need “Big J” journalism for the larger audience. If there’s a pattern in citizen media conversations, it may be worth bringing it to a larger audience.

Ryan Thornburg gave some great perspective about how citizen media is playing a huge role in the political process. Citizen journalists’ impact on politics means more voices in the discourse of a political season. Social networks are offering a more efficient way to deliver those messages. Currently politicians are doing things already that he said newsrooms should take note:
*build an infrastructure for citizen participation
*give volunteers/CJs recognition for the participation
*allow volunteers to easily connect to each other
*have fun
Of course he reminded everyone that this requires “authentic leadership.”

Do you see a consistent trend in these conversations? There is great potential for professional journalists to guide and lead citizen journalists/media creators. I have a lot of hope in these ideals.

Steve Yelvington talked about how most reporters of today are young, underpaid and have no community connections. He feels today’s “broken journalism can be repaired by learning how to participation in unfolding conversations” of citizen media.

You could feel some of the skepticism in the audience. There were concerns over who is liable for libelous blogs. One person considered blogs as a bar conversation. Another wondered how can we ensure blogs remain a supplement to quality journalism.

4) Panel on Innovation in Journalism Education
Tom Fiedler (Boston University/Harvard University)
Wolfgang Donsbach (Technical University, Dresden, Germany)
Nick Lemann (Columbia Graduate School of Journalism)
Peter Shane (Ohio State Law School)

Fielder and Donsbach presented a paper they wrote with recommendations for the future of journalism education. It is still in the vetting process and if we guage the reaction of the audience to the research, there’s more work to be done before it’s published. I’m not going to get into too many details but I’ll mention a couple of things. There was a recommendation to throw out undergraduate journalism programs because it’s too trade-based and not liberal arts enough (Dean Mills of Missouri was pretty quick to counter that). Also, there was a recommendation to “outsource skills.” They thought journalism schools should teach theory and farm out the skills training elsewhere.

There was an unsteady rumble during the many, many PowerPoint pages of thoughts and assumptions. I happened to sit next to UNC’s Dean Jean Folkerts. She gave a very eloquent response to the presentation and the rest of the audience joined in agreement. (I actually asked if she would type out her words – it was written down on paper – and I’m hoping to link to her thoughts when she gets them online) After the room was pretty hot and bothered for about 20 minutes, the conversation continued into drink time and into dinner tine. Long day, lots of thoughts and a TON of emotion.

**Update – Jean Folkerts posted her thoughts from the experience. Take a look.

I’m planning to twitter live during the conference and hopefully blog about conversations on this blog. It would be great to have even more conversations spin off from this event. I’ve been to Boston before – but never Cambridge. I looked at BU and BC, but never Harvard or MIT. I look forward to a new experience and great discussions about our grand industry.