New media meets campus media

There's an interesting article out this week in Inside Higher Ed about college journalism programs and their slowness in adapting to the new digital age of news delivery. If you follow the link, check out the comments others have added below the article. Several are from students who make it clear we need to be doing much more to prepare future journalists than we're doing.

In 1995, an article in Quill, a publication of the Society of Professional Journalists, deemed the ability to "deal with new media such as electronic newspapers or World Wide Web pages" as "nice, but not necessary." So David Wendelken, an associate professor of journalism at James Madison University, told a chuckling crowd August 10 during the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. Suffice it to say, precious few journalism educators would agree with that assessment today. And yet journalism education is lagging behind industry in embracing the new media technologies that students will need to be competitive in the work place, according to Wendelken's research.