Taking Technology out of Web Journalism Classes
A recent post by Mindy McAdams touched upon a topic I've been encountering quite a bit lately: What are the boundaries of Web journalism and technology?I've been teaching Web journalism classes at Emerson College for the last few years and each semester I run headlong into the same issue: how much technology is too much technology? When I first started at Emerson, I focused far too much on the inner-workings of HTML, Photoshop and Flash. But over the course of the last two years, I've pushed technology to the periphery and rebuilt my lessons around the essence of journalism: storytelling.
This quote from McAdams rings true to me: "I do not mind teaching students how to use software, but I think my role is really to teach them how to report and how to tell stories, how to exercise news judgment and be responsible."
She's exactly right. Journalism teachers have to teach journalism, not technology. We've lost our way a bit with Web journalism because so much of it is defined by the technology used to create the stories. Fortunately, the continued refinement of Web publishing software coupled with the maturation of the Web as a distinct medium is leading to a sea change in Web journalism education. Slowly ... very slowly ... we're refocusing our efforts on the journalism.
The students we're currently teaching aren't going to be designing sites or programming databases, so why do we teach these skills in journalism schools? What we need are Web journalists who understand the strengths and limitations of their medium. We need editors who can harness the Web's storytelling tools to deliver useful, important and entertaining information. As McAdams notes, technology is nothing more than a tool used to tell a story. And it's our job to resist the siren song of technology and instead teach these students how to tell those stories.
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