If you’re like me, you know more about economics now than you ever thought you’d want to know. I can describe a Credit Default Swap (CDS), a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO), a Mortgage Backed Security (MBS), mark-to-market accounting, and the LIBOR index, not to mention the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP), U3 and U6, and the difference between a liquidity problem and a solvency problem. Paul Krugman haunts my dreams.
Much of this economic knowledge has come from a burgeoning online industry in economic news. I first got hooked on NPR’s Planet Money podcast through This American Life (pay particular attention to The Giant Pool of Money), then followed the links to Calculated Risk blog and others who followed the economy. As always, the New York Times’ interactive graphics team has been working overtime (see here, here, and here, for instance). But there have been many others who’ve been doing a good job chronicling the recession. Check out the Crisis of Credit Visualized, or this layoff map from the Roanoke Times, or Scenes from the recession from the Boston Globe.
But while much of the professional media has mobilized to cover the crisis, the response by college media hasn’t been as encouraging. Despite the wealth of new media tools that could help them to find and tell innovative stories, most college media have relied on a decidedly old-fashioned approach to their story-telling.
College Media on the meltdown
Over the past week, I’ve surfed a ton of college media websites looking for innovative ways these journalists were telling the biggest story of their generation. And I’ve mostly come up empty.
Probably the best example I have seen comes from the Amherst Wire, not a traditional college media outlet by any means. They covered the economic collapse in October with Market Meltdown 101. In March, they returned with an explanation of the economic stimulus package — Economic Stimulus 101, which was tied to a FAQ about the stimulus package.
The Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill did a nice interactive graphic in October called Making Sense of the Economic Crisis, but there’s been little recent activity to update that information.
The Nevada Sagebrush has a section about cuts to the state budget which includes a timeline (using Dipity), videos, and a salary database. A group of journalism students at UN-R are also covering the budget crisis.
Beyond that, things are a little sparse. Sure, lots of words have been written about students not getting jobs, or having job offers pulled, or enrollment in graduate programs spiking as students decide to stay in school (or go back to school) instead of facing a dicey job market.
But words don’t really paint an adequate picture of economic downturns. Video and audio add to the picture (as in this InsideVandy piece), but there seem to be few attempts to really grasp the global crisis at hand, especially through data visualization.
Here are a couple of suggestions for college media to bring the topic of the economy home in ways other than the inevitable “jobs are tough to come by” story.
Many Eyes
The other day, I caught the Online News Association/Poynter Institute’s ONAvation webinar on data visualization, which showcased Many Eyes, the IBM collaborative data visualization site. It’s free for ONA members, and worth the cost for those who are not. After watching the webinar and spending a few moments with a spreadsheet, I came up with this visualization of U.S. bank failures by state.
You can embed the visualizations on any social network site or blog, and the data is viewable by others who are interested in the topic.
How can student news orgs use this tool? Is your university budget being cut? By how much? Perhaps that can be graphed over time. Perhaps you can partner with someone in the economics department to come up with some similar statistics that illustrate how the economy is impacting campus.
Questions to ask
The most frustrating thing in my tour of college websites is the “sameness” of much of the coverage of the economic situation. We get it, students are having a problem getting jobs. Really, we get it. With over 5 million people unemployed, we get it. So dig deeper. There are ways to show your fellow students how this economic downturn is affecting them in other ways than employment. Really. Think about these questions:
- How much is the TARP bailout going to cost me personally?
- How are my tax rates going to be affected by the stimulus package?
- What impact will delinquent credit card holders have on my credit card interest rates?
- How is the stimulus package going to impact my state specifically?
- What parts of the stimulus package are specifically geared toward college students?
- Why should I care about a “credit crisis?”
There are a lot of ways to present this information. My hope is that more college media outlets will explore those different ways to engage students in understanding the economic crisis.
Who do you know?
Earlier in the semester, I sent students in my multimedia journalism class out to do man-on-the-street interviews. Their assignment was to ask a simple series of question: Who do you know who has been impacted by the economic downturn? How were they impacted? How does that make you feel?
The fact is that at this point, we all know someone who’s been affected by the economy. It may not be showing up on campus so much, but it’s on the periphery. And student journalists can tap into that periphery to create compelling stories that hit home with fellow students.
I hope to explore this topic more in the coming months, and I hope student journalists will take more time to digest this important topic.
Disclaimer: I visited a lot of websites over the last week looking for innovative storytelling. Maybe I missed some. If so, please drop them in the comments. I’ll update the post as needed.
Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i2.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png)
Why do you charge college newspapers with the responsiblity of covering the economic crisis? Students don’t have 401Ks. It’s largely irrelevant.
College newspapers are getting hyper-local and that’s the only way they’ll survive the newspaper crisis. Why would they try to compete with the NYT and This American Life?
They may not have 401ks, Chris, but I would guess many college students are effected because their parents, who often pay the bills, are effected. The NYTimes had some articles on college students changing patterns in terms of their majors, increased applications to community colleges, etc. So there are some real stories from a college perspective, although I agree that Mark’s sample questions aren’t especially relevant. Not: “What impact will delinquent credit card holders have on my credit card interest rates?” But maybe, “Are you in debt to your credit card, have the interest rates gone up, and how are you going to deal with it?”
i agree w chris above. the writer is unusually knowledgeable re finances for a young college student. he is certainly more knowledgeable than many of my 40- 50 year old physician colleagues. it is unrealistic to expect college newspapers to cover finance in the depth he describes .
cant enter website too difficult so sorry for you
effect versus affect
and btw this site is impossible to participate in
why is every response rejected as a text error
I don’t think he’s putting the responsibility on college newspapers to cover the economic crisis — we’re already doing it.
the point is to take the national issue and localize is to every extreme. the economy has been buzzing in everyone’s ears all year, so it’s largely affecting graduating senior’s decisions and the job market possibilities we’re all looking into.
At my paper, we produced an entire economy issue…complete with a game slightly similar to monopoly that we called CALOPOLY.
See it here:
http://plugintodan.wordpress.com/
As a CPA who returned to school and ended up as the edidtor of my college newspaper I can assure you that most students at my college roll their eyes and walk away from this topic or any like it.
Most of them say that politics, history, and economics have no bearing on their lives. As such, they are at risk of becoming the unwitting dupes of the dominant political machine in this area.
So far, the only positive response we have had on articles concerning the economy have come from professors.
If college students are governing the circulation of the newspaper and the circulation has not been affected by not covering the economic crisis, it is clearly not of importance to college students at this time. Millennials are largely optimistic, though realists, but they are also still (for the most part) under the financial covering of parents, and money matters just go right over their heads. More short term concerns consume this generation.
Hi this is diwali..Most of them say that politics, history, and economics have no bearing on their lives