Multi-platform media
Create your own online environment
When clinical professor Brett Atwood applied for a job recently, his avatar donned a snappy suit and entered cyberspace for an interview with the company that created Second Life.
Atwood got the job as managing editor of the company, which is one of the things he does in addition to teaching classes on new technologies in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communications.
“I love the Internet culture,” he said. “I’m always exploring new gadgets. Sometimes it is purely recreational and sometimes it applies to the classroom, but I tend to lean towards applications that relate to my career.”Learn to launch a new web property
Atwood brings his love of new technologies to the classroom. His Journalism 475 class is all about using different media outlets for news content.
Students in that class select web topics and work with a team to creatively conceptualize, put together, and market an original new web property. They start from scratch — develop an editorial strategy, register the domain, set up the website and logo, and create text-driven stories, podcasts, video, and audio narrative.
“Some of the sites have become quite popular once launched out into the world,” says Atwood.
Journalism jobs a-plenty
Atwood says there are more career opportunities than ever in journalism, even though some say that print media is dying.
“Journalism today is not just about writing well, which is still incredibly important, but also about learning how to tell a story in a non-linear way for the web using audio and video, podcasts, and other means,” he says. “It involves understanding how you can be more effective in an entrepreneurial way to get your story out to the masses.”
