And increasingly, reporters and editors with backgrounds in traditional mediums are gravitating into Web jobs. There's no cookie-cutter response at the nation's journalism and communications schools. But all the corporate deal-making has forced academics to reevaluate not only the way they teach Internet journalism, but also how they teach basic reporting and editing. This is not the engineering school or the computer science school. I'm teaching them to be versatile in a rapidly changing environment.
Students rotate during the semester between jobs as content producers and news editors.
When they're functioning as news editor, they help a graduate teaching assistant who's serving as managing editor to decide which of the week's top stories moving on the wires will get most of their attention. What we try to do is a big takeout on whatever the news of the week is. Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, joined McAdams this summer in surveying online news professionals. Online managers overwhelmingly reported that they want recruits who can edit, rewrite and copyedit text and update time-sensitive material. Editors want their staffers to be able to distinguish between a personal homepage and one produced by a more reputable source.