Manic Over Multimedia

Having technical skills is a plus, but editors and recruiters say “traditional” journalists are still in demand.

By Pearl Stewart

Shannon Pittman-Price graduated from North Carolina A&T State University in May 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in print journalism. In past years, her degree may have been enough to set her on a career path in journalism.

But Pittman-Price, after completing an internship with Black College Wire, realized that journalism was headed in the direction of multimedia, and she wasn’t prepared.

So she applied to Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she was accepted into the graduate program in new media.

“I think grad school was very important to me in order to pursue my career goals,” Pittman-Price says, adding that while she “learned a lot about journalism,” at N.C. A&T, “I did not learn anything about new media.”

The Newhouse new media program states in its online promotion that “by blending content and technology with analysis of current industry regulations, students prepare to be new media producers and managers for projects such as news Web sites and disk-based ventures.”

This summer, having completed the one-year coursework for her master’s, Pittman-Price is an online intern at the Roanoke Times in Virginia. When the internship ends, she hopes to find a permanent job as an online or multimedia producer for a news organization.

Her story exemplifies the experiences of many students graduating from journalism programs that are not preparing them for the positions in highest demand in today’s newsrooms. However, not all of those students are willing or able to attend a top graduate school before beginning their careers.

So what’s the holdup at the undergraduate level?

“There are very, very few journalism educators who know how to do much of anything online. And many of those who act like they know something are in fact using techniques and approaches that are far, far out of date,” says Mindy McAdams, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Florida and author of Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages.