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'.
<br><br>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&#39;d prefer to save the subjective experiences for whatever lies between quotation marks. We can see this clearly on wikipedia. There&#39;s a reason why the most comprehensive page on the internet regarding the Virginal Tech Murders is a wiki page - there&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s only a matter of time till the sharks realize that the blood they smell in the water is actually theirs.
<br><br>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. 
<br><br>In the world of the internet, the day a company sells out is the day innovation dies.<br><br>I guess what I&#39;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&#39;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 <br>asynchronous video from all possible feeds (radio, sattelite, etc) for instantanous feedback on youtube++. <br> <br>The future will be wikiated,<br>Darien Acosta<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/20/07, 
<b class="gmail_sendername">Peter Parisi</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:[log in to unmask]"><a href="/Scripts/wa-hc.exe?LOGON=A3%3Dind0704%26L%3DHCJ-L%26E%3Dquoted-printable%26P%3D270063%26B%3D------%253D_Part_97526_26896656.1177108991674%26T%3Dtext%252Fhtml%3B%2520charset%3DISO-8859-1%26pending%3D" target="_parent" >[log in to unmask]</a></a>&gt; wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Some of us journalism faculty have been meditating on how to address<br>multimedia journalism at Hunter. I&#39;m curious where the students on<br>this list stands on this possibility, in terms of your interests and<br>your abilities.
<br><br>It&#39;s tough enough to simply master the writing and research/reporting<br>skills plus the civic savvy that it takes to be a good journalist.<br>Full-on mastery of multimedia elements like web design, still<br>photography, video and audio could practically turn into a triple
<br>major! At the same time, many professional journalists are working<br>fluently with across media. There may also be intermediate skill<br>levels that are adequate to navigate in the current convergent<br>journalism environment.
<br><br>An interesting wrinkle here is that a lot of you are probably shooting<br>and editing video for websites like YouTube and MySpace just for fun!<br>Not to say that these recreational uses amounts to complete multimedia
<br>skill, but it&#39;s a start.<br><br>So could we hear from some of you guys about the abilities you possess<br>and your interest in engaging in multimedia storytelling at some<br>appropriate level?<br><br>Peter Parisi<br>
<br>--<br>Peter Parisi, Ph.D.<br>Dept. of Film &amp; Media Studies<br>Hunter College<br>695 Park Avenue<br>New York, NY 10021<br>212-772-4949<br>It&#39;s not the suffering itself that is so bad, it&#39;s _resenting_ the<br>
suffering. --Allen Ginsberg<br></blockquote></div><br>