Howard Rheingold’s Digital Journalism Workspace: Winter Quarter, 2009 Stanford U.

Howard Rheingold’s Digital Journalism Workspace: Winter Quarter, 2009:

About This Course

Over the past two decades, shifts in media technologies, institutional structures and the organization of public life have combined to change the practice of journalism. This course explores these shifts, with an eye to seeing how they affect journalism’s role in society. At the same time, the class will introduce you to the techniques of journalism in digital media and offer you conceptual and practical tools with which to join the fray. By the end of the course, you should have a clear sense of the various ways journalists have taken up digital media and a sense of how you might use those media yourself. You should also gain a broad understanding of the ways in which recent social and economic developments have changed both the practices of journalists and the nature of the publics with whom they communicate. The role of the journalist in the public sphere is emphasized — journalism is unique among the professions in its responsibility to provide the information and context necessary for free people to govern themselves. You will actively blog, wiki, RSS, tag, Twitter, create map mashups and widgets. These particular skills are proving essential to journalists today, but for the foreseeable future, journalists will have an even stronger need for the meta-skill this course cultivates: learning to apply new media to journalistic practice as the new media emerge. Blogs were the new medium for journalists four years ago. Last year, Twitter was new. This year, it’s widgets. By learning to apply today’s Web 2.0 tools to journalistic practice through iStanford, the Stanford journalism program’s news site, students will learn how to recognize journalistic potential in new media as soon as technological developments make them possible, and know how to assess, learn, and tune new media to their needs as journalists.