Students in my Digital Journalism II (JOUR 1550) course this week chose their community journalism assignments as part of our collaboration with the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. As I shared in an earlier post, the 10 students will work as pairs this semester to produce multimedia packages profiling 2012 MANDI finalists.

We spent most of our time in class yesterday focusing on how to best conduct interviews. Most of the students don't yet have much experience in student media and only one has any in broadcast. So I did a quick Internet search for sure-fire tips on how journalists prepare for interviews and then conduct themselves while in the midst of one. These tips will help journalism students whether they are using audio recorders or depending on pen and paper only.

Sarah Stuteville offers 13 Simple Journalist Techniques for Effective Interviews. Among them, Stuteville writes, are "be a little annoying" – as in don't be afraid to revisit a question or topic that hasn't been completely answered – and "be a little sneaky," or, in other words, remember to continue taking notes even after the interview is over. In Top 10 Tips for Conducting an Exceptional Interview, Pat Flynn reminds us to remember our audience, prepare open-ended questions, strive for a high-quality production and, yes, to have fun. "If you make it seem like a task or a chore, then it will reflect in the interview – and that's not what we want," Flynn writes.

Shreyasi Majumdar provides 10 more tips in The Art of "Question": How to Conduct a Good Journalistic Interview. They range from selecting interviewees with care to setting clear rules for the interview to avoiding stupid questions. "Interviewees do not like being asked questions which insult their intelligence," Majumdar writes, adding that if you think about to ask one, "take a step back, think about the question again, rephrase if necessary, and then present it more intelligently." For broadcast interviews, Angela Grant presents six tips in Audio Interview Advice Also Useful for Video, including don't let you equipment get in the way, asking the speaker to repeat what's just been said if someone coughs or the dog barks, and don't ruin it all with uh-huhs. "Simple nods and smiles are enough to let people know you're listening," Grant writes.

If all these aren't enough, David Sparks shares 30 Tips on How to Interview Like a Journalist that he writes come from his questioning fellow journalists for their best advice. From making the interviewee comfortable, to asking to spell and pronounce their name and title, to asking about feelings, to not trying to fill the void – give the subject time to answer – there's plenty to learn and consider among these tips, whether it's for print, blog, radio, TV and films.

Finally, in 50 Common Interview Q&A, Bhuvana Sundaramoorthy begins with "tell me about yourself" and ends with "do you have any questions for me?" Clearly, this list offers typical job interview questions. But they also can be used or altered by a journalist asking about a person, institution, team, organization, community, etc. For their news service assignments, for example, my students can ask a nonprofit leader, "What motivates you to do your best on the job?" or "Why (did) you want to work for this organization?" or "What is your (organization's) greatest strength?"

Any student that makes smart use of these dozens of interview tips will almost certainly return with a nice story.

The Diederich College of Communication presented Hall of Fame broadcaster Dick Enberg as this year's Axthelm Memorial Lecture speaker last week at the Alumni Memorial Union on campus. Hundreds of people packed a ballroom to hear Enberg, a 14-time Emmy Award winner, reflect on his experiences with Al McGuire, his longtime broadcast partner and, of course, the beloved coach who led Marquette's men's basketball team to the 1977 NCAA championship. Calling his lecture "Communicating in a World of Noise," he also shared his five "points of power" for succeeding in journalism: pause, perseverance, presentation, humor and kindness.

Enberg also met with students and classes during his latest visit to Marquette – he served as its commencement speaker in 2009 – including a "news conference" after the lecture for my Digital Journalism I (JOUR 1100) class that my Diederich College colleagues James Pokrywczynski and Julie Rosene arranged. Surprising that only one of my 14 students had heard of Enberg when I first said they would use Twitter to cover his lecture. Certainly, I had heard him exclaim his signature "Oh my!" during countless significant sports events of the past generation.

This was the first live-tweeting experience for most of the students. (Of course, I shared what their predecessors had accomplished by live tweeting Marquette's presidential inauguration last fall.) We had practiced in class the week before and some had used the 2012 Grammy Awards and other recent events to try it out. In class after the lecture, they said the #muenberg live tweeting helped them, among other things, focus on their writing; extend their journalism to as far as Puerto Rico; capture moments not typically reported in news articles, and inform and engage MU alumni, students and employees unable to attend. We then discussed curating social media, employing tools and tips used by many professional news agencies and people worldwide.

