Greta von Zielinski

Columbia professors on new media

February 22, 2011

“Its painful going from being a caterpillar to a butterfly” — June Cross, associate professor of broadcast, Columbia University

If you need any reassurance on the future of journalism or you need to be convinced that journalism is anything but a dying breed, look no further than the following video. In the video, by Columbia University News, faculty members discuss exactly what the title suggests, the future of journalism.

“Newspaper is part of an industry that is changing, really revolutionary,” says Duy Linh Tu, digital media coordinator and associate professor at Columbia.

As writers, we should be excited to be able to do “ground breaking and innovative journalism,” explains Sheila Coronel, Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

June Cross, like Mark Briggs, author of Journalism Next, explains the need for journalists to work across multiple platforms. “The guys and the gals who have made a living from writing long-form narrative are really struggling with this concept of how do we do video and how do we do sound, and how do we mix all of this together?” Although it seems stressful to have to learn new methods, it is important to do so because they can “yield follow ups in ways that we would never even have time to do” otherwise.

In combining multiple methods of journalism together, such as magazines and websites we are able to enhance our readers’ experience. As Victor Navasky, delacorte professor of journalism, explains, we are able to have “physical, very attractive magazines plus websites that get increasingly sophisticated each year in what it provides.”

“There’s this great flowering and proliferation of new news organizations doing new things,” says Nicholas Lemann, Dean and Henry R. Luce professor.  This is an exciting and challenging time, and we are all able to help make history. So future journalist, I’ve asked you once, and I’ll ask you again: are you ready for this exciting time?

Related reading: Welcome to the future: the age of new media

Entry Filed under: Individual Tech Blog Items. Posted in  Individual Tech Blog Items Tags: Duy Linh Tu, June Cross, Nicholas Lemann, Sheila Coronel, Tech Blog 3, Victor Navasky.