University journalism programs are stepping up to meet newsroom demands for students with online skills.
Schools are adding programs to teach print students to use words, audio, video and other tools needed for the quickly evolving world of online news.
“The more they know, the more marketable they’re going to be,” said Wayne Wanta, president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Journalism educators said editors are looking for graduates who are learning more compelling ways to tell a story and to expand a news organization’s audience.
At Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, editors and recruiters have been calling the career services office to seek out students who have that mindset.
“Editors want to see new ways of thinking,” said Sree Sreenivasan, dean of students at the school.
“The audience is changing, and they want news when they want it, and you have to provide it for them,” said Sreenivasan, who is also a new-media professor and a technology reporter at WNBC in New York City.
Columbia is incorporating new media into its more traditional classes and included a new-media program in its Masters in Science in Journalism program.
The university also offers a New Media Workshop, in which students learn how to use text, photography, audio and video together to create stories. They are trained to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver, software that aids in the editing of photos and the creation of Web sites, before launching an online media project.
At Forbes.com, which recruits from Columbia, there is some leniency toward students who aren’t trained in online media, said human resources director Sharon Jautz, but students have to be “smart” so they can learn the trade quickly, she said.
“Embrace technology,” she said. “That’s where it’s all heading.”
The University of Missouri-Columbia offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism that focus on convergence. The graduate program offers six two-year graduate programs for students interested in learning how to combine mediums. It offers four five-year combined bachelors’ degree/master’s degree programs.
Misty Anderson, an undergraduate student at the university, was originally a broadcast student but changed her sequence to convergence after seeing how much the journalism industry is changing.
Convergence “requires you to go the extra step or extra mile to get that story,” she said.
The journalism graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley partnered with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California to create the Knight New Media Center with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The center launched in April 2006, offering fellowships to working professionals who need skills in new media.
Lanita Pace-Hinton, director of multimedia training for the center, said she’s seen high demand for its programs. One of its six-day seminars offers instruction in producing video, audio, photo slide shows and Web sites.
The program will have to change within a decade because more journalists are being trained out of college in those areas, she said.
Wanta compared the latest change to the conversion from typewriters to computers and software for pagination.
“This is just another evolution of computers in the newsroom,” Wanta said.
