With the Internet becoming a major source of news and advertising over the past decade, news organizations are increasingly catering to consumers who favor online media over print publications. That means journalists, through the Internet, are now using multimedia formats, blogs, podcasts and citizen journalist reports to disseminate news and other content that audiences deem useful to them.
Preparing journalism students for this shift to online news and other electronic media means that journalism schools are turning to individuals, such as Sandeep Junnarkar, to teach multimedia storytelling techniques and to explore how interactivity could improve online journalism. A veteran of online journalism since its earliest days, Junnarkar, 42, is now an associate professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate journalism school.
In the mid-1990s, Junnarkar, who was then fresh out of the Columbia University journalism school, helped pioneer online news production while working on the early online editions of The New York Times. Those early experiences included stints as a breaking news editor, writer and Web producer. He later became a reporter and the New York bureau chief for CNET’s News.com, a news Web site that specializes in digital technology. What emerged as critical components in the Internet as a news venue was the use of multimedia storytelling and allowing reader interactivity, Junnarkar notes.
“It seemed to me that the Web wasn’t going to be all that interesting if it just tried to reproduce what was in the newspaper … .I saw the importance of readers’ comments and interactivity,” he says.
Eventually, Junnarkar gravitated to teaching. His expertise in online journalism proved highly attractive to CUNY adminstrators who were organizing the graduate journalism school, which enrolled its inaugural class in fall 2006.
In addition to teaching and writing, Junnarkar has won acclaim as the co-producer of www.livesinfocus.org, a multimedia Web site that reports stories on underreported issues. The Web site’s projects have focused on the treatment of the HIV and AIDS population in India and the impact of incarceration on prisoners’ families in New York state.
