The Three V’s: Curricular Semantics
The Online News Association annual conference is kicking off this weekend in Washington, D.C. and one of the pre-conference workshops was J-Lab’s J-School Entrepreneurship workshop. Listening to the presenters from other journalism schools and organizations started me thinking about our own curricular discussions at Merrill.
We have been working over the last few years to infuse multi-platform and multimedia skills throughout the curriculum and not segregate these skills/mindsets into just the “online” classes. But let’s take a step back: why do we even have “online” classes?
Historically, at least at Maryland, we’ve been divided into the traditional print, broadcast, magazine and online silos. If you examine the industry, it’s clear those divisions don’t exist anymore. The Washington Post has won an Emmy for video it has produced. NPR is experimenting with written and video content to supplement its audio coverage. More and more we’re finding our students operating in this new world. A recent graduate who is working at a local television affiliate said she is not only producing stories for broadcast, but also actively posting them and written content online.
So let’s break down those silos. “Print” is no longer just relegated to ink on paper; “broadcast” is often not seen on a mass scale. Let’s disconnect the values and skills of these curricula from the historic delivery mechanisms.
Following the “jack of all trades, master of none” philosophy (and realizing there are limited credits in accredited journalism programs) our students should have some sort of specialization.
J-schools should consider framing their curriculum now into three tracks: Verbal, Video/Audio and Visual.
Verbal respects the written word, regardless of delivery mechanism. Just because a piece is 140 words doesn’t mean it doesn’t need the same reporting rigor that a 50 inch takeout does. The principles are the same. Period.
Video is broadcast without the broad. Video content delivered online is soon going to explode. Our students should be entering the market just as comfortable behind a $80,000 Ikegami as a $250 Sony Handicam.
Visual is for those students who excel at presenting information via graphical form, and help conceptualize user interfaces for the content produced by the other two. Designers/developers have an important part of journalism too.
The time to abolish the online ghetto has come. There is no such thing as “online reporting skills;” they are reporting skills. There is no such thing as “online video;” it’s video. Our students live in a multimedia, ‘Net-centric world — it’s time our standards and philosophies infiltrated this world without the devaluing connotations we signal by equating quality only with pigment on pulp and mass market reach through boxes in our living rooms.