MJ students produce variety of projects in digital journalism course

From life after addiction to female priests, donor diversity and Toronto’s hippie college, Master’s students in Ryerson’s School of Journalism worked hard to produce a range of projects for JN 8202, Digital Journalism Studio.

The winter course, taught by Cheryl Vallender,  developed their skills as digital journalists. For the final assignment, they created websites in conjunction with their work in the Narrative Journalism course,  JN 8203.

“Students were required to produce an in-depth multimedia website and use a variety of the interactive elements to enhance their stories. Each element served to further engage the reader and encourage interaction with the story,” Vallender said.

They have been learning and working with various interactive elements, such as  timelines, mapping tools, podcasting, data journalism, infographics, interactive images, animated gifs, cinemagraphs and immersive technologies.

Karen Longwell is a student in the class who created multimedia components for her story on Roman Catholic women priests.

“On my website, I include a gallery of a woman priest mass, videos of the women speaking about the movement, a map showing the locations of women priests in Canada and a timeline showing how women were priests in the early Christian church,” she said.

Longwell said the class was a good learning experience, especially for those who don't have website development skills.

“Cheryl brought a lot of energy to the topics each week, which made it enjoyable. There are many really good digital tools out there that can enhance a website and they aren't difficult to use. Timeline and Pikto Chart were two of my favourites.”

The students used the Jarvis theme for their Wordpress websites, which allows users to continuously scroll down the page.

In total, 21 websites were produced.

Here are some screenshots of the projects: