Columbia School of Journalism Picks Up On New Digital Journalism Craze

When the New York Times, announced that it was starting a citizen journalism blog called, fittingly, “The Local” and that it would be assisted by journalism students,the natural assumption was the paper of record would use the most prestigious journalism school in the country.

So why was City University of New York chosen instead of Columbia? Well, as New York magazine reports, Columbia’s program doesn’t really have a new media curriculum. That’s all about to change though.

Beginning in August, Columbia will offer a revamped, digitally focused curriculum designed to make all students as capable of creating an interactive graphic as they are of pounding out 600 words on a community-board meeting. The force behind the change is former WSJ.com managing editor Bill Grueskin, the school’s new dean of academic affairs.

Not all professors are quite as eager to jump on the new media bandwagon.

“Fuck new media,” the coordinator of the RW1 program [short for Reporting and Writing 1], Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

The real problem? Most of the school’s tenured professors have never worked in new media. So in order to accomplish this new curriculum standard, the school will either have to hire tech-savvy adjuncts&#151which they do not currently have the budget for&#151or train the professors themselves&#151which might not be possible given the new schedule.
Much like the greater problem facing the journalism industry right now, media is moving into the digital age and in order to remain competitive everyone will either have to adapt or die out.

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