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Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Journalists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide?

Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, told us that although students generally know their way around the web by virtue of being young, creating these powerful new tools requires a different, deeper skill set — one that, to date, has been missing from university journalism and technology departments, and it’s underrepresented in the field at large to a damaging extent.

“Some people coming out of high school or college possess technical savvy, but more often than not, the skill set is bordered by an ability to use Wikipedia, Facebook and Gmail,” said Grueskin, noting that while Columbia journalism students are taught to edit multimedia and maintain websites, “almost all of those skills rely on using existing software or programs to do digital journalism. We hope and expect that graduates of this program will be more able to innovate and create the solutions the news business so sorely needs.”

Full article at Wired.