Facts & Frictions (Nov 2023)
How to create a virtual newsroom
Abstract
An essential dimension of the journalism school experience is the hands-on training that takes place in studio courses and workshops. Learning to troubleshoot and adapt in real-time situations is as important as gaining experience with industry-standard equipment. As useful as video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet have been for some forms of remote teaching, they are not ideal solutions to replicate the collaborative experiential learning that happens in our campus newsrooms and broadcast studios. Through much exploration and experimentation with different digital platforms, instructors and technical staff at the Toronto Metropolitan University School of Journalism were able to continue leading live TV and radio news courses and real-time training workshops while our campus largely remained shuttered from Spring 2020 and into 2021. We sought out tools that were agile, accessible and as user-friendly as possible. Many of these tools have proven to be so effective and versatile that we continue to use them even as students return to classrooms, offering more hybrid approaches to broadcast journalism education. In this commentary, we discuss some of these tools and show how they work in short videos, with the goal of supporting other journalism or media instructors building collaborative virtual newsrooms and studios simply and quickly.
Keywords
