A converged curriculum: One school's hard-won lessons

This article was adapted from a talk that Larry Pryor gave on February 14, 2005 at a session on “Convergence Journalism for College Educators” hosted by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Digital technology disrupts, especially journalism schools, which are dealing with a difficult problem: How to make room for convergence in an already-crowded curriculum. Where does it fit? What has to be dropped? What will it cost? Is it worth it?

The unknowns are daunting, and no one has the answers. Limited experience indicates that one size does not fit all schools. Each has different resources, goals, missions – and obstacles. We have been experimenting with a converged curriculum at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism and can share some hard-won lessons and tentative answers. Should schools make room for new media instruction? Absolutely.

• First, students gain, whether they want to or not, especially the better ones.
• Second, the faculty benefits. Careful convergence changes can draw a majority of faculty members together and break down the isolation of traditional instruction “silos.”
• Third, journalism schools will be strengthened academically. Preparing students for a new media world represents a new mission and opens opportunities for research, experimentation and collaboration.

It’s hard, at first, to sell this vision. Reports back from many schools indicate stiff faculty resistance, a fear of online journalists as an attacking horde, lacking culture and leading a mindless audience revolt. This resistance must be approached from within, by converting one faculty and administrative ally at a time. If this resembles subversion, so be it.

Almost by accident, we found a path of least resistance: Start with one online class and build outward. We created our first, experimental new media course in 1994. This three-hour elective, for both undergraduates and graduates, taught students to cruise the Net, code in HTML and use Photoshop’s basic design and graphic elements to build a Web site.

The experiment evolved into “J412 Introduction to Online Publishing” with a syllabus that focused on learning digital technology. The course became reasonably popular, and we usually had two sections, totaling 30 students a semester out of a total of almost 400 majors. Some of our graduates were finding entry-level online jobs at double the $22,000 that prevailed in print and broadcast.

We began adding more advanced courses for J412 graduates who showed a passion for new media. These included seminars in “Multimedia and Graphics in Online Publishing” and “Multimedia Reporting.” They attracted relatively few students (8-10) but these were bright and dedicated, some of our best.

In 2001, our new director, Michael Parks, held a faculty meeting where he asked: Is our curriculum, even with these improvements, designed for the new century? The answer was a unanimous “no.” We lacked many elements, but what next?

We concluded that convergence had to be taken seriously, but we had trouble defining it. We started with the “Florida Model,” combining print, broadcast and online journalism into a coordinated product aimed at an audience capable of accessing all three platforms.

When should this converged curriculum be introduced, what would we have to drop to accommodate it? We saw several choices:

A. Offer one comprehensive new media course as a requirement.
B. Create a briefer survey course to introduce convergence to incoming students, followed by advanced electives.
C. Introduce new media into a basic Core Curriculum for all incoming students, including graduates, in which this topic is given equal weight with print and broadcast. Students would learn, at the outset, how to work on all platforms.

We opted for “C” with classes in print, broadcast and online in writing, reporting and production spread over three semesters. Schematically, it looked like this:

In other words, a student would take a 2-hour print class on Monday, a similar broadcast class on Wednesday and an online class on Friday. We envisioned, and tried to implement, lesson plans that would carry over from class to class, with the same story being done in all three media.

A commitment to convergence, even at the A and B levels, requires computers, infrastructure, class space, and instructors who are capable and willing. And the C approach calls for team teaching, tight scheduling, customized course materials and multiple texts.

Someone had to be designated to recruit adjuncts and full-time faculty members willing to retrain and become familiar with new media. This person, in our case a new full-time administrator, had to orient and familiarize the new faculty with the curriculum, develop the class materials, coordinate the labs and classrooms for 165 students, get university course approvals – and more, a huge job that took a year and a half to pull together .

Our converged curriculum went into operation in Fall 2002. Here’s what we found:

Students were not as enthusiastic about new media instruction as we had thought. Print students complained about being forced to take broadcast production and both print and broadcast students said they resented being forced to study online topics.

The technology Bubble Burst of 2000 had reduced the perceived value of online journalism and, in fact, the starting salaries for online editors dropped dramatically as electronic news outlets stopped hiring.

We had a hard time pointing out successful convergence models. The definition kept changing and the Florida Model was not accepted industry-wide. It seemed that each online operation had a unique media mix.

Instructors had many complaints but also felt we were going in the right direction. Team teaching and coordinated assignments worked to a point but cut into classroom autonomy. We also found that only a few stories worked well across all three platforms. Our biggest problem: too many of the “basics” had been crowded out of each sequence.

We concluded that online journalism was not well-defined enough to be treated as an equal partner. Also, we found that broadcast was not a good fit with online, since it has distinct production needs and a unique tradition of presentation that doesn’t play well on the Internet. Online video and broadcast television seemed like distant cousins. We found that online journalism has more affinity with print, radio and photojournalism.

