The lab is used both as a classroom and as a newsroom for students taking beginning and intermediate web journalism courses. It boasts 13 fast PCs, several digital cameras and digital audio recorders, a photo scanner, telephones (for use by student reporters), a ceiling-mounted projector for displaying web pages, and a slew of software applications that allow text, audio, and video to be published on the Internet. Included in the software suite are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage (for Web editing); RealProducer Plus, Dazzle, and Cool Edit (for audio and video publishing); and Adobe Photoshop (for creating and sizing graphics and photos).

The tools allow students in the three-credit beginning class to learn the basics of web editing and publishing. The tools also allow journalism majors taking the intermediate, six-credit course to create and publish content for an online newsmagazine, Maryland Newsline.

Working three days a week in the lab, the newsmagazine students report and write stories, take photos, publish video and audio clips, and design “special reports” on major issues. Their work is edited by Online Bureau Director Chris Harvey, a faculty instructor who worked as an editor at washingtonpost.com.

The online newsmagazine “provides our students with the important, real-world experiences of producing the news in an interactive, multimedia environment, while giving Marylanders a new and exciting news product about issues that affect their everyday lives,” said College of Journalism Dean Tom Kunkel. The web magazine also showcases work from the college’s print and TV reporting bureaus in Annapolis and Washington.

The web courses, integrated as electives in the journalism curriculum, prepare students for jobs at professional news web sites. But they also give students interested in pursuing careers at newspapers or TV stations an introduction to working for a different medium. This versatility has become increasingly important in today’s fast-changing media landscape—where it’s not uncommon for newspaper reporters to be asked to write shorter versions of their stories for the Web or to do on-camera interviews about the day’s top stories with TV reporters.

For more information about the College of Journalism or Maryland Newsline, see http://www.journalism.umd.edu/ or http://www.newsline.umd.edu/.

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