Shaping the Multimedia Mindset: Collaborative Writing in Journalism Education

Blogs are being used for PR, online newsmagazines are booming, and young people are watching TV more and more often via Internet portals such as YouTube. Increasingly, publicity results from stories and news on the Internet. This development is unstoppable, just like when the market switched from black-and-white to color photography, from silent movies to sound films, and more recently from letters to e-mail. And, as always in journalism, anyone who understands how to exploit current technology for contemporary storytelling is in demand. The accelerating change calls for media—and journalists—fit enough to adapt to new circumstances. Professional practice and research show that multimedia mindsets foster applying three success factors: writing on all channels (see Section 1 of the article), working in teams (Section 2), and finding emergent solutions (Section 3). This has consequences for the design of writing courses in journalism education (Section 4) —including meaningful, relevant assessments, as an example will show (Section 5). The second part of this essay describes in detail a new joint programme in multimedia journalism designed by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and the Zurich University of the Arts.