The school itself is a campus located in the outskirts of Denmark’s second city, in a neatly laid out area of low-rise academic buildings, wide boulevards and extensive sports facilities. It is built in that bare-concrete, slightly brutalist style typical of its era, but which in this case is well enough done to look cool and well-maintained, rather than scruffy and hostile like so many less well-designed exemplars of the style.

At work in the Danish School of Media and Journalism (from website - photo: Anders Hviid)

I was in Aarhus as a “keynote speaker” for a “mini-conference”, this one on the potential for the creation of a European public sphere through the use of social media. The conference was a good and well-attended one, though large parts of it necessarily passed me by, being conducted in Danish. The discussion panel at the end, which included Danish MEP Morten Løkkegaard (he of the report on the future of media in the EU), and which was conducted for my benefit entirely in English, was rich, insightful, and, as always, left many interesting avenues of further discussion unexplored.

However, this post is not about the conference as such, but more to record some interesting discoveries (for me, anyway) about the Aarhus school, gathered in the margins of the conference.

1. Crisis, what crisis?

It is notoriously difficult for young European journalists to get jobs. Or so I thought. Each year, in WebCom, we host something like 8-10 trainees in two five-month batches. I am continually impressed by how good they are – motivated, hard working, quick to learn, rapidly operational and productive. I am often also struck by how experienced many of them are, unexpectedly so for people doing internships. The truth is, as many of them have told me, that it is becoming very hard to get jobs. We all know about the crisis in the news industry, particularly its newspaper component, with falling sales,  cutbacks, redundancies, retrenchment being the order of the day. It may be, as one US online editor told us, that the “panic is over“, but that doesn’t mean that the traditional economic model sustaining journalism is not in big trouble and that the new model has yet emerged to replace it.

On top of that, there are specific national issues. I cannot, for example recall an Italian trainee who hasn’t told me of the near impossibility of finding stable employment back home and a consequent search for options in Brussels, Paris, London or elsewhere. Nor are the Italians alone in this, far from it. Meanwhile, it’s a continuous round of short-term contracts, internships and hopeful freelancing.

In Colombia school of journalism in New York, we had heard that graduates were nonetheless still getting jobs, albeit mainly in “organizations which did not exist two years ago”. But that was Colombia, I was curious about Aarhus, a small-country European equivalent.

Anne-Marie Dohm, Dean of the Aarhus Campus (photo: Anders Hviid)

The answer was simple: yes they do. They all do. This remarkable fact, which so contrasts with the experience of all those Brussels trainees, deserves some explanation. According to what the Dean of the School, Anne-Marie Dohm, told me, the secret lies in a policy of selective entry and a close working relationship with the industry. Media organizations are on the board of the school and participate in the design of its courses. Every student does an 18-month period of internship during the course, and many end up working in the organizations they attended as trainees. So the Journalism school works hand in glove with the industry and, so far, a peculiarly Danish mix of investment, planning and paternalism seems to be doing the trick.

Incidentally, all this helps explain why we don’t seem to get many applications for traineeships from Denmark – they don’t need them…

2. Dream of newspapers, but go online

What do wannabe journalists, well, wannabe? One professor wryly remarked to me that, “you know, the newspaper dream is still alive”. He told me how most of the students still carried within them the romantic notion of the newspaper reporter as the ideal form of their trade, and how, in choosing their options they made sure they never shut down the possibility. “But we stop them aiming just for that, he said, we push them to learn all the online skills, because that’s what most of them will be doing in the future.”

I suppose it’s obvious, but the Aarhus course is now designed entirely to equip these young professionals for a professional world centred on the internet and a broad range of related skills. Which brings me to my third revelation, one close to my heart.

3. Journalism ain’t just journalism any more

Except once, I have referred to the Aarhus institution as a school of journalism. Most people there seemed to do the same. But, as the CEO of the School, Jens Otto Kjær Hansen, explained to me, the current institution, the Danish School of Media and Journalism is the result of a 2008 merger between the Danish School of Journalism and the Graphic Arts Institute of Denmark. The rationale for this merger is what fascinated me. “We aim,” I was told, “to provide all the editorial skills you need for journalism under one roof”.

Jens Otto Kjaer Hansen, CEO (photo: Anders Hviid)

The concept is that modern journalism is no longer only about research, facts, writing and the traditional skills of the old-fashioned newshound, but also about graphic design, web design, development of online features and apps, and all the rest of it. Aarhus doesn’t pretend to combine all these skills in one person, but considers them interlinked, mutually dependent and to belong in the same educational context.

This boldly and concretely acknowledges what we already know: the dividing lines between “media” skills and “journalism” skills are blurred. Journalists deliver media products, while graphic designers and web developers deliver journalism. Online news organizations, thus in reality all future news organizations, need to report the news using a rich variety of tools and formats. Good writing is vital, but it needs to live symbiotically with good infographics, good design, good video, good interactive interfaces, good technology and so on. The Aarhus people, who, as we saw, work hand-in-glove with the industry, get this and have acted accordingly.

