JD on EP

Y'know, I went back and re-scanned a number of followup blogposts before closing them out, and noticed that there was a divergence of scenarios described... then I re-opened the Poynter article and saw that this was how it all started:

A colleague was telling me about a course he's teaching on interactive storytelling at a big-name and very, very pricey journalism school. I asked him which tool they'll use to build the class project, a Web-zine (really a package of online feature stories, it sounds like, not a periodical). His answer: Dreamweaver -- and, "I had no choice in the matter, sorry. This is the default tool used in almost all their online journalism classes and projects."

This surprised and saddened me. Dreamweaver is a decent Web design and development tool. However, it's not very relevant to journalism, because it does not include a robust content management system! Apparently, this j-school (like many others) offers little or no training in true CMS-based tools. Their online courses focus on Dreamweaver.

It was a class in "interactive storytelling", at "a journalism school". The project was to publish a website.

Seen within these constraints, the subsequent focus on Dreamweaver seems a digression. "Should journalism students learn how to self-publish?" and "Should journalism schools have classes on 'interactive storytelling'?" seem to be more direct questions.

And the objection "[Because] Dreamweaver is NOT a content management system" seems even more strange in this context. Other than the word "apparently", there's no indication that this school doesn't use content-management systems as well.

The investigative editors and reporters organization at ire.org have a convention on something called CAR. Computer Aided Reporting. Heard of it? How to use and interpret databases, how to get the information you need; screen scraping. There is a sequence of five sessions on using GIS. Lots of story ideas. Journalism does not equal publishing. By the way, did you know there are thousands of people who are registered to vote in more than one state? Sorry, but publishing tools like Dreamweaver as wonderful as they are, are not going to help you find that kind of thing out.

[jd sez: Yup, and dead people vote too. I'd like it if more reporters were consciously aware of general semantics and Ericksonian hypnosis... would cut short many of the games. But the general curriculum of a "journalism college" is up to them to choose... it's a larger issue than whether they use a particular HTML tool in some courses.]

@JD: as a support to your view, I asked the content writers around here (former journalists) as well as the multimedia teachers teaching Dreamweaver.

The bottom line is publishing on the web is *still* a visual medium and is not just content driven. Dreamweaver (and DW skills) are perfectly valid in that situation.

just like newspaper and magazine publications are also a visual medium, using a specialist set of DTP skills.

besides, DW has never worked better than it does now.

Isn't this what Contribute is for?

A simple front-end to a CMS could also be built with MS Infopath.

[jd sez: True, could be used that way... some of the links to the Poynter article did go on that way. I still think it's good for upcoming "journalists" to be familiar with publishing for themselves though.]