Indeed, a few students from my other courses this semester (JOUR 1550 and JOUR 4953) also live-tweeted the lecture for their Storify assignments. And the word is spreading across campus. Last night, the Marquette University Student Government speakers commissioner emailed me to ask if I would assign students to live tweet Morgan Spurlock's campus visit on Thursday. The commissioner wrote that "friends studying journalism" had referred her to me. Actually, some in my JOUR 1550 class already plan to live tweet this event; they even had me change the deadline so they could. Still, I love it that students outside of Johnston Hall appreciate what's happening in my classes – and, yes, hope more of them will answer the commissioner's call.

Finally, it must be shared that #muenberg trended in Milwaukee, reaching the same success that #muprez achieved when my classes live tweeted the inauguration. Another sign of progress: Diederich College Dean Lori Bergen encouraged those tweeting to use #muenberg while welcoming them to the Axthelm lecture. With apologies to Enberg, must admit that when the dean did that, I could only say to myself, "Oh my!"

The Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service yesterday unveiled a special report focusing on eight nonprofit organizations that provide services to residents in local communities. Writing here with much pride that my Digital Journalism II students last fall created the 17 stories for the series, "How Service Agencies Work, From Inside and Out." Even more pleased that NNS Editor Sharon McGowan wishes to continue the series as she and I send those students enrolled in my latest JOUR 1550 class to profile another group of notable agencies and residents.

McGowan met with JOUR 1550 last week to help me introduce the news service and to reveal this semester's community journalism assignments; they will be from among the 15 finalists for the 2012 MANDI (Milwaukee Awards for Neighborhood Development Innovation). "Anyone of these makes a good story, I think," she told the class.

The editor and I then shared what we learned from our first experience working together. First and foremost, she said, more than a few students last semester seemed unprepared to craft and report a 400-word story. Next, too many factual errors – or, as McGowan put it, "stupid mistakes" related to names, dates, etc. "I really need much more attention to accuracy than I had from the last class," she said. "The factual errors just eat away at our (NNS) credibility. ... Here's how I want you to feel if that happens: I want you to feel sick."

We're just getting started. "Students did not go into the interview sufficiently prepared," McGowan said, noting that agency leaders shared afterward that some had not spent enough time becoming familiar with their assignments. Source information was another problem. With any story, at any level of journalism, editors will likely have questions requiring reporters to reach back to those interviewed for more answers. For the JOUR 1550 assignments, however, many students did not get any contact information for the residents they spoke with. Not even a cell phone number, which seemed to particularly perplex McGowan. "We haven't come across anyone – in any neighborhood or income level – who doesn't have a cell phone or have access to one," she said. "We have to know how to reach them."

Other concerns included knowing when to ask your editor for help and trusting when he or she says to cut bait. Case in point: one pair of students found an organization's leaders inaccessible for way too long. When McGowan proposed another group to feature, the pair dallied and ended up stressing during finals week to complete their work. (Oh yes, being published by NNS represented a significant part of each student's final grade.)

For sure, these matters left me feeling charged, indicted and convicted as an instructor. Last semester was the first time I sent students into the community for assignments. In my three prior terms, I had only had assigned them to cover events on Marquette's campus, and in most cases I attended as well, so spotting factual errors was easy and sourcing wasn't a major problem, either. Of course, community work is much more instructional, it inspires students much more to do their best work and getting published by a professional news service provides invaluable exposure. On the other hand, because neither McGowan nor I live in Wisconsin, fact-checking and sourcing is crucial.

All this to say the instructor and editor are better prepared to help JOUR 1550 and news service succeed. Most importantly, the students will begin their community work much earlier in the course. Instead of distinct multimedia packages on both a service provider and service recipient, they will produce just one package about their agency. Each package will offer multiple sources and longer text stories – 650 words long instead of 400. Also, they will submit drafts of their text stories long before the final deadline, so there's more time for editing and fact-checking.

To be very clear, JOUR 1550 produced some exceptional work last semester for the news service, which is proudly promoting it as a series on its website. (Indeed, McGowan hired two of the students – Tessa Fox and Heather Ronaldson – as interns for this term.) Every news agency spends time learning how to make its product and journalists better, and what me and McGowan learned last term will surely better prepare my students for internships and their first jobs. If nothing else, there's satisfaction in having their work viewed by more than just their instructor.

Here's what Kenya Evans, a part-time beat reporter for the news service, told the class last week after McGowan discussed how the local Fox News affiliate re-published one of her stories:  "It feels good to know the stories are getting out there and that people are reading them." Based on these tweets below, my class is ready to get started: