COMM 209, 390: How the world is changing ... part _____+1

A story in Higher Ed Today, a newsletter I keep up with for my faculty committee work, about changes in the master's degree program in journalism at Columbia University. It says a lot about the way the industry is changing as more and more of it moves online.

Money graf:

Among other required courses, these students currently take a law course and a course combining journalism history and ethics. [Academic affairs dean Bill] Grueskin’s first initiative would shuffle these courses slightly, splitting history and ethics into separate courses and bringing a more modernized approach to the law course. As journalism has moved predominantly online, he noted, legal discussions surrounding it have shifted in a way that demands students be aware of how copyright and other laws apply in this new environment.

“These courses should be taught with a different agenda in mind,” Grueskin said of his revamped requirements. “Students will be going off, when they leave these walls, into a very different environment than the one that greeted them years ago.”

And this, which I think also applies for undergrad students in mass communications at Benedictine:

“It’s important for the school and for our students that Web training not be segregated from the core journalism curriculum,” Grueskin said. “I think it’s important for us to address digital skills training for everybody, not just those who will be new media majors. Students who are multi-talented will have the intellectual dexterity to adapt to some of the technological change that will come in the next 5 to 10 years. Still, at the core is journalism. All of the [new media] tools in the world don’t cover up bad journalism.”