Our day-to-day reality reflects this same trend. A few years back, our job was conceived essentially as a writing job – the preparation of articles, accompanied by a photo, for publication on the website. It was something we could do autonomously and is a (valuable) job we still do. However, the way we actually spend our time has changed. Most of the team are increasingly devoting their working hours to broader internet communication activities: managing social media platforms, preparing multimedia products, developing features for our website and various other online platforms, or devising online strategies within various communication campaigns. All this means we are working daily and intensively in teams with graphic artists, web designers, developers, and their ilk. We will only see more of this as we continue the process of renewing Parliament’s web presence.

4. Happy Danes

Happy Danes: journalism students with good employment prospects (photo: Anders Hviid)

I had a little side-project for my trip to Denmark – to try to work out what truth there is in the 2007 finding that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth. I have to confess that my method was unscientific, but I did ask quite a few people in the Aarhus school whether they felt as happy as we would believe them to be. I also naturally made my own observations, including at a professors-students football match which immediately followed the conferences, in which the conference speakers were cordially invited to play (on the side of the professors). Now, that’s a good sign –  it’s not every conference where the invitation is extended to sporting participation. Nor did the 12-1 thrashing the professors suffered at the hands of their students seem at all to dampen anyone’s spirits (Morten Løkkegaard played, by the way). My questions on happiness to staff members elicited remarkably similar responses: “yes, well, we are happy. I mean there’s not really very much to complain about in Denmark, all things considered…” However, most of them did also mention a thing called the “Jante Law” which I initially took to be a legal obligation on Danes to be happy, though subsequently discovered to be a bit more complicated than that.

Suffice to say, on the basis of my one-day research project in the Danish School of Media and Journalism on a beautiful June day, Danes do seem pretty happy. Maybe I’ll just leave it at that.

Finally, thanks to John Frølich and Lars Christensen, conference organisers, for their invitation, welcome, hospitality and easy-going friendliness. It was, well, a happy trip.

“Anthropologists have argued that, contrary to popular perception, early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by complex modern societies. For instance, one camp of! Kung Bushmen was estimated to work two-and-a-half days per week, at around 6 hours a day,” claims one of the largest online encyclopaedias.
Maybe this is the time to slow down a little bit and to start to make working meetings more efficient so we can work only 8 hours a day and dedicate our other 8 hours to active or passive rest time.

Webinars
Tired of travelling, moving and staying away from friends or family? Instead of having face to face meetings you could use modern technology to speed up your conference procedures. “Face-to-face meetings used to be the only way to get things done. Now the best way to save money, time and travel is to collaborate over the Web,” says one of the modern technology web pages. By pushing few buttons you can host or attend live meetings, demos, webinars or even give presentations, share web pages, whiteboards, voice, video – even record your events. This sounds easy and really handy, but resembles Star Trek a little bit.

Lunch time with allies
By accelerating the seminars you can have more time for our daily animalistic survival routine – food. It does not need to be seen this way if you go with your fellows. :) So how much? 30 minutes or for the lucky ones even an hour? Better than nothing. If you need to meet a VITK friend (very important to know), lunch is the time for that. 15 minutes to get there, 30 minutes to eat lovely menu for 5 Euros, 15 minutes back and your lunch-socializing or even business is easily done.

Evening food session with your Cherie organized via new technology
Now you can work hard for another four hours while checking your online social networks to see whether there is anybody organizing dinner. For those who are less lucky and cannot use anything else except the company’s webpage there is a new technology. You are not from the same city, or distance between you two is long, you are both crazily busy and finding new and different places for the two to meet may prove trying, as it would be for many in a similar situation.

There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley

But thanks to new software which provides meeting points of interest between two points, it can be easier. These two points are Points A and B. In either one, you can choose to use your current location or put the address in to your phone. After settling on the locations of both Points A and B, tapping the “places to meet” button provides a list of places to meet by category and subcategory, for which vendor ratings and reviews are provided. It also provides the distance from a vendor to both Points A and B, so you’ll know who’s really driving or walking more. And you can even meet “by coincidence” at the bus stop or other “random” places.

Sporcializing
“Join a club with people who have common interests. You don’t necessarily have to have a lot of common interests with people in order to make friends with them. In fact, some of the most rewarding friendships are between two people who don’t have much in common at all, but if you have something in common with people, it can make it a lot easier to start a conversation and plan activities together,” suggests the online encyclopaedia. But on the other hand practicing a sport together such as tennis or golf provides a very neutral and healthy environment for a little gossip as well as business conversations. Simply it is crucial to multitask. (It has been proven that man can do it as well :) )

Cheers, Ho ta la, Na zdravie
These are the magic words that make deeper talks, eventually trustworthy friendships and good business deals. To get to this stage, you just need to check your online social networks or phone book to write few messages or to make some calls. All in all it shouldn’t be more than few minutes while your are having your 5 minute break.
A very clever and funny friend of mine told me that you do not do business at work but during lunch, golf or evening drink. These five tricks can make you efficient or even successful, but at least it gives you some idea how to catch up with your friends, loved ones or partners.

