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Digital Demandsamounts of their time finding and sharinginformation online.Fortunately, some academic leadersare undertaking new initiatives, such asthe new Graduate School JournalismScholarship for students with undergraduatecomputer science degrees.However, we must do more to preventa widening gap between academicpreparation and the technologicaland economic forces of the digitalage into which students will emerge.And the consequence could be thatthe valued place journalists have longheld in our democratic process couldbe endangered.Seeking a New ApproachThere are ways to act on critical aspectsof these problems. For example, whileit’s not unusual for middle andhigh school English teachers tohave students create print andonline newspapers and magazinesas a way to teach writing andinformation gathering, journalismeducation—including medialiteracy—needs to be more directlyinfused into the curricula.Multimedia research and communicationsskills are essential forstudents as they become criticalconsumers and producers of informationand news; but they must also taketo heart the rights and responsibilitiesthat accompany this privilege.To do this requires the developmentof a degree track for teacherswith certifications in language arts,art education, and computer science.Therefore, undergraduate journalismeducation should offer a liberal artstrack and an education track, just ashappens often with other liberal artsdisciplines.Concern is now being expressedabout the future of investigative reportingas newsroom staffs and reportingresources are cut. So I offer someexamples of how such an approachmight help in this regard:1. If middle and high school studentspracticed the skills of online journalismin the course of their studies—researchingpublic records,assembling databases from informationthey gathered, doing podcastsof interviews and their own production—thentheir lifelong connectionto news and to the importance of itsreliability could be strengthened.2. Young people taught in this waymight be more likely to enter thenewsgathering field, either as journalistsor as publishing entrepreneurs.3. Even the majority of students whodon’t become newsgatherers mightbecome more civically engaged,perhaps using online sites such asYouTube as places to practice theirown local watchdog reporting.The challenge for journalists—andjournalism educators—is to thinkabout ways to create dynamiccurricula to enhance the practice ofjournalism.The challenge for journalists—andjournalism educators—is to thinkabout ways to create dynamic curriculato enhance the practice of journalism.Such a challenge lends itself tothe development of new and closerpartnerships among journalists, technologyspecialists involved with communicationstools, economists lookingat new business models, and educatorsworking with the next generation ofpotential journalists.Adrian Holovaty, a programmerinvolved with journalism Web sites,eloquently argues that journalists needto move beyond the linear narrativeand think of stories as chunks of datato be segmented and cross-referencedso readers can easily find what intereststhem. 3 His new direction relieson the database capabilities of contentmanagement systems. But Holovaty’sexperience working in newsrooms hasshown him that for this to happen,those who manage newsrooms need tolearn to treat their technology peopleas partners, not as mere support staff. 4In the future, especially if studentsemerge from school with greater adeptnesswith technology, this divide mightbe lessened.But Holovaty goes further in proposingthat journalists abandon hard newsstorytelling in favor of database-drivenpresentations. This question is oneI’ve been researching with a computerscientist. Her background is in computationallinguistics and gaming; mineis in literary journalism and narrativetheory. Together we are trying tocreate a prototype storytellingengine that delivers chunks ofstory content from a database thatis programmed to allow the enduserflexibility and control whileensuring that related chunks ofmaterial—which might be text,image, audio or video—are presentedin a sequence that preservescontext and coherence. Weare well on our way to designingthe information architecture for theprototype. We presented our researchat the 2007 summer conference of theNew Media Consortium. Notes on theproject, including links to the slidesfrom the presentation, are available atthe blog, The Nancybelle Project. 5It’s impossible to know how wellsuch content management systems willfunction as future tools of journalistsin terms of their power, flexibility andesthetics. What we do know is that undergraduateand graduate journalismcurricula need to provide opportunitiesfor students to participate in andreflect on the intersection of storytellingand technology. Exposure to linearand nonlinear storytelling shouldalready be happening. As for techno-3www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/03074www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/10/02/23005www.kimpearson.net/labels/presentations.html/Nieman Reports / Fall 2007 69