On Saturday, Oct. 15, NPPA/NPPF teams us with Poynter NewsU for our third all-day video workshop, Video Storytelling with the Pros. It’s a Webinar. It’s a Webinar with a studio audience. It’s great teaching from four great teachers:

• Secrets to Natural Sound Stories, with Darren Durlach. The tricks to letting people tell their own stories without narration.
• To Light or Not to Light, with Adam Vance.

We have lined up our partners – Missouri State University, Florida Atlantic University and, the latest, California State University, Fullerton. We announced Cal State this week.

We have lined our courses – 16 weeks of readings, assignments and discussions based on more than two dozen self-directed modules.

We have lined up our faculty – 15 Poynter faculty and associates who will lead a live, interactive session weekly.

We have had such fun with our first Webinar series the Poynter Writing Webinars that we thought about doing more topics. To figure out things, we are conducting another survey to help us get a sense of which topics matter to you and what Webinars we could do within these potential series.

Whether Wednesday's Webinar was your first or your 100th, thanks again for signing up for 100 Ideas to Make Your Journalism Better. The replay, with all the audio and video, is now available. You can watch as many times as you want to catch all the great ideas to make your journalism better.

Not only do we love training, we love sharing our training with others. Here's where you can help.

We've talked about this for a while. We picked our new server technology because it could do this. Finally, we have gone public with the first of our Poynter News University International efforts.

NewsU International is a partnership between The Poynter Institute and the International Center for Journalists. Together we'll customize NewsU's interactive, self-directed modules so that they are culturally and professionally relevant for international users.

With the holiday season upon us, Poynter’s News University introduces Training Tuesday, a new "shopping" tradition that follows in the footsteps of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Training Tuesday, which starts Nov. 30, kicks off that period when work slows and, we hope, there might be a little more time for self-directed training. And self-directed e-learning is what we do best.

In celebration, Poynter's NewsU is giving you 30 percent discounts on NewsU’s Webinar replays, training packages, NewsU Tech courses and seminar snapshots.

Poynter's News University, prepping for its annual trek to the AEJMC convention high in the mountains of Colorado [Denver] just released the results of a new study about integrating e-learning into the classroom. We asked educators about their use of e-learning [any kind of online training]. We were surprised [shocked?] at how high the usage was. If anyone thinks e-learning is the future, they are out of date. E-learning is the present.

We have launched. The New NewsU is live [as you probably already know thanks to our e-mail blast.]

We have officially thrown the switch for our new site. And nothing blew up.

That's what makes everyone happy, which we are. And we're pretty tired, too. We've all been hard at this for the last several months and during the last several weeks it has been very intense. OK, I've been very tense.

We aren't done yet. NewsU has great users and they are giving us great ideas about how to make the site even better. We came across one idea today: A screencast on how to send a "course report." This was put together by Barbara Nixon who teaches at both Georgia Southern University (online) and Southeastern University (face-to-face).

If you want to learn more about some of our new ideas and features on the site, come to our FREE Webinar on

We made a big step yesterday. At 5:30 p.m., Eastern Time, we made the first of two technology changes to the new site and technology platform for Poynter's News University project: We turned off the registration system on the old site and are now signing up folks only on the new platform.

After 133,804 users, our final sign-up on the platform was a student from the journalism school at the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers.

We think our new registration is easier. There is one big change, however.