If we don’t teach convergence in journalism schools and training courses, and if media companies don’t wake up to the need for these extraordinary changes needed in their company organization, I fear what will happen in the upcoming years. Keep on pushing to teach these courses and making them an important part of your curriculum. Even if it hurts.

Here at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, we’ve taken a different approach – a kind of convergence light.

Almost 5 years ago we switched from teaching online publising to multimedia reporting as the main focus of our new media curriculum. That meant designing an elective course – called Intro Multimedia Reporting – in which students used digital video cameras, photo cameras and audio recorders to report on a team project, and then used audio, video and photo editing software, and a Web page editing program (Dreamweaver), to create a multimedia Web site presentation of their team reporting project (they choose the projects to work on).

Part of the reason for our much less ambitious effort than USC’s was practical – we just didn’t have the resources to do a full-blown converged curriculum. And there were the concerns Larry mentioned about not wanting to cut into the time needed to teach basic reporting and writing.

But the other reason for a single multimedia class approach was we wanted our students to concentrate on how best to tell a story if they could combine all the different media forms at their disposal into a single presentation, rather than taking the same story and re-doing it in print or video or radio or Web. That meant we were able to focus a lot on the journalism in all this – how to report a story and then present it in a compelling and informative way. The students who take the class also seem very motivated, probably because they get to experiment with telling a complete story rather than re-purposing a story from print to broadcast to Web etc. And I think the students still learn the skills they’ll need to do the latter if they’re in a truly converged newsroom.

The class has grown steadily in popularity and this semester the dam finally broke – we had a sudden upsurge in demand and had to turn away a number of students. I’m not sure how we’re going to cope with this – we’re contemplating adding a new section next year to handle the increased enrollment (we currently offer the class only once a semester)

If we do that (and the student demand continues at its current pace), we’ll probably be running about three quarters of our students through the multimedia class. And most of those who don’t take it are in the TV program, where they at least get exposed to print reporting in our intro reporting class.

Ultimately we may move to a completely converged curriculum like USC’s. But for schools that can’t afford to do that or are meeting resistence to the idea, the approach we’ve taken might be a good alternative. You won’t have to contend with getting faculty buy in, it doesn’t detract from teaching the basics, the students tend to be excited about the chance to tell a story in new and more comprehensive ways rather than having something forced upon them, and support for it grows organically within the school (hopefully).

And you get to sit back and wait while USC figures out for all of us how best to do a totally converged curriculum

Paul Grabowicz
New Media Program Director
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

PS – A few things I should add about our particular situation here:

- We’re only a graduate level program and we’re pretty small – only about 120 students enrolled in a two year program.

- Besides the Intro Multimedia Reporting Class I’ve described above, we offer an advanced MM Reporting Class taught by Jane Stevens, in which students pursue individual projects. That focuses even more on the journalism issues in multimedia, rather than the technical skills.

- We teach computer assisted reporting as a separate and required 2-unit class for all first year students. It’s a kind of add-on to the required basic reporing course. And in the CAR class, which I teach, I spend a lot of time on very traditional reporting techniques like researching public records – property records, business filings, court cases, etc. – whether online or not. And I sneak into the CAR class a session on how to do a basic Web page in HTML, so the students at least exposed to HMTL.

- On Larry’s other main point about how to deal with the growth of “participatory journalism,” we started about 2 1/2 years ago to use Weblogs as a publishing vehicle for student stories, in large part because of the more interactive nature of blogs. In the past year we’ve been experimenting with moblogging – having students use cellphones to upload photos and audio clips to accompany their stories on a blog. And we’re trying to work with wikis or even a dedicated citizen journalism site in which the students would try to understand what the role of a professional journalist is when citizens are reporting on their own communities (similar to what Rich Gordon did at Northwestern with their “goskokie” project). In all this we’ve learned a lot, but we’re still just stumbling around trying to get it right.