Renaming the dept. to 'Film and Digital Media Studies' would probably be the
fastest solution to this problem. But the addition of that one word,
'digital', would imply that there would cease to be any stark emphasis on
any of the skills used by traditional journalism. This seems to be a good or
bad thing depending on the cultural generation that each of us subscribes
to. I think most professors would be disheartened to consider the fact that
good writing and that deeply (deepthroat) inspired spirit of searching for
the truth through reporting is just about to get thrown out the window by
the next generation of so-called 'journalists'.

When it comes to information (especially news) I believe this generation is
significantly less tolerant of pretension, biases and opinions. They want
hard objective fact and they'd prefer to save the subjective experiences for
whatever lies between quotation marks. We can see this clearly on wikipedia.
There's a reason why the most comprehensive page on the internet regarding
the Virginal Tech Murders is a wiki page - there's 10,000+ brains scanning
and re-editing a single article of their own free will when in the past a
single paid brain would've sufficed. There is no pretension or biases
inherent in such articles since the piece is actually representative of a
type of leveled understanding of the group. The washington post and NYT
attempt to fight off this type of brain power with reputation and nifty
interactive flash animations, yet the whole concept of Collaborative
Journalism (Citizen journalism being a loaded term) is still in its beta
stages. Journalism is a dying industry and it's only a matter of time till
the sharks realize that the blood they smell in the water is actually
theirs.

We should see some massive integration (probably on the part of google) of
all these services. Therefore it is interesting that just today Rupert
Murdoch released a PR article on Forbes discussing the power of mixed media.
His decision to add a news aggregator to Myspace, while a good move, seems
like an attempt to add more feathers to a technology that is already flying
dangerously close to the sun; especially when compared with RSS enabled top
sites such as Digg or reddit.

In the world of the internet, the day a company sells out is the day
innovation dies.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is that in this age of hypermedia, a
digital media curriculum would be nice, but it would become notoriously
outdated in a matter of months. We're on a cusp of change that will only
continue to accelerate until the only people able to able to understand it
will be supergeniuses, leaving everyone else just a monkey typing on a
computer, editing wiki-media 4.0 or splicing
asynchronous video from all possible feeds (radio, sattelite, etc) for
instantanous feedback on youtube++.

The future will be wikiated,
Darien Acosta

On 4/20/07, Peter Parisi <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Some of us journalism faculty have been meditating on how to address
> multimedia journalism at Hunter. I'm curious where the students on
> this list stands on this possibility, in terms of your interests and
> your abilities.
>
> It's tough enough to simply master the writing and research/reporting
> skills plus the civic savvy that it takes to be a good journalist.
> Full-on mastery of multimedia elements like web design, still
> photography, video and audio could practically turn into a triple
> major! At the same time, many professional journalists are working
> fluently with across media. There may also be intermediate skill
> levels that are adequate to navigate in the current convergent
> journalism environment.
>
> An interesting wrinkle here is that a lot of you are probably shooting
> and editing video for websites like YouTube and MySpace just for fun!
> Not to say that these recreational uses amounts to complete multimedia
> skill, but it's a start.
>
> So could we hear from some of you guys about the abilities you possess
> and your interest in engaging in multimedia storytelling at some
> appropriate level?
>
> Peter Parisi
>
> --
> Peter Parisi, Ph.D.
> Dept. of Film & Media Studies
> Hunter College
> 695 Park Avenue
> New York, NY 10021
> 212-772-4949
> It's not the suffering itself that is so bad, it's _resenting_ the
> suffering. --Allen Ginsberg
>