Three “flavors” of web journalism

At the Columbia University School of Journalism, they’ve been thinking about how to better reflect the Internet in their journalism curriculum and have come up with three “flavors” of Internet-related jobs that students or alumni are or will be doing.

“Continuous News” – Entails providing multiple stories of varied lengths at deadlines across the day. The all-too-familiar wire service style of reporting upon which many journalists have cut their teeth for decades.

“Editor-host”
– The journalist works inside the newsroom most of time. This job is about synthesizing, analyzing and displaying (in timely fashion for online audiences) content from myriad information sources: newswires, the Internet, video, audio. This is very much an editing role; some have likened it to a typical newsroom copy desk role.

“Webified Reporter” – A kind of one-man band, the Webified reporter is able to apply multiple Web tools — from reporting to videography to Flash — to create original content that takes full advantage of the medium’s interactive multimedia capacities. Not only does the Webified reporter knows how to use these tools, but also when to use which tool for a particular Web story.

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