The Journalism and Mass Communication program at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, consistently has been witnessing increased enrollment over a number of years now. We currently have nearly 200 majors, by far the highest number of majors in the Humanities Department, and one of highest in any department. We have two majors: print and broadcast media. Broadcast media majors clearly outnumber. Ours is a small but growing department: a director, two tenure-track faculty members and a term faculty member (meaning contract is renewed yearly). More enrollment growth is definitely in our future. Our total university enrollment is about 1,700. So we have to brace for continued growth in our department. The courses I currently teach that could use more multimedia skills for the students include Online Journalism and Desktop Publishing; Advanced Reporting and Feature Writing; Copy Editing, and a couple of television production-related courses. I'm also advisor to WCSU-TV, a student club. Part of our planning for our future growth is attempting to develop a mutimeida journalism curriculum (and possibly a major). I want help guide the department in this.
Our curriculum offers a good mix of skills and conceptual courses, which I think is important. Our School of Journalism is separate from the Department of Electronic Media at MTSU, although we share a building, a dean, and some other things. That makes it challenging to "converge," but SOJ and EMC faculty have teamed up on a course that asks students to write and design a Web-based news site. Those in our media design sequence have also begun to work on multimedia teaching.
Whitworth also is a small school, though a private university in Spokane, Washington (the dry side of the state, 300 miles from Seattle). We have only three journalism faculty, all with professional print experience (though none recently enough). As a department we focus heavily on writing and ethics. Our broadcast and photography courses are taught by adjunct professionals. The student newspaper has been online for a number of years, though this year is the first in which theyve been using slideshows, audio and video. You can see some of their work at Whitworthian.com. The Whitworthian has been picked as the best newspaper in the region--from any size school--by two different journalism organizations in recent years, and was in the top three nationwide at its most recent national convention. Recent staff members have gone on to work as reporters or editors for the Sacramento Bee, the Washington Times, the Albuquerque Tribune and other newspapers.
Ban IP | Delete Post | Report Spam | Edit Post | Quote | Reply U of Mississippi I may be a bit of an oddball at our session. First, I'm odd. Second, I have have a foot in two camps. I direct student media at the U of Mississippi and that falls under the division of student affairs and I also teach in the journalism department. We have not always worked hand-in-hand. That has been a mistake for us. Like many journalism programs, we are struggling to define ourselves. We are trying to figure out what the heck to do given all the changes taking place in journalism and journalism education. Our journalism department does not teach a single online/multimedia course. On the other hand, our student media center made a decision four years ago to stop dipping our toe and instead dive in to convergence and multimedia. We have built a converged newsroom where everyone works in one room. We have tried and tried to eliminate the silos of print, broadcast, online, etc. Students still like to go off to their corners. We have tried to force the different media areas to work together and that has been a mistake. As an administrator, my biggest mistake was not developing a partnership with journalism. As a result, the faculty has not always been supportive of what we have tried to do in student media. This year we have seen some improvement. We have started a morning budget meeting where all student managers of media and their advisers get together and talk about how we can improve our efforts at not only producing better journalism for each area, but how we can find ways to work together and really start some serious efforts in producing effective multimedia packages for the Web. We are a work in progress. I wish I could count the number of times I was ready to toss in the towel and just say to heck with it. student media journalism department
__________________ Dr. Ralph Braseth Director of Student Media U of Mississippi http://www.collegemediainnovation.org
Working well at the University of Florida I'll make this brief, because I'm posting primarily to show that if you START A NEW TOPIC here in this thread, you can put your school's name in the topic title.
This will make the topic easier to read and easier to respond to. If you choose to REPLY to someone else's topic, then your school will be buried. If you reply, you should be responding only to what that topic-posting person wrote.
So if you want to talk about my school, UF, then REPLY to this.
But if you want to tell us about YOUR school, then start a NEW TOPIC right here in this thread, "What Is Working at Your School?"
Now, as for my school -- our program is big (about 3,000 students in the College of Journalism and Communications). Journalism is one department out of four (telecom, p.r. and advertising are the others).
What's working well for us is that we have offered, since 2000, four different electives focused exclusively on online journalism. There is an intro course, a multimedia course for reporters, a production course for the more design-oriented students, and a capstone that combines it all.
The drawbacks are -- these are all electives. Lots of our students never sign up for a single one of them.
__________________ Mindy McAdams University of Florida
What is Working at Lyndon State College We are a small state school in northeastern Vermont, a rural area not well covered by state media. Five days a week during the school year, our students in the Television Studies Department produce an award-winning half-hour news show called News7. (http://www.lyndonstate.edu/news7/. The show airs on the local cable channel and its coverage area spans several counties. Having spent about fiteen years producing and reporting for public radio and television in Maine and on NPR, I was hired by Lyndon State this year to help develop (among other things) a new "convergence curriculum." Because our students are already learning in a high stakes "hands-on" environment, they are eager to prepare themselves for a world in which video is only one tool in their box, and "broadcasting" may not the be only avenue for their work.
We have built a strong writing and reporting program in the first three years of the masters program at Harvard Extension. The Web has become an integral part of teach and we have state of the art distance learning capabilities. The real-tiime distance options allows us to include students from around the country who are actually in newsrooms right now. But currently, we offer just one class -- Storytelling in the Digital Age -- that includes any hands-on multimedia experience.
