Sunday, October 21, 2007

New Media Meets Campus Media

I was searching through the Internet for some new blog topics and I came across an article about the new types of media on college campuses. The article talked about how college journalism classes are lagging behind on the industry in embracing new types of media. Ten years ago students may not have needed to know about multimedia approaches to journalism, but today the world wide web and online newspapers are becoming more and more prominent. Therefore, students are needing to know more and be equipped with knowledge of different typed of medias to enter a competitive workplace.
In the article there was a survey done by....surprise surprise....David Wendelken and Toni B. Mehling, of James Madison University. According to the survey even the smallest commercial newspapers, with 10,000 readers or fewer, are looking for reporting candidates with experience writing for the Web and uploading stories to the Internet. Of nine respondents in the "large daily newspaper" category (those with a circulation of 44,000 and above), eight required reporters to have skills in capturing audio while four required audio editing skills. Five required reporters to have skills in capturing video, while one required video editing expertise. According to Wendelken, many newspapers are are looking at reporters to do these things from the start.
So it's no surprise that this semester our newspaper production class has moved towards a multimedia approach. I personally believe that all SMAD classes should be begin to include multimedia elements in order to better prepare students for the competitive workplace. As a print journalist student I still want to learn about audio and video editing works and how I'm going to put my work onto the Internet. Some students may cringe and complain about the work load...or say that including a lot more multimedia elements is not what a newspaper production class is about...but personally I think we'll all be thanking our teachers who are pushing us to have these skills when it comes time to apply for jobs. It's the students who have the extra knowledge that will have that competitive edge that so many print journalism students lack.

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