Some Basic Choices

Planning to incorporate new media elements into a visual communication course begins with deciding how this new class will fit in our overall curriculum, and that decision must take into account the nature of our program here at Lehigh. Some background will help:

Lehigh University’s journalism program began in 1927. We’ve had a student newspaper since 1894, and it was the newspaper that provided the momentum to offer a journalism degree before the Great Depression. Until I gave it to our library archivist recently, I had the 130-page manual from that era that spelled out the new system for how the student newspaper, called The Brown and White, would be run. The creative force behind this new system and the advent of a more formal journalism program was a young professor named Curtis D. MacDougall, who later went on to teach at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1942 to 1971 and wrote one of the great journalism texts of all time. He was working on the ninth edition of “Interpretive Reporting” when he died in 1985. I digress, but the point is that we have some deep and interesting roots.

Prof. MacDougall went on to teach in a much larger program, where students had many choices, or “tracks” that were designed to fill a traditional job market: photojournalism, magazine editing and writing, radio and television, newspapering, advertising. At Lehigh, he left behind a program rooted in the liberal arts. Our philosophy is that every student should get a strong and broad liberal arts education, and that we can provide it through the lens of journalism and media studies. For the more than three decades I’ve been at Lehigh, we’ve graduated about 30 students each year. In our major, they complete basic courses in news writing, editing and reporting. They all have internships in the senior year and capstone senior seminar courses. They have media ethics and law, and they can choose from a menu of other courses to suit their interest. Most of them have second majors or minors in subjects like political science, English or sociology.

When the Internet came along, we began a web version of the student newspaper, hired a journalist with a background in website work in newspapers, and incorporated training in most of our courses. Seems like a long time ago.

These days, few of our students take jobs in the “traditional” media. They more often are hired by social networking startups, or by organizations that are trying to increase their social media footprint. These graduates need a broader set of skills, along with a fresh understanding of media and society, to take into the workplace. The choices we’ve made about incorporating these elements into our curriculum are dictated by being a small department with a focus on liberal arts.

While we lack the breadth of larger programs, it’s probably simpler to retool at Lehigh than at schools where entrenched field-of-study specialties have made training more specific. Since all of our students are cross-trained because of the nature of our program, incorporating new media and community journalism concepts into our curriculum boils down to deciding how to revamp existing basic courses, and how to add new courses that emphasize these skills at a higher level.

So we’ve made some of these choices, and this new course I’m developing in visual communication is an important part of the change. It will be taken by freshmen and sophomores who, by the time they take this class, will have a foundational course called Media and Society, and our entry-level Writing for the Media class, which includes blogging and use of Twitter.

Next blog: The Other Pieces of the Puzzle