"Columbia presumably understands that this is its job when it comes to teaching traditional newspaper and broadcast reporting. But suddenly, when the skills involved are newfangled Webby things, that job becomes discounted, something anybody can learn from any old extension school, or any faculty member can pick up by cramming."
I disagree with this a bit. I think j-schools should provide students with access to the software/computers needed to do the sorts of multimedia stuff they need t learn and they should have people on staff who are darn good at it, but there shouldn't necessarily be classes devoted to it by name....because you have to teach yourself this stuff on your own.
If I was going to teach a multimedia class, the assignment for week one would be to learn HTML before next week's class. Instead, we spent 10 weeks learning it in piecemeal fashion via Dreamweaver, a g-d-awful program that's best use is for writing stories, not building web sites.
Also, while it's important for folks to understand how their Word document gets turned into a published story on the web, if someone's going to be a reporter, they would be best served by getting really, really good at that. There's always going to be someone with more technical skills. Being a jack-of-all-trades helps no one.
"Columbia presumably understands that this is its job when it comes to teaching traditional newspaper and broadcast reporting. But suddenly, when the skills involved are newfangled Webby things, that job becomes discounted, something anybody can learn from any old extension school, or any faculty member can pick up by cramming."
I disagree with this a bit. I think j-schools should provide students with access to the software/computers needed to do the sorts of multimedia stuff they need t learn and they should have people on staff who are darn good at it, but there shouldn't necessarily be classes devoted to it by name....because you have to teach yourself this stuff on your own.
If I was going to teach a multimedia class, the assignment for week one would be to learn HTML before next week's class. Instead, we spent 10 weeks learning it in piecemeal fashion via Dreamweaver, a g-d-awful program that's best use is for writing stories, not building web sites.
Also, while it's important for folks to understand how their Word document gets turned into a published story on the web, if someone's going to be a reporter, they would be best served by getting really, really good at that. There's always going to be someone with more technical skills. Being a jack-of-all-trades helps no one.