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Abstract: Instructors in journalism programs in this period of evolution are searching for ways to strengthen and apply students' skills in multimedia writing and content production. They are also looking for opportunities to engage students in problem-solving in their local communities, using what they have learned in the classroom. A municipal election posed a chance to create a voter education website that would benefit various stakeholders in the nearby urban community. Working with a community group, instructors and students set goals for a multimedia website to inform and entice voters to participate in the 2014 Trenton mayoral election. The two-semester, year-long project included the work of 120 students at different skill levels and no previous in-depth knowledge of the city's history, current challenges, or of municipal elections. The course taught students to consider the history of the city, learn about the issues it faced, and to explore the role of media in stimulating community involvement. They developed critical thinking skills, learned about user-centered design principles, collaborated with students of different majors to tell digital stories, and decided how to best inform voters through the content they produced for this WordPress site. At the end of the course, students reported higher levels of interest in their community and in real-world projects with deadlines as well as projects that would have a life after the semester's end.
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Introduction
To best prepare undergraduates for careers in journalism, we continue to retool our curriculum to include courses that will incorporate opportunities to practice and produce multimedia content and to work with editors and clients on producing a publishable body of work.
As educators we must also stay current on the marketable skills needed to enter not only journalism but also the related fields of public relations, social media and communications. We have found it helpful in the past to find and pair with community organizations that might benefit from our skills. These opportunities to work on local stories and projects also help the community by filling a need that professional journalists and content producers alone cannot fill.
While working on local stories, students come to realize their storytelling can help empower a community, highlighting issues or agents of change often not...