I’m excited to be speaking tomorrow with the young journalists at the National High School Journalism Convention. A few months ago, Creative Commons had a table at a similar convention in San Francisco. When we saw the enthusiasm that the students there had about open licensing, we decided to start planning a session about Creative Commons for young journalists.

Whenever I’m talking with high schoolers about Creative Commons, one thing always strikes me. They get it. Today’s young content creators don’t dream of spending 40 years working for a single publisher or media company. They’re preparing to piece careers together working on projects for lots of clients with lots of different business models; therefore, they intuitively know the value of using open licensing to get their work out to as wide an audience as possible. Or as Cathy put it, “The creators who are thriving today are the ones who use internet distribution most innovatively; in fact, the ones who are most generous with their work often reap the most reward.”

I’m hoping to use this session to meet some people at school journalism programs who’d like to experiment with ramping up their sharing. What if your school newspaper went 100% CC for a year? Where would the content get republished? How would it impact your staff’s résumés? Interested? Let’s talk.

Here are my slides for the session (see the speaker notes for more information and links):

Download as PDF (2.6 MB)

And some links for more information:

• Six licenses for sharing your work (45 KB PDF): Nice, simple introduction to Creative Commons.
• ProPublica: Investigative journalism organization that licenses all of its content under CC.
• Jonathan Worth’s connected classroom: Jonathan is a well-known British portrait photographer who’s been licensing his photos under CC for years.
• Creative Commons in journalism