By BOB STOVER
Florida Today

Feb. 20, 2006

The long-term vitality of multimedia newsrooms will depend on educators as well as professionals. Communications schools are positioned to have a big influence on the quality of people entering these newsrooms. They, too, are trying to stretch resources and figure out how much training to spread over the various media.

Dona Hayes, chairman of broadcast journalism at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, said journalism schools that choose to be accredited can't just keep adding communications class requirements to produce a converged journalist. In an effort to produce well-rounded students, accrediting bodies set restrictions on the number of hours a person can take in their major. At Syracuse they're allowed 36 hours in communications related courses.

"I like to think I have $36 and ask myself how I spend it," she said. "You have to spend a great deal of those dollars just getting the foundation correct. The trick is to add multimedia skills without weakening that foundation." The University of Southern California has been a leader at pushing convergence training, and it is making some revisions.

"One change will be even greater emphasis on basic newswriting and reporting for all students; another is putting all the online/new media elements into one course rather than scattering them," wrote Michael Parks, director of the Annenberg School of Journalism.

"Finally, we will require students to learn production only in print or in broadcast, not both, unless they opt to. Where we had less success is actually getting students to take a print story and turn it into a broadcast piece, or vice versa, or to cover the very same story for all three media. We are going to return to that effort in the new online course that will be positioned toward the end of the core curriculum."

Parks emphasized that all the changes "stem from our experience in the ways that students learn, not from a retreat from the belief they will need multiple skills."

"It takes a while to see what sticks and what doesn't," Hayes said.

"Let things take their course and adjust. There's a long way to see how this all pans out. In different communities there will probably be some common truths and some individual characteristics. But as the experimentation continues, educators need to keep working on the best way to incorporate convergence into curriculum."