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The democratization of the image is a journalistic term referring to the fact that advances in technology are causing the media to undergo a seismic shift in who can tell stories to the public with images, sound, motion, and graphics.
Last year during London's terrorist subway bombings, for example, many pictures of the event were shot by passers-by with their cell phones before being distributed worldwide on the Web.
The message for journalism educators is clear. The fast-moving current of the information age has become even faster and journalism students must be prepared to swim in the swifter stream.
"They have to be able to do everything that any layperson can do, and more," said Van Kornegay, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
That means the school's approach to instruction, said Kornegay, is to emphasize media convergence and teaching students how to disseminate messages through multiple channels, including the most recent development: pod casts.
The audio and video files are among the latest offerings available on the Web for replay by computers or hand-held devices like iPods.
During this past school year, students enrolled in Journalism 564, the capstone course in the school's burgeoning new visual communications major, learned pod casting in a unique classroom experiment that combined study of the new technology with a look back at South Carolina's history.
Their assignment was to produce 12 two- to five-minute mini oral history documentary pod casts (http://podcast.sc.edu/weblog/jour564/) on Cecil J. Williams, the Orangeburg native who photographed many of the key events and personalities in the civil rights movement. He later published them in a book, Freedom & Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle As Seen by a Black Photographer of the Deep South (Mercer University Press).
Kornegay learned of Williams through his sister, Lee Ann Kornegay, a filmmaker who had gotten to know the photographer from her work on a documentary she produced on Orangeburg's Briggs vs. Elliott school desegregation case.
Lee Ann Kornegay agreed to teach several classes of the course under a journalism school grant designed to encourage the exploration of new instructional techniques. And she accompanied the students and Van Kornegay on field trips to Orangeburg for interviews with the photographer and tours of key sites in the Civil Rights movement there.
She was impressed with the students' results, particularly considering that the pod casts were their first effort at shooting documentary-style video.
The educational experiment had the added advantage of familiarizing the journalism students with an aspect of the state's past that many of them were not aware of, and provided a channel for feedback.
Associate professor Ken Campbell assigned students in his Women, Minorities, and Media Class to review each of the pod casts and write a reaction to them in the comment sections. Among other things, the comments and discussion ("not something you can do watching a TV show," said Kornegay) highlighted the fact that many of the students were unaware of Orangeburg's racial strife in the 1950s and '60s.
"I think that short form of classroom discussion can be a good supplement to the instruction," said Kornegay, adding that pod casts are a more interactive form of media that can be seen or heard on the Web at any time without some of the limitations of more traditional media.
The segmented approach of the pod cast interviews with Williams don't come across as a true documentary that would be stitched together, Kornegay said. "They're 10 or 12 short takes on a civic topic and that is where pod casts work best," he said. "They're not for big long subjects, because you're on a small screen and they're more suited to that kind of format."
Kornegay sees limitless applications for creating other similar informational kinds of pod casts for students in training, like videos the class did in previous outings for users of the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center and new prisoners being processed into the S.C. Department of Corrections.
"And I can also see us moving out to broader aspects of mass media topics like Cecil Williams that have wider appeal," Kornegay said. "That's what journalists do. Keep searching for the good stories."
5/06
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Working with Cecil Williams and faculty member Van Kornegay, fourth and fifth from left, journalism students, from left, Chrissy Williams, Brooke Edgeworth, Elaina Fakas, Megan Skidmore, and Ervin Zanders visited Orangeburg to work on pod cast documentaries examining Williams' role in civil rights history.
