(written spring semester 1997)
By Eric Wiltse
University of Wyoming
INTRODUCTION
Once journalism graduates get a newspaper job, they may find themselves in communities
far removed from universities or colleges that offer continuing education courses. This is
particularly true in rural, Western states such as Wyoming and Montana. For those journalists
who want to keep up to date with changes in the field, or who wish to pursue a graduate degree,
the Internet seems to hold potential as a continuing education resource. Classes could be offered
for college credit over the Internet, or resources could be made available on-line for professional
development and training of working reporters, editors and photographers to help them stay
current with technological changes in the industry. With the explosion in "new media" (which
include multi-media and electronic publishing over the Internet), journalists may find they need to
learn new skills and techniques to survive and compete in the changing industry. Many of them
will seek distance education opportunities, and the Internet could become the main delivery
system for those courses.
This paper will examine whether continuing education and professional development
opportunities are available for journalists to learn about the "new media." The research will focus
on resources available over the World Wide Web, which has become the most popular segment of
the Internet because of its graphic and interactive capabilities. Both college-credit and non-credit
enrichment opportunities will be explored. The paper also will examine the quality of the on-line
resources and whether they are sufficient to meet the distance education needs of journalists.
REVIEW
A keyword search for "journalism education" using the
Webcrawler search engine
(http://webcrawler.com/) produced 91,008 hits, including the World Lecture Hall at
http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/.
This site mainly serves as a clearinghouse for on-line
courses in various disciplines, including journalism. According to the home page, "The World
Lecture Hall (WLH) contains links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web
to deliver class materials. For example, you will find course syllabi, assignments, lecture notes,
exams, class calendars, multimedia textbooks, etc." The home page is well organized, using a
table that lists academic areas alphabetically. Each academic area is a link to other Web sites that
specifically deal with that field. The breadth of academic areas is impressive. In the mass media
field alone, there are links to telecommunications, journalism, advertising, and communication.
Clicking on the Journalism link took me to http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/jour/
which contained links to eight journalism courses, including two classes that dealt with new media
-- Writing for the World Wide
Web and Computer-Assisted Reporting. Writing for the World
Wide Web (http://www.towson.edu/~lieb/write4web.html) is offered at Towson State University
in Maryland and can be taken for undergraduate or graduate credit. According to the home page,
the course objectives include "principles of writing and designing for publication on the Internet's
World Wide Web. Students will use computer technology to explore existing Web sites using text
and graphics browsers, create hypertext documents and create Web sites for themselves or
organizations of their choice." Other than the objectives, the page contains only a list of links to
the class meeting time and place, prerequisites, assignments, schedule of classes, required
materials, on-line readings, about the instructor, an e-mail link to the instructor, plagiarism and
cheating policy, and examples of student work.
Ironically, a class about WWW writing is not available as a distance education course over
the Web. Students must attend the class at Towson. The site seems mainly to be a repetition of
information that could be put in a course packet for students to buy at the bookstore. There are
no capabilities for students to file their work by e-mail or by using forms on the Web. However,
for journalists looking for professional development material, the link to on-line readings might
prove useful. Six articles about electronic publishing were available there, as well as links to 16
on-line magazines and newspapers. The link to examples of student work could potentially be
valuable to distance learners to see the course's theory put into practice, but there was only one
sample of a newsletter project there.
The other course, Computer-Assisted
Reporting, was offered the University of Texas at
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/j352/. Graphically, its home page was much more visually
interesting, with a picture of a computer next to the class title at the top of the page, a magnifying
glass for a navigational icon to link to a search strategy home page, and a newspaper front page
icon for a link to other journalism resources on the Web. Some text links on the page were in the
traditional blue, while others were in green, for no apparent reason. The course description did
address some possible opportunities for professional development and training, saying "This page
is primarily for UT students taking J-352 in the Spring of 1997. It includes resources for other
journalists, especially those in Texas."
For content, the home page contained a list of links, including: syllabus, class schedule and
notes, reading list, assignments, tests, students' stories, journalism resources, FOIA (Freedom of
Information Act) issues, and government databases. The reading list of journal articles could be of
some use to distance learners because it had links to 29 full-text articles. However, the other 37
articles on the list would require the learner to have access to a library housing those journals, or
to a CD-ROM database that accessed the articles. The reading list of newspaper articles, though,
contained no links to full-text articles, raising more access problems for off-site learners. The
students' stories link was impressive, providing 16 examples of projects from the 1995 and 1996
classes. A journalist visiting this Web site might find story ideas of his or her own from looking at
the student samples.
