Salute to J-Prof

James Glen Stovall is a veteran of the college journalism class and the newsroom, and the author of several journalism and mass communication texts.

This past weekend, I brought home one of his books as part of my research for a revised edition of my textbook.

Before I turned the cover of Stovall's text, "Web Journalism: Practice and Promise of a New Medium," Pearson, 2004), I turned to Google to learn more about the author. (Okay, so I was procrastinating.)  I learned that, after  a quarter century as a professor of journalism at The University of Alabama, he's now a visiting prof at Emory and Henry College in Virginia.

I struck gold a few clicks later when I discovered Stovall's web site, "J-Prof, the web site for teaching journalism. 

The site is a generous repository for journalism teachers and their students. It's embedded with web links along with Stovall's own teaching and examples from contributors. 

J-Prof offers an authoritative take on media law, ethics, story examples and how-to's on do-it-yourself photogalleries, among them a slide show of his own watercolors of football players in motion), along with ways to check on the state of the news media.

Before I knew it, I'd spent nearly three hours exploring every topic on the site's left rail. If you want to learn about journalism and its current state of practice, pitfalls and power, J-Prof is one of the first sites I'd send you to.