Early Future

It's just a matter of time before the things we have done in this class and in Cindy's Web Design class become their own concentration.

A large majority of the people in Cindy's classes are print journalism majors. But there's nothing "print" about what we're doing.

We may follow some basic guidelines of print journalism (inverted pyramid), but the things we do seem more like electronic media.

But we know it's not that, either. Electronic media focuses mostly on radio and television. What we do doesn't fit that mold.

A lot of people throw around the term "new media" for what we do. That's a very lazy term if you ask me. "Hmm, there's something new going on here in the media. What should we call it? I've got an idea...."

Another name being thrown around is "online journalism." It's a pretty accurate term. But there's nothing that about it that pops out to you. It's kind of boring. But we're getting closer.

The official name for this class is "multimedia journalism." You know what? That sounds about right. We're journalists, of course, that's why we're here. But we're doing it in a much different way.

It's electronic, but in a different way from radio and TV. It's new, that's true. But in 20 years is it still going to be new? It's online, but that doesn't begin to describe all the ways news can be presented online.

No, we're presenting the news through multimedia. We can give you information on the 2008 Presidential election via a flash presentation. We could tell you how a music festival went down through a slideshow. We can analyze the latest sports news in the form of a podcast.

We're a part of the new wave of journalism. We may not know it yet, but we're going to help determine the future of the media. Radio, TV, and print will be there. But multimedia can go anywhere and we're the ones who will help drive it.

It's not going to be long before students here are mass communication majors with an emphasis in multimedia journalism.