Mike Reilley
Journalism Professor, Creator of the Journalist’s Toolbox
Educating the next generation of journalists
Mike Reilley wrote his first line of HTML in 1995. Since then, he’s spent decades teaching digital journalism as a professor and as a newsroom trainer. Most notably, he’s the man behind the Journalist’s Toolbox, a hub of resources for reporting, editing, verifying facts, and data visualization for complex stories (currently focused on artificial intelligence with the tagline “Look at journalism’s future, not its past”).
Reilley was a reporter and copy editor at the LA Times and a founding member of ChicagoTribune.com. He is now a lead trainer in the RTDNA-Google News Initiative election fact-checking program and the ONA-Microsoft AI in Journalism training program. He’s skilled up countless reporters as a professor and lecturer at schools such as Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
Reilley’s students have presented award-winning journalism through The Red Line Project, a site focused on news and urban issues in the neighborhoods of Chicago. As the advent of artificial intelligence keeps the digital revolution rolling, Reilley continues to adapt just as he did back in the ’90s.
By Bill Meincke
I’d say the future is bright for training. Journalism has evolved a lot in the 35 years I’ve worked in it. But where will it be in the next 35?
Trainers have to bring the teaching to the newsrooms. With spiraling budgets, newsrooms can’t afford to send as many journalists to conferences for in-person training like they used to. Zoom workshops and other online training are great, but there’s nothing like in-person learning: The energy in the room, the ability to interact. I can walk around the room and see what they’re building. That’s hard to replicate on Zoom.
There wasn’t any one “a-ha!” moment about changing an approach to training. I just roll with the punches when I see what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes I’ll test out an approach in a class or with a small group of journalists before taking it to a larger conference. The pandemic did force some change by having us do more online training. But other than that, it’s been a rolling evolution of teaching approaches over the years.
The Birth of the Journalist’s Toolbox
The Journalist’s Toolbox started in 1996 with 10 resource links for a Northwestern University news-writing class. There wasn’t a canvas of how to do something like this back then, so I just built the course on the class web server. The links were to OpenSecrets.org and a database that tracked government spending and how politicians voted. I had students track their home-state senators using those tools, then write on what they learned about special-interest groups and influence.
Over the next five years, the page of links grew exponentially. When I worked at the Washington Post in 2000, I saw some reporters had found it on a live web server called GeoCities. That led me to naming it “The Journalist’s Toolbox” and turning it into a full website.
Now journalists benefit from it in many ways. The site is organized and indexed by topics of interest to journalists, including beats.
Imagine if you were a new statehouse reporter. The “state and local government” page on the Toolbox would give you a great starting point of resources. If you’re a new reporter and didn’t learn how to scrape data, there are training videos and tools on how to scrape web pages, PDFs, and social media sites. The twice-monthly newsletters keep reporters up to speed on the latest and greatest paid and low-cost tools. We have pages on mental health, digital security, and physical safety for journalists. Never covered a protest before? We have a page full of tipsheets, equipment and best practices.
The Journalist’s Toolbox has gone through five redesigns in multiple decades. But the biggest changes have been the expansion of the site as journalism has evolved. What was once an “online journalism” page is now broken into dozens of pages spread across verticals such as data journalism, social media, fact-checking, mobile journalism, productivity, etc. As new beats and issues arise, the Toolbox evolves with it.
Shaping Young Reporters
I started teaching journalism courses part-time in 1996 and eventually became a full-time lecturer. Over my career of full-time teaching, I started to attend conferences and eventually started speaking at them.
I built relationships through the Online News Association, SPJ, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Broadcast Education Association and other organizations at the national and local news levels. The SPJ partnership with the Google News Initiative training program started in 2016 and really got things rolling. I was just doing some sessions here and there, and eventually people started paying me for it because they thought I was pretty good at it.
Now I teach four different classes at UIC: Digital Journalism, Data Journalism, Advanced Data Journalism, and Multiplatform News Editing. My data journalism classes fill up the day they are offered. The students know they need it. In all the classes I teach, we cover things like writing for the web, fact-checking, analytics, data-visualization fundamentals and large elections, and we learn how to use data tools to create maps of polling locations or charts of voter turnout.
My students line up to take my classes at University of Illinois Chicago because they want to learn all the tech, the toys, bells and whistles. But what I’m really teaching them are concepts, a process of how to think through building a digital or data story; how to think critically of what they find online; how to think through a problem in storytelling and tech when there’s nobody around to help them.
I have spent a lot more time teaching students about how to use social media in my classes since 2007. I spend more time on fake news, fact-checking and all of the good and bad that comes with social media. I teach students digital self-defense if they are being attacked on social media, for instance. That wasn’t something I had to cover in my classes prior to 2009, really.
Teaching Journalists to Embrace New Tech
The biggest challenge is to get them to think visually and interactively. Not only must journalists know how to write a great story, they also must package it with visuals and interactive tools and maps to make the story more appealing to an online/mobile audience. That’s the biggest challenge.
Technologies such as Zoom have helped me train journalists all over the world in the SPJ/Google News Lab program and through my Penny Press Digital tools training.
The hesitation to get on board new tech can come from anyone learning something new, young or old. Technophobia crosses generations. Some are good with it, some not. I try to make the technology approachable in my teaching and training. I also tailor my approach. How you teach data skills or Google Earth to a business journalist is different from training a sports journalist, so you have to try different data and topics to make it accessible for them.
I see and hear resistance and grumbling from time to time from older journalists. But many are eager to learn — and they know they must learn it. Change or perish.