Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This March – June 2000 Classic follows Baylor journalism students on the frontier of digital reporting.
Salon.com, here they come. Last fall, Baylor’s journalism students prepared for life beyond the printed page in an experimental graduate-level class titled “Reporting and Writing for Online Media.”
Dr. Amanda Sturgill, Radford Distinguished Lecturer of Journalism at Baylor, created the class after she noticed that 30 percent of job openings for journalism graduates were in “new media”—Internet magazines like Salon or online divisions for traditional media outlets.
“It’s one of the most important classes I’ve ever taken,” said graduate student Brenda Huang of Chengdu, China. “These skills will open very important doors for me.”
Sturgill said she didn’t teach the students a specific way to write the Web-based html code. Instead, she gave them skills to figure it out for themselves. “If we taught a specific software program,” she said, “it would change in three weeks.”
The students created their own website for the class, which can be viewed at www.baylor.edu/~Lariat/elections, though it hasn’t been updated since the class ended. Students wrote stories, edited and designed the site, and took turns as the “site editor” who put it all together.
“It took a lot of cooperation,” said senior journalism major Paul Gibson of San Angelo. He enjoyed the new medium, he said, because “the immediacy was very rewarding.”
