The University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication will use a $75,000 grant from the James M. Cox Foundation to launch a three-year, traveling program designed to empower journalists and other citizens in communities throughout Colorado with professional newsgathering techniques and hard-nosed tips for negotiating the "invisible Web."
Foundation trustees approved the grant in late April for a program named in honor of George Orbanek, a CU-Boulder alumnus and longtime publisher of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, a Cox Newspapers Inc. publication.
The George Orbanek Journalism Workshop: An Outreach Program for Negotiating the Invisible Web and Interactively Engaging Residents of Colorado Communities will take place five times annually in towns and cities in every corner of the state and across the Denver metropolitan area. The first workshop will take place in late July in Grand Junction.
CU-Boulder journalism and mass communication professors, staff and graduate students will lead on- and off-site, interactive workshops, said Program Coordinator Alan Kirkpatrick.
"News is more than quotes, sound bites and photo ops," Kirkpatrick said. "This program will help local journalists hone their professional skills and expose citizen journalists, bloggers, community activists and others to time-honored journalistic techniques - the kinds of hands-on newsgathering and fact-checking needed to produce reliable, objective information for print, broadcast or the Web."
Each year, the traveling series of workshops will begin in Grand Junction, focusing on information relevant to the seven counties served by the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel and covering a large swath of the Western Slope.
Major components of the interactive program will include teaching participants how to access information on the "invisible Web," or the estimated 95 percent of Web information that general search engines cannot locate, and how to implement effective strategies for engaging citizens through blogs, podcasts and other new-media applications.
According to Kirkpatrick, workshop participants also will learn how to access Web-based, journalism-related resources and how to make a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request. In addition, they will be able to access online or CD tutorials from classrooms, newsrooms and other work areas.
"Over the last decade the Information Age has morphed into the Internet Age," he said. "Never before has so much good information been so directly available to so many people in smaller communities, but much of that information is coated in spin, opinion and dubious authenticity."
For more information on how to participate in the workshops, contact Alan Kirkpatrick at (303) 492-5480 or kirkpata@buffmail.colorado.edu.
To learn more about the CU-Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication visit . For more information about the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel visit .