Welcome. For the next semester we'll be working on journalism as well as the usual English.
The world is a rapidly changing place and maybe nothing changes as fast as information. Well at least the access to it. Hundreds of years ago news as wells as entertainment was carried from town to town and village to village simply by word of mouth, by men, in the west, called minstrels After the invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg in 1439 the "news" changed. People were able to cheaply print what they needed and distribute the information fairly easily. From the ease of information sprang the Renaissance as well as what would become modern journalism.
Since Gutenberg's little invention print has dominated the way people get their information, after all seeing is believing.
It wasn't until Marconi invented radio that this axiom became less that true. With the radio-telegraph, and later the radio we know today, information could travel at the speed of sound. And so could the news. Local cities could pick up news reports from around the world in a matter of seconds, and people no longer had to wait days or even months to find out what was happening.
As you can imagine these two inventions revolutionized how we perceived the world. Other inventions along the way have had their impacts upon the news, television for one, as well as improvements in photograph and sound quality but none of these have had the same impact as an invention most of you have grown up with.
The personal computer and the Internet.The personal computer puts the power of Gutenberg's press in the hands of almost everyone in the Western world, and the Internet can send your stories around the globe faster than Marconi could ever have imagined. You are living in the world that only Science fiction writers could have dreamed of a mere fifty years ago. This is the world you are going to study journalism.
Keeping all of that in mind the next semester should be as technologically challenging as it is academically. We will be completing several different kinds of writing assignments and trying to integrate technology and the web as much as possible into our final products. It's going to be a lot of work, but I think if you give it a fair chance you'll find it rewarding.