This site had more potential to be offered as a distance-education course than did the
Towson State site because it was more fully developed and offered more content, particularly in
the student stories section. However, a few course requirements might limit its potential as an
on-line offering. Students must use Eudora, FoxPro and Excel software for their assignments.
These
programs are made available to on-site students in the computer lab in which the course is held.
Off-site learners would have to purchase and then learn the programs, and have a computer
powerful enough to run them. This might make the course financially prohibitive for some.
Of the first 25 hits from the Webcrawler search, the Connected Education: Online Courses
for College Credit seemed to have potential. That home page
(http://www.cinti.com/connect-ed/welcome) said it offered "online courses for academic credit in
cooperation with major universities, plus a variety of non-credit workshops..." It included a link
to graduate courses at Polytechnic University of New York. Going to that page revealed that
PUNY was founded in 1854 and is a fully accredited university via the Middle States Association
of Colleges and Schools. Courses can also be taken on a non-credit basis. Awarding of graduate
credit assumes possession of earned bachelor's degree and completion of Polytechnic registration.
Tuition as of 1996-97 is $1845 per three graduate credit course; $925 per course non-credit. The
Connect Ed campus is accessible via Telnet from any Internet provider, including commercial
services such as Compuserve. Tuition includes all necessary connect time on Connect Ed campus;
there are no additional expenses other than those charged the student's Internet provider. PUNY
listed a course in Online Journalism, which showed up as a link. The link went to a brief,
one-paragraph course description in the Connected University
Catalog
(http://www.cinti.com/connect-ed/CATALOG.HTM#journalism). The course description, in turn,
was linked to a one-paragraph biography of the instructor. There were no links to a syllabus,
requirements, class schedule or reading list. No information was available about how Telnet is
used to present the class via distance. Given the extremely limited information, it would be
difficult for a distance learner to decide whether to take this course. An e-mail address for the
instructor to obtain more information would be helpful. Experienced Internet users might also be
skeptical about the course because it is offered via Telnet, a primarily text-based system that has
largely been replaced by the WWW with its multi-media capabilities.
The University of Missouri-Columbia is
generally considered to be among the best
professional-oriented journalism schools in the country. Its home page
(http://www.missouri.edu/~jschool/) contained links to a page listing courses. The page claimed
that it was a list of "Courses Taught by Broadcast News Faculty via the World Wide Web."
Among those courses was Introduction to
New Media (http://www.missouri.edu/~jourmlm/301/).
This was misleading, though, because the New Media class was not taught on-line as a distance
education class. It merely used the WWW as part of the instructional process. The site also had
potential to be offered on-line. Exercises were set up on the page for students to learn various
aspects of the Internet, such as using search engines. If an off-site learner could file those
exercises and other assignments by e-mail and receive feedback from the instructor by e-mail, the
class could be offered by distance. The site also included a glossary of terms that will be used in
the course, which would be convenient for an off-site student.
Professional organizations also offer information on-line that could be considered as
resources for journalists to use for professional development and training. The Poynter Institute
for Media Studies' Visual Journalism home page
(http://www.nando.net/poynter/vj/visual.html)
contained a link to a Writing/Editing/Design for Interactive Media Virtual Seminar. Again, the
name "virtual seminar" was misleading. There was a summary of comments from participants in
the seminar, which was held at the Institute's Florida headquarters, biographies of faculty, and
information on how to register for the 1997 seminar.
The Poynter site was highly visual, with creative graphics, and was easy to navigate. But it
was largely an instance of style over substance. Its content seemed largely aimed at promoting its
seminars and workshops. A link to an Online Design seminar, for instance, revealed nothing more
than information on how to register for the event. There were links to other sites, including one to
Drew DeVigal's Online Designs. However, clicking on that link revealed the DeVigal site had
been moved to another location. Trying to access the new URL caused Netscape to crash twice.
Another link that promised "tons of student work" turned up empty. The URL could not be
located, indicating the coding was either incorrect or the page no longer existed. For a journalist
considering attending a Poynter Institute workshop in new media, these problems with links might
cause him or her to reconsider the quality of instruction.
