Ryan Sholin, Zac Echola and myself have started a new site (based on Ning) to provide help to journalists looking to improve their wired literacy.

It’s called: wiredjournalists.com.

The idea for the site grew out of the objectives post.

H.

But I know why they prefer hands-off: They do not have training rooms; they do not have a stock of laptops to provide to the participants in the workshop; the reporters and others do not have their own laptops (as incredible as that is).

Is this a case of “for want of a nail, the battle was lost”?

But then I wondered about the suitability of some of the tasks. Joining most social network sites, for example, involves sharing / posting at least some personal information on somebody else’s servers. That may be an inappropriate ask for an employer mandated training session.

I guess people could create fake identities to use during training, and then re-register with any tools or services they wanted to continue to use.

Still, it may be worth noting that, say, learning to “use” Facebook may expose learners in a way that learning to use a desktop tool (Word, Paint, etc.) does not.

I find such glaring typos ironic when you criticize others.

The key, though, is to show them how this all relates to their daily routines. Ask the reporters what time wasters, hurdles and annoyances they’ve run into and show them how these technologies can solve (or help solve) their problems.

I’m sold on Howard’s plan not because I think these technologies are necessary for the future survival of newspapers (at least not on the reporter level), but because knowing–even just a little–about various Web services and how they interact adds to a reporters vocabulary when trying to simplify a complex issue. This type of training becomes immediately useful if retained and applied.