Just lately, chance has dictated that I find myself moving in rapid succession from one webby/communications/social media conference to another (and another). My job is to surprise people with the fact that the European Parliament is actually rather ahead in terms of its institutional peer group in this kind of thing. It works well in the more parliamentary conferences, where a fair proportion of the gathering is often still quite wide-eyed about the possibilities offered by Facebook et al, maybe less so in the more web/communication events where half the participants start twittering the event before boarding their planes to the venue. I jest not. (At such events, every move you make is inevitably filmed and uploaded to YouTube before you’re home. Dangggg! Did I say that?)

One thing 99% of these events have in common though is the business of the powerpoint presentation.

How it's done. Would he send you his slides?

No, this is not going to be a whinge about those presentations where slides full of dense type illegibly reproduce the text read out too fast (or way too slowly) by the presenter. Nor do I intend to complain about complex tables and slightly askew pdf scans projected incomprehensibly behind the talking head responsible. (Inevitably a seated and immobile talking head in such cases.) I am not even going to moan about 200-slide shows or dodgy animations – you know the sort – featuring wandering ovals and mid 1990s text art splurging improbably onto the screen to make some not-very-interesting point surrealistically not-very-interesting.

No, I am not going to mention any of that. My gripe is a different one and concerns the moment when the conference organisers ask for an advance copy of your “slides”.

There is a variant, whereby they ask for a copy afterwards “so we can put it on the website”. This is also problematic, but at least avoids some of my deeply-felt objections to these practices, which are as follows:

First, requests to send in the slides presume the slides are ready, and, if they are not, put you under pressure to finalise your presentation early. Now that might work for some, but I suspect that that is not the way the creative process works for many people. OK, I may be finding rationalisations for my chaotic and last-minute working habits, but, hey, this is me and you asked me to do the presentation, right?

My presentation weighs in at a meaty 150 MB. So how am I supposed to send it? Chopped up into small bits? Or even in a special “lite” version? Ugh! Alas, my art…

Second, practical issue no. 1. You want my presentation. You want it by email. But because I have slaved over a magnificent graphical presentation, full of wonderful hi-res photography and maybe even some cool video footage, my presentation weighs in at a meaty 150 MB. So how am I supposed to send it? Chopped up into small bits? Or even in a special “lite” version? Ugh! Alas, my art…

Third, practical issue no. 2. Yes, the curse of the evil monopolist. People ALWAYS say: “could you send us your powerpoint?” But what if my presentation is NOT powerpoint? Now I know there’s a kind of snobbery about these insufferable Mac-using types who think that they are superior to mere mortals, but the problem is that not they, but the presentation software they use IS actually superior to yer bog-standard powerpoint show. So the moment always comes when the conference organisers need to be appraised of the fact that the file in question is a Keynote presentation designed to be shown from a Mac (which, by the way, I intend to plug into your beamer in the conference hall – no problem there, I trust?), and therefore will be of little use to them anyway. Conference organisers rarely enthuse at this news, though the presenter may secretly rejoice at the infallible excuse to hold back his creation. (“Insufferable Mac-user” is probably right, actually.) I have to mention one way out of this impasse which is truly horrific: to export the Keynote file to a Powerpoint file. This is possible, but I am convinced that Apple engineers have deviously written the code to ensure that, though the outcome is recognisable and usable, it is also truly horrible to behold, full of inferior graphics and clunky transitions. Ha! Take that.

Fourth, and here we get more philosophical, what is a presentation for? Surely it is to illustrate my talk. Hopefully it will have nice pictures, delighting the senses, stimulating associations and assisting the memory. It will pick out key words, key figures, add value, provide an extra dimension. But if it just says what I say, why did I bother turning up at all? If it is a self-standing document comprehensible in its own right, I may as well have saved the fare…

Why should I hand out the fruit of my creative juices copyright-free to any Tom, Dick or Harry? You wanna see it, you show at the conference. So there!

Fifth, …and that goes for the audience too! Somehow it doesn’t seem right. If your slideshow lives independently of your actual presentation, what is the point of anyone being there? Conference organisers have an interest in grasping this point. The point of a conference is to be there, to hear the presenter speak, to be inspired, bored, enlightened or annoyed by what is said… Do you imagine that all those starry-eyed fans who pack the Moscone Center in San Francisco to hear Steve Jobs show them a new iPod would be just as happy if he “sent over his powerpoint”? Now, boy, I ain’t no Steve Jobs, but there is a point here somewhere about, ahem, art, isn’t there? Why should I hand out the fruit of my creative juices copyright-free to any Tom, Dick or Harry? You wanna see it, you show at the conference. So there!

I can hear the mob of social webbers howling at my gate already – it’s all about sharing! How dare you withhold your presentation from us? But stop guys, we have the internet now. We can post stuff that’s suitable for sharing, stuff that is useful when viewed at home or in the office, stuff you can post to Facebook, YouTube, whatever you like. But how about we agree to protect that rare flower – the moment, just being there?

Disclaimer: if any conference organisers, those nice people who have asked me for my slides, read this, please don’t take it too hard. I know you just want the conference to go smoothly and meet the expectations of all those eager participants. I know, because yes, I’ve done it myself – asked for the slides…