Good morning. My name is Neil Foote. I'm an old school journalist and a new-school
storyteller. I'm a principal lecturer at the Maybourne School of Journalism and
I'm the son of a fisherman. Well, I mean, he was a mechanical engineer by trade
but on the weekends he spent many a day fishing and as a kid growing up in
Brooklyn New York he loved to go deep-sea fishing and I had that
wonderful opportunity to go with him fishing all the time. He always told many
of the same stories, right? B ut never the same way every time. I decided to go a
different route storytelling and I became a journalist. Having a great
career at the Miami Herald and the Washington Post. Having a great
opportunity to cover stories like the Haitians coming to the US for the first
time and trying to get used to living in the US. Riding along with cops in the
middle of the night in Miami on drug raids. Interviewing corporate CEOs. City
Council members heping companies and individuals with their public relation
strategies. Celebrities, entrepreneurs, authors. So you can imagine the look on
my face about four years ago when the department chair turned to me in a
faculty meeting and said "Neil, we want you to create journalism 2300:
Principles of News. We have Principles of PR, we have Principles of Advertising but
we want you to create this class." Well, I was honored humbled. A little odd that my
colleagues with many many more years of teaching than I had asked me, someone
from industry, to create a class. I was anxious. I was nervous. I taught a class
of maybe, at that point, of about sixty folks. Never a lecture of 150 to
200 people. How could I engage 200 Millennials, for the most part, in this
conversation with me, right? How could I convince these students to come into an
industry that was under such disruption? How could I convince them that well, you
know, 50% of the circulation of newspapers had dropped in the last 20
years, 40% of the newsroom staff had dropped in the last ten years.
How could I convince them that journalism was the way to go? Well, I
decided to come up with the three E's: Educate,
Engage, and Entertain. The three E's. So, I got to work. Pull down syllabi from
universities around the country that were teaching similar classes, consulted
with my colleagues, lecturers, and tenure faculty on my staff to come up with the
class. First class, 150 folks in the room. There I was. What do I do? What do I do? We
dove into a discussion of current events and that became the platform by which I
started every class. Twice a week, we met. We talked about Miley Cyrus and Justin
Bieber, we talked about President Obama and Brian Williams and his credibility,
we talked about gun violence, we talked about race in America, we used those
discussions to frame this discussion of the importance of news. Oh yeah, by the
way, this class I was told. I had to convince this group of 150-200 students
every semester to major in journalism. No pressure, right? We talked about Walter
Cronkite and that's the way it was. We talked about Ted Turner and his
opportunity to transform broadcast journalism into 24/7 journalism. We
talked about Huntley and Brinkley. We talked about the role that Jon Stewart
was playing with The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert in framing and
interpreting the news. Here, I was. I had to convince these students, who got their
news and information from Twitter and Facebook, that this industry was relevant
and important. The second day of the class that week I flipped the classroom.
I flipped it. I said, "well there's no way I can stand up here for an hour and 20
minutes and get folks to listen to me," so I flipped it. We broke into small groups
and I gave them prompts. Would you run this picture of dead bodies in the front
page of the newspaper? How would you vet citizen journalism
these stories and images that are coming from people or witnessing events in our
communities and around world? At the end of those- those 15-20
minutes, I went around the classroom. There was a basically spokesperson- a
leader from each of those sections who had to report out. At first, they were
very timid, yes. Most students are at each the beginning of each semester, but by
the end of the semester I would have dissenting opinions. "Well, half of our
group believed that you should run those pictures, but the other half said no." I
said, "I got them thinking, right? I got him thinking about the importance of this
business because I was educating, them I was engaging them, and they were feeling
entertained, but getting educated at the same time." And what I learned from this
process was that; whether it was a small lecture or seminar, a practical class of
18 to 20 students, or whether it was a class of 150 to 200 students, that
educating engaging and entertaining was critical to that process. So for me, with
each venture with Chiefs classroom, this principles of lecture class kind of
became that inspiration. The kind of edge that we all kind of have as educators as
we walk into the classroom was, can we relate to our students? Can we get them
excited about what we're doing because we're so excited about it? It became that
mantra for me: educate, engage, entertain. Good luck, and I I look forward to
talking to many of you later. Thank you very much.