"Journalism 2.0"

On Thursday, Mark Briggs, the assistant managing editor for interactive news at the Tacoma News Tribune and the author of "Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive: A digital literacy guide for the information age," spoke to our class via teleconference.

Briggs took questions from the class and discussed the importance of new journalists understanding the technologies that newspapers are beginning to adopt. While this is something we have been told by our professors for years, hearing it from someone working in the field makes me feel that all of the computer courses I have taken were worth the time and money.

Listening to Briggs talk about the importance of Internet skills made me think about the work I have done in journalism. When I began working on my high school paper as a freshman, the Internet was still new and exciting. Only the kids with really cool/rich parents had the Internet at home, always on the super-fast 14K dial-up modems of the day. The school I went to was years away from even having computers that could handle the Internet, let alone providing the service to students. We still did our page layouts the old-fashioned way — by printing out the pages and pasting the individual page elements onto the page dummies (While other students preferred plain Elemer's glue, my favorite was the clear rubber cement with the brush applicator). I remember how excited we were when the publisher began accepting our page proofs on a disk and the days of dealing with real scissors and paste were over. It amazes me to see how far the process has come in just the nine years since I finished high school.

And here is the rest of it.