We also got feedback from editors and producers who wanted graduates with “strong basics.” They said they could train people to use technology. What they needed were good journalists who wouldn’t screw up on the job.

In addition, we found in upper-level classes that many students still had problems with grammar, spelling, AP Style and mathematics. They seemed to have forgotten what it took to pass their SAT or GRE exams and couldn’t parse a sentence or calculate a percentage change. Statistics were a mystery and polling methods poorly understood.

Meanwhile, other curriculum demands had to be accommodated. Photojournalism and visual culture had become increasingly important as high-speed broadband enabled fast transmission of photos, video and digital graphics. The spread of digital cameras meant that photos could come from anywhere.

Web logs and citizen or participatory journalism continued to expand. It seemed that the industry definition of convergence was being eroded by technology. What was the role of “gatekeepers” in a media environment where gates had been battered down?

Computer Assisted Reporting skills became more valuable in newsrooms, especially at operations that had no library researchers or designated CAR specialists – precisely where our new graduates could shine. We had little CAR instruction in our curriculum. Where should this go?

We began re-organizing the Core Curriculum in the summer of ’03. We might have made more drastic changes but were limited by university course policy and catalogue language. In retrospect, small changes and tweaking worked better.

On the plus side, new media software was getting easier to use and cheaper. It wasn’t necessary to spend much (if any) class time on technical instruction. We saved money by turning to InDesign and not teaching Quark. (Concepts are more important than specific pieces of software.) We taught Dreamweaver and de-emphasized HTML and coding [with some exceptions — Editor]. Photoshop and digital editing programs were popular with students. Many students had used Excel and spreadsheets in outside jobs.

We are now working on several long-term fixes to our Core Curriculum and hope to have them in the 2006 course catalogue. But here are some short-term changes that we made within the constraints of university policy:

• We cut into the time allotted to Online Writing to spend more time on grammar, style and spelling. We now have drills on mechanics the first six weeks of that course, followed by a tough exam.
• We are placing more emphasis on the “basics” of storytelling, especially lede writing, which tends to go naturally across all three platforms.
• We will continue to develop extracurricular uses of new media, such as a Web log run by students and a local news network, now in a preliminary planning stage, that may cover the neighborhood surrounding the campus and serve as a laboratory for innovative digital news projects.
• We continue to make more room for photojournalism and radio instruction, meanwhile cutting back on TV broadcasting as a major component in the Core.
• We found that print writing, especially wire service style, fit well with online journalism. We are coordinating that better so that students now get stronger writing instruction throughout the week. We drill them in class on speed, rewriting and, most important, updating stories with new information.
• We stress skills such as story boarding, database structure and creating “shells” or online news packages with a central story surrounded by elements and links that give it context. Design and navigation continue to be important.
• We view math for reporters, CAR and statistics as a logical collection of topics. We were not able to define Online Reporting well in the second semester, so we substituted a math-CAR-statistics class. We are also coordinating Print Reporting and CAR assignments. They fit together well.
• We have taken elements of our upper-class electives in new media and put them into the Core Curriculum. This has allowed the seminars to operate at a more advanced level.

Here are more specific suggestions, based on our experience at USC:

• We strongly recommend recruiting photojournalism adjuncts from the ranks of professional photojournalists. The active ones have a problem since their spot assignments make it difficult to commit to teaching. The ideal candidate is a recently retired news photographer who has experience with digital cameras. They can be almost Messianic in their approach to teaching visual arts.
• We are now integrating blog technology into our classes, either a class blog or having each student maintain a blog. It’s a lot easier and cheaper than Blackboard and gives the students hands-on experience. It’s a great way to manage beats.
• We have had success forming partnerships with other schools and departments. The likely candidates would be Engineering, Fine Arts (Design, Theater, Dance), Cinema, Communications and Business – or Law. They are all active in the digital world.

Our conclusion: Convergence should be defined broadly. Schools of journalism should not adopt industry definitions wholesale, as we did, lumping print, broadcast and online together. We discovered more natural combinations.

It’s best to avoid treating journalism curriculum changes as a zero-sum game. It’s possible to fold new media and CAR topics into courses without sacrificing the basics of good writing, critical thinking and ethics.

Journalism educators have a great opportunity to do a better job for students and, by extension, the public. I teach in the Core and I’ll admit that it is hard work. Sometimes I’d rather be back in the simpler world of 10 years ago. But technology won’t stop. Audiences have been unchained, and we have to deal with that or risk being irrelevant.

A converged curriculum is a tougher discipline, more rigorous for students, faculty and staff. But I sometimes fear that too many journalism and communications majors are refugees from science and engineering, looking for a “softer” humanist path. We have to disabuse them of that thought. There’s no easy way out for any of us.

Larry Pryor teaches at USC and is the founder of OJR.