I was in a high-school classroom today, picked up a textbook called Journalism Today, and went looking for all the good stuff about online. Ha! The entirety of the internet was handled in three paragraphs on page 495. Granted, the book didn’t come out until 2001, so it would be asking too much to see much about blogs. But lots of major online news services are celebrating their 10th anniversaries this year (and my first is 11 years old), so there’s no reason the text could not have explored the opportunities and impact of the internet for journalism. Shocking.
I’m also scratching my head wondering why schools still print their papers. Every student is online and if any of them want to continue into journalism, creating a school site would be far better experience. I don’t want to hear how they’re scared of the internet; it’s time to join the new century and not doing so is a disservice to students. (I’m about to try to figure out how to convince my son’s principal of that).
See also Bryan Murley arguing that college papers should be promoting their online execs, as the Chicago Tribune just did.
: LATER: Scott Heiferman adds:
Reminds me… I recently heard Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig say that in grade school on Long Island, they had lessons on how to properly fold/read your NYT on the train [for you inevitable life commuting to the city]. This was in response to him hearing the staggeringly low numbers of people in their 20s or 30s who read a newspaper (on paper). I also recently heard Nicholas Negroponte say that in the rare times when there’s a PC in a classroom in a developing country, he often sees the kids being taught Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office? As if the power of the technology is in ‘office skills’ vs. access to the world’s information/market/creativity/power/…
