All industries involve with new technology, and the New Mexico State University Journalism program is trying to stay on top of the new trends.
Dr. Hwiman Chung is the Department head of Journalism and Mass Communications at NMSU. He says a journalist's job is changing.
“Traditionally those people who want to write they just need to know how to write,” Chung said. “And then those people who want to do photography they need to know how to do shooting. But these days they have to have all of those skills.”
He says because of this they have changed the program.
“We try to teach students the basic skills, including writing, and shooting, or editing,” Chung said. “But also to have to understand how to use a lot of different kinds of tools for mass media.”
Because of this they set up and online newspaper, called Kokopelli.
“We not only use that online publication as a teaching tool,” Chung said. “But also we want to use it as a professional publication. So in that way students get the credit for the work and also they can have some of the works in their hands before the graduate.”
Professor Lourdes Cardenas is in charge of the new website. She says they try to incorporate all forms of storytelling.
“You used to read stories, but now we can deliver information in multiple formats,” Cardenas said. “You can use audio, you can use graphics, we can use data visualization, we can use video, we can use photo slideshow. So we can use all these components to enhance our stories.”
She says they are also incorporating the new trends of how people receive news, on their smartphones.
“We are getting the news here, if i want to read an original story i’m going to click on the tweet it’s going to take me to the New York Times, to the Washington Post, the Las Cruces Sun News, to kokopelli NMSU,” Cardenas said. “We are getting the news from twitter, social media, facebook, so I think we can’t avoid to think of that. We can’t just put it aside.”
She says the students are excited to be able to have their classwork in the public eye.
“It’s going to motivate them too because its not the same when you are producing a story, and then you just submit the story and nobody sees,” Cardenas said. “So this is public they can recieve comments. Actually we already have some comments from some readers about a story that we made last semester.”
KRWG is also taking part in the multi-media push you can find this story on our website, Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter for your latest news updates.