JPROF.com is a web site designed to help people, especially students and teachers, learn about journalism. The site has a wide variety of resources that teachers and students can us to better understand the place that journalism has in our society, the processes by which journalism operates and the skills necessary to become a journalist.

The site is meant, in part, as a supplement to the journalism textbooks authored or co-authored by James Glen Stovall. Those books include:

This site contains a great deal of information about various aspects of journalism and links to many site on the web where additional information can be obtained. But rather than just be a site with a lot of links, we want there to be good, useful material on the site itself. That's why you will find abundant exercise and handout material -- things that a teacher can use in the classroom. Students will find many extra resources and pointers to information they may need.

Beyond classroom use, the material here is restricted and may not be used withou the permission of the author. This restriction includes all artwork found on the site.

Most of the material you will find here can be duplicated for classroom use. We ask that you maintain the integrity of the material at all times and that any credit lines be left visible.

We also ask that you share your ideas with us. If you have a lesson plan, a classroom activity, a handout or something else that others could use, we hope that you will let us know. Write to Jim Stovall at jstovall@jprof.com with any ideas, material or suggestions that you have.

We plan to make JPROF.com a dynamic site, one that is added to and updated often. Much is happening in the world of journalism. It should be noted and commented upon. That's what we plan to do. We hope that you will stay with us and join in the fun.

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JPROF.com was launched on Dec. 31, 2004. The pages were built with Adobe GoLive, and the site is hosted by Omnis.com.

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Third anniversary. JPROF observes its third anniversary today. Three years ago, after a couple of months of preparation, I launched JPROF from my small study in the house we were renting from Emory and Henry College in Emory, Va. The site was a personal endeavor, designed to help me keep up with the field of journalism so that I could stay current for my students and so I would have material at hand to updatte the textbooks I had written. I had no ambitions for the site other than those. If the material that I put on JPROF could help other instructors and students of journalism, that would be great, but that was not my first priority.

That's the way it's worked out, however. JPROF ended last year with about 1,400 unique visitors a day (see below). This year the audience grew enormously, and I am not certain why. In November, JPROF averaged more than 8,000 visitors a day, and there were three days that month with the visitor count topped 10,000. That figure has dropped back for December to nearly 5,000 visitors a day. (You can check out the stats for JPROF if you are interested.) The image to the right shows the monthly totals, and you can get a larger view of it by clicking on it. JPROF comes up near the top when a Google search of "teaching journalism" is done.

I sincerely appreciate the time that people spend with JPROF, and I hope there is material here that they find interesting and useful. I also enjoy hearing from folks and certainly don't mind when people point out errors of fact or grammar.

A couple of other items of note before we close out 2007:

I am in the process of changing JPROF from an HTML tables code to a cascading style sheets (CSS) code. I am testing the frontiers of my technical knowledge by doing this, but so far, there have been been few problems. I hope this will make the site more stable, and it will load faster for users. It will also simplfy the layout somewhat. The big differents users may notice is that more pages will have search functions. I hope that helps.

The publishers of Writing for the Mass Media has asked for a seventh edition of the book, and I will be working on that full bore this spring. The sixth edition was used as a text in about 240 colleges and universities, and I am greatly humbled by that fact. Thanks to all.

By far the biggest web thing that has happened to me this year is the phenomenal growth of the Tennessee Journalist, the news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee where I teach. I got TNJN.com rolling in October 2006 with a lot of help from some very good friends. I was blessed with a set of students who quickly took ownership of the site and are making it into something to be proud of. Their hard work and enthusiasm leaves me awestruck, and there were will many good things to come of that in 2008.

With that, I'll stop and bid you my usual New Year's greeting: Party on!

(Posted Dec. 31, 2007)


Second anniversary. JPROF celebrates its second birthday today. This is one of those things that "the world will little note nor long remember" (Abraham Lincoln, a big supporter of JPROF). Still, we pause for a moment. I've had a lot of fun putting this thing together and then adding to it over the last couple of years. The best part is the many folks who have said they looked at the site and liked what they said. Some have even recommended to others, and a few cruel folks (including me)have made their students spend a few moments here. Some kind of audience for this site exists out in the world. I'm not sure who they are or why they come, but they seem to be showing up regularly and growing. The number of daily visits -- whatever that means and for whatever that's worth -- grew seven fold this year. At least, that's what my stats say:

I have other counters assigned to the site, but I'm not sure what those numbers mean either. I like these because they are the biggest ones, and they make me feel better on days when the ego is shrunk.

Besides, as Casey Stengel, the old perfersser, says, "You can look it up."

So, in addition to celebrating the New Year, take a moment to celebrate with me. 2006 was a good year in lots of ways. One of the big things for me was taking a position at the University of Tennessee where I have had the chance to get a new news web site started for the School of Journalism and Electronic Media there. The site is called the TennesseeJournalist.com (TNJN.com), and I'll be writing more about that shortly.

I'll stop now. Party on. (Posted Dec. 31, 2006)


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