Wiring journalism for the future

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Journalism programs of the new millennium, including the one at the University of Maryland at College Park, are increasingly incorporating the Internet in their curricula.

Melissa McGrath, a senior at UMCP, uses the Internet to do some of the initial work for her classroom assignments.

Miss McGrath, 21, conducts her primary research and identifies potential sources online before making her first phone call. In some of her classes, she is learning which Web sites are useful and credible and how reporting and writing articles is different for print versus online publications.

"I don't think the Internet replaces good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, but it has become a facet of journalism and a facet of reporting," says Miss McGrath, who is double-majoring in journalism and government and politics and has a goal of becoming a political reporter.

As such, journalism programs include Web research and writing for the Web in their teaching of journalism skills.

"A lot of courses do incorporate some elements of new media in them," says Thomas Kunkel, journalism professor and dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. "We try to introduce this to our students because this is an age of convergence."

Convergence is the bringing together of media formats to report the news, such as a daily newspaper with a Web site that publishes updates and breaking-news items before the next day's issue is delivered.

The University of Maryland's new-media courses teach students basic skills of formatting stories for the Web and uploading stories, photographs and other material onto Web sites.

The courses focus on teaching students how to report in a multimedia format. The students learn how to use different media's tools, such as tape recorders, cameras and video recorders, to gather information and how to write and report what they gather for the Web, print, audio or television.

"What we're teaching students is how to use different media and to report their stories in multiple dimensions," says Mr. Kunkel, a newspaper and magazine journalist with 25 years of experience.