In this post a few days back I wrote about how online journalism is taught in universities and, more specifically, how it’s taught at the University of Lincoln.
Today was my first session of the semester. Our assignment is to produce a ‘news-based’ website by the end of term – which is about ten weeks. We will be using Dreamweaver 4 and Photoshop to design and code it, with maybe a little hand-coding too if we’re gonna try and be bit flash.
Refreshing that it’s ‘news-based’, I suppose, but judging my some of the suggestions and examples given it seems like that could be a fairly loose requirement.
I know my tutor may be reading this – he asked students to email him with their blogs – so I’m guessing this is a good time to air my concerns.
My main criticism still remains: I don’t think these are skills we really need. Of course, knowing HTML is useful, absolutely, but what’s really important is the skill of news gathering for an online audience.
We will be doing some of this once our sites are up and running, but it seems the emphasis is on the technology rather than the journalism. Which is all well and good, but I know that if I were to go and write for Comment is Free, or the BBC, or any online news source I’d not be coding the pages. Those websites would hire me on the basis of my news writing skills.
It seems at the moment we’re learning old skills on old software. I’m going to leave university and have to learn it all over again. Except this time it won’t cost me £600 a term.
Internet journalism is blogs, Web 2.0, citizen journalism. It’s exciting. Botching together a page in Dreamweaver is old fashioned, and just doesn’t make sense.
Like I’ve mentioned in my post, my tutor may be reading. So I’ll add that this isn’t a lazy student rant. I want to be an online journalist. The way I see it, I don’t have much choice. When was the last time you read a newspaper front page to get up to date? Hardly ever – simply because you probably know already.
I’ve linked to this blog post before, but it’s even more relevant now. The author opens with this:
How many j-schools are permitting students to graduate with a journalism degree and inadequate skills to pursue a career in journalism?
Lincoln? I may be being a little harsh, but take a look at our unit handbook (Word, 60KB). You can read a break down of the weekly sessions there.
The reading list says a great deal:
Html 4.0 Sourcebook, Ian S. Graham
Html 4 Bible, Bryan Pfaffenberger, Alexis D. Gutzman
Creating Killer Web Sites, David Siegel
Building Better Web Pages, Rebecca Frances Rohan
Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen
A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, John Naughton
Weaving the Web: origins and future of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee
Spinning the semantic web: bringing the World Wide Web to its full potential, Tim Berners-Lee
Where are the journalism books? We’re not here to become web designers.
We’re journalists. Well, we want to be. Units like this do little to help us with that cause.
Dreamweaver 4??? Doesn’t your school know that the current version is Dreamweaver 8? That’s sad!
I do agree with you, though, that j-schools should not be teaching software. Where you and I might disagree is here: I think j-schools should require students to USE software, and to use it correctly.
So, if you’re writing a blog for your journalism course, I would deduct points if your photo file size were atrociously large — just as I would dock you if you used a copyrighted photo without permission!
I think proper use of current tools is important. And Dreamweaver 4 doesn’t handle CSS, so you’re not even learning the proper use of a Web-authoring tool!
i’m currently standing on the other side of the fence to this. i wish my school taught us how to use basic programs in order to pursue different types of journalism. one module, journalism studies, is compulsary through every year and is the most boring and badly organised i could ever imagine. in two years of studying it i have learnt how to write a news feature, and the exams are pretty much stolen from old nctj papers. we learn nothing about any type of journalism but newspapers and i’m so so bored at the moment. (i don’t know if i went off topic there)
On the journalism course at the University of Cental Lancashire (UCLan)we used Dreamweaver in the second year. Most people hated it and the websites produced were shambolic! Now we’re using blogs and it’s much better.