Poynter did have some useful home pages, but it took an indirect route to find them. A
keyword search for "information graphics" using the AltaVista search engine led to The Real
Visual World (http://www.nando.net/prof/poynter/grads96/real.htm), which contained 12
outstanding examples of online feature writing from a 1996 Poynter Summer Fellowship Program.
The samples could be valuable to journalists considering applying for the fellowships because they
demonstrate the possible outcomes from attending the program. There was no link to this page
from the other two Poynter pages that were examined.
The Society of Newspaper Design home page
(http://www.snd.org) offered one-day
workshops in new media for $50.00 students, $75.00 members and $100.00 non-members. The
home page included e-mail addresses to get more information about the workshops, but did not
make the addresses links that allow the viewer to open a self-addressed blank e-mail document.
This feature of WWW page design would be convenient for the viewer to quickly contact the
society to find out more about the workshops. This, too, was a very well designed home page, as
one might expect from a society devoted to newspaper design. But, again, it emphasized form
over content. There was no information about the workshop content, instructor(s), instructional
objectives or prerequisite knowledge. Most information concerned the dates, places and costs of
workshops, as well as how to register. At least there were forms on the pages that could be
printed out and mailed in to register. However, an online form that could be e-mailed to the
society would be more convenient and take advantage of the Web's capabilities.
The Society of Professional Journalists home page
(http://spj.org/) looked suspiciously
like the pages of the other two professional organizations in its layout and graphics. It differed in
one significant way, though, by offering a comprehensive index that listed all the pages in its web
in hierarchical order. The society's main home page also contained a link entitled Professional
Development, which led to a list of its conferences, conventions, workshops and seminars. Some
of those were linked to pages containing more information. The link to the National Computer
Assisted Reporting Conference (http://www.nicar.org/nashcar/) offered a list of objectives,
followed by registration information, but no online instructional or training material.
The Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication's site
(http://www.aejmc.sc.edu/online/home.html) seemed primarily an academic site promoting its
conferences and calls for papers. Other than the AEJMC logo, the page was graphically dull, with
a standard gray background, heavy with text, and few links to other sites. But that link led to the
ERIC Clearing House for Reading, English and
Communication
(http://www.indiana.edu/~eric_rec/), which in turn linked to the Indiana University's Distance
Education site (http://www.indiana.edu/~eric_rec/disted/menu.html). From there, a series of
pages led from Correspondence Courses in Subjects Other than Education, to Distance Learning
Courses, to Internet-based Courses, to Previously Offered Internet-based Courses to be Offered
Again in the Future. Listed there were listed two courses from Indiana University's School of
Journalism that were offered online: Cruising the Internet for Writing Ideas and Write, Edit and
Design World Wide Web. Each class listing included an e-mail link to the instructor, their phone
numbers, and the last semester the class was offered. Despite the small amount of information
available about the classes, it was encouraging to find a university actually offering two new
media courses over the Internet.
CONCLUSION
This brief review found, somewhat surprisingly, that there are few new media courses
available over the Web. A few courses seemed as though they could be transformed into distance
courses over the Web with a few technological modifications, such as adding forms and
interactivity. It would be revealing to follow up on this initial review by surveying new media
instructors about why their courses aren't on-line, whether they plan to offer them as distance
courses, and what obstacles they may be encountering to putting the classes on-line. Do they have
support staff to help put courses on-line or are they waiting for software that will make it easy to
go on-line with classes? Are they getting pressure or encouragement from administration to put
classes on-line? Is there any incentive -- courseload reduction, tenure and promotion, etc. -- for
them to go on-line? Do they think there is an audience of learners who would like to take the
classes on-line? If so, who are those people, what are the demographics?
Almost as surprising was how little professional development and training material was
offered on-line by journalism organizations. Many of the workshops and seminars offered on-site
by the groups might be transformed into on-line sessions using RealAudio, for example, for
one-way audio transmission. Papers and projects could be made available on-line. The
organizations
could control access to the material and still charge a fee. They could increase revenue by making
money from journalists who might not attend the workshops anyway, but would pay to get the
information on-line. On the other hand, journalists who couldn't attend the seminars could benefit
from getting the information, but saving travel, food and housing costs, and not having to take
time off from work. Journalists could read the papers, look at the projects and listen to the
RealAudio recordings of workshops, panel discussions, etc., when they had time.