Incorporating Online Publishing into the Curriculum.

The rapid growth of multimedia electronic publishing poses a challenge to the traditional journalism curriculum. Electronic publishing is transforming the practice of journalism in the traditional divisions of newspaper and broadcast at a quickening pace. First, new techniques within each field are emerging at a speed that makes them difficult to assimilate for major news organizations, much less for schools of journalism and mass communication. The rapid pace of acceptance of new technologies means the vision of the "multimedia journalist" carrying a tape recorder, small format video camera, and notebook becomes less futuristic every day. In fact, such a vision has achieved reality as one can see the application of such new journalistic practice daily on the World Wide Web. Thus, due to this rapid acceptance of new technologies, we can now define multimedia journalism as the combined application of hypertext, graphics, audio, and video in a single journalistic publication on the Internet. Second, electronic publishing is beginning to challenge traditional divisions within the news industries. The once secure boundaries between newspaper and magazine, print and broadcast, television and radio, information as news and information as data--to mention only the major fault lines--are eroding in an emerging practice of a multimedia journalism that no longer respects such divisions. CNN on the World Wide Web may emphasize text and video, NPR audio, and the Raleigh News and Observer print and graphics, but increasingly these are differences based in custom rather than necessity. The division of the traditional journalism curriculum--news editorial, broadcast, advertising, public relations, and mass communication--is based on this same media structure, one that is in flux. Therefore experiments in teaching multimedia curricula have ramifications beyond the need to keep up with new techniques. They allow us to explore changes in news that have profound implications for both the teaching of journalism practice and teaching about mass communication per se. This article addresses both sets of changes in three ways. First, we briefly describe the current transformation of the news industries to offer a vision of the changed structure that shapes both practice and theory. Second, we describe a three-year experiment in the development of a multimedia curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, centered around the creation and development of ONline Wisconsin, one of the first multimedia news journals on the World Wide Web. Finally, we discuss the practical problems of teaching that we have encountered in the course of conducting this curricular experiment. Our goal in this brief article is to relate these three elements to each other and to demonstrate how changes in industry affect both curriculum and instruction. We do not intend to offer either a full description of changes in the field or an overview of other college programs. Rather, we want to show how rapid change in the field has been addressed at the University of Wisconsin in the belief that a demonstration of how one school has addressed the challenge of industry convergence may be useful to other programs considering implementing multimedia curricula. Multimedia and news Traditional journalism organizations--newspapers, television, and radio organizations--are moving rapidly to establish a presence on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, the interconnection of graphically driven, hypertext-linked "pages" that support multimedia. These changes are leading to a rapid recomposition of traditional news industries that can be summarized as: a) changes in the provision of information by newspapers and broadcasters; b) changes in the news cycle that began with the advent of global television in the early 1980s; and, c) changes in the end markets for news with the growing acceptance of online information services, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. …