A new digital book that aims to benefit anyone working in the rapidly changing fields of journalism and communications has just been released and is available as a free download.
Searchlights and Sunglasses: Field Notes from the Digital Age of Journalism, is a digital expedition through the past, present and future of news. It is both a call for change and an example of change: with one click, the HTML5 website also turns into a teaching tool – providing lesson plans and resources that educators can use in the classroom and that journalists and communicators off all kinds will find helpful on a daily basis.
According to recent statistics released by Knight Foundation, employers in a survey said only 26% of current journalism-school grads came with the necessary digital workplace skills.
Searchlights and Sunglasses includes no less than 1,000 lesson plans and resources for classroom use, developed at the University of Missouri’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.
Eric Newton
It is available for free at searchlightsandsunglasses.org and via Kindle.
The book’s author, Eric Newton, has spent his career as a top newspaper editor and then as a leading grantmaker at Knight Foundation – where he helped invest more than $300 million in the future of news.
Newton provides a unique perspective on the changes in journalism, which affect all of us working in media or trying to tell our stories. As a call for change in journalism education as well, the book will likely be a useful tool to help universities and multi-media workshop facilitators produce journalists with the skills needed to be effective storytellers in the digital age.
Feel free to share Searchlights with your networks, and follow the conversation with the hashtag #edshift.
