Our journalism minor is three years old, although many of the courses have existed for several years. Until 2002, the journalism sequence was shared by Communications Studies and Media Studies. MS won the battle for journalism -- but lost the CS students who accounted for about half of journalism's enrollment. Still, having a journalism MINOR, instead of a track or sequence, has attracted nearly enough students to make up the difference.
The minor is simple: Intro to Media Studies, Beginning Reporting, Advanced Reporting, one 300-level journalism production course, and American Journalism Ethics.
The director of the minor has been dreaming of a course called "Online Magazine" for a long time, but so far, none of us has the skills to teach it. Our digital culture scholar taught a class called Digital Journalism (mapping and tagging, flickr, blogging and YouTube), but, recognizing that he wasn't teaching any journalism (although everyone in there had been through Advanced Reporting), he's talking about renaming it Digital Storytelling. There's a bit of a conversation in the department about making "storytelling" an emphasis over journalism, but I don't think any of the people having this conversation have ever reported a story. On the other hand, our digital cultures guy has been wonderful in getting us all to think about changes in how journalists do their jobs. How do we use new tools and formats to report what's going on?
Our department is undergoing an external review this year and we expect the shape and content of our program will change as a result. One thing we're all thinking about is how to integrate the theory and practice elements of the program. There's more theory content in the skills courses, but we want more sophisticated and informed journalism content in the theory courses.
I have more about the new audio and video offerings in the what works and what doesn't work posts.
