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Teaching Journalismlogical knowledge, it will be importantfor students to understand the limitsof artificial intelligence technology,because those limits constrain theability to use gaming as a journalisticmedium. They ought also to grapplewith ethical questions raised by thesemantic recognition programs andrecommender systems that powerthe most advanced search enginesand e-commerce marketing softwareprograms.High-quality research will inevitablylead to new communication technologiesand techniques, which can beemployed earlier in the educationalprocess and will likely end up in thetoolbox of future journalists. If this approachto journalism education takeshold, it might also improve the medialiteracy and civic engagement of nonjournalists.And in the digital world ofour future, those who see themselvesas readers today are increasingly likelyto become publishers and editors oftheir own words tomorrow. Kim Pearson is an associate professorof English and interactive multimediaat The College of New Jersey, acontributing editor for BlogHer.org,and former contributing writer forthe Online Journalism Review. She isa senior investigator in a researchproject funded by Microsoft Corporationthat teaches advanced computerscience skills using a multidisciplinarygame-design curriculum.The Web Resides at the Hub of Learning‘For us, the Web is entirely positive: It is a journalistic tool with wondrous powers ….’By Nicholas LemannThe academic year now underwayis the first one in whichall professional students at ColumbiaUniversity’s Graduate Schoolof Journalism will have been trainedto work on the Internet. Our schoolwas relatively early toembrace the Internet andother new technologies fordelivering journalism. Weestablished a New Mediamajor back in 1994. Butwe treated the Internetas one of several forms ofjournalism in which a studentcould specialize. Thesize of the New Media major waxedand waned with the fortunes of theInternet economy. In my first year asdean, 2003-04, we had only a handfulof New Media majors.Since then a lot has changed. First,jobs that end in “.com” are waxing againand as a result so is our New Mediaconcentration. This year we have 38New Media majors, by far our largestnumber ever. Second, and more important,many of our students who majorin one of the old media are finding,when they graduate, that they spendmuch of every day working for theirnews organization’s Web site.So we have been making a lot ofcurriculum changes at the school. Weinvested in a content managementsystem—something most news organizationshave—that permits studentsIt’s amazing to us how quickly andpervasively the Web is permeating nearlyeverything we do at the school.and faculty members to post lots ofmaterial to their own class-based Websites, without needing to consult aWebmaster. All faculty who teach ourcore skills courses are required to betrained to use the content managementsystem, and many other faculty havechosen to be trained as well. Everysection of our basic reporting andwriting course now operates its ownWeb site, and every student learns towrite for the Web and also to gatherimages and sound about news storiesand post them to the Web. We havehired a small squad of Web expertswho go from class to class helping toiron out whatever problems arise inthis new regime.We have also launched this fallthree sections of a new class calledNew Media Newsroom. Here the ideais not to emulate the newlife of a newspaper reporterbut to experiment with thecapabilities of Web journalismin a way that assumesno anchoring presenceof another medium. Thestudents experiment withnew ways of delivering information,using all of theWeb’s rich capabilities for interactivity,linking, and the use of words, sound,and still and moving images. The written“news story”—an 800-or-so-wordpiece of text meant to be read frombeginning to end—is not assumed tobe necessarily the basic unit of journalisticproduction.It’s amazing to us how quickly andpervasively the Web is permeatingnearly everything we do at the school.Quite a few classes other than the onesI just mentioned (including the classI teach) operate their own Web sites.On our school’s home page, click on70 Nieman Reports / Fall 2007