One of the luxuries of teaching at a small private school is you can make curricular changes relatively quickly when no one is looking.
A couple of years ago we tweaked our offerings to address the shifting tide we were witnessing in the professional world. We addressed the reality that we would never be a state school and have state-of-the-art technical goopbut PLU did have a good reputation in the region for turning out hard-working journalists. Were too small to be an AEJMC-accredited school but we did respond to many suggestions from professional colleagues. We were close enough to see the convergence cloud, so we dropped the divisions between print and broadcast classes. We required more ethics credits (one can never require too many ethics classes) and developed our journalism writing class into a skills or "reporting" course. We broke out our other skills training (like photojournalism or shooting and editing video and audio) to half-semester intensive classes. This left us to develop our upper-division narrative writing sequence. We first wanted to call the two classes storytelling but our wiser, more academic leader suggested Narrative I and Narrative II. Here students work (more or less) seamlessly across platforms to write (not merely report), edit, coach, layout, shoot and edit video, capture and edit audio, work in teams and work alone all in an effort to tell good stories well. The format of the class allows for much flexibility and prepares students for more professional experiences like their required internships. One rather unique aspect of this class is we bring in local professionals to critique student work several times during the semester.
