Journalists and Smart Phones, a Course of Course!

This year, the University of Madras began offering a new course in their Journalism Department based solely on the smart phone’s role in reporting.The new course will educate students on how to use smart phones as journalistic tools and includes training time in an online media lab. Students can now also choose to partake in a two-year program in online media and earn their Master’s in Journalism. In addition to using smart phones and studying the role of new technologies in journalism, students in the program will also learn about issues of online privacy and defamation, though Gopalan Ravindran, Head of the Journalism Department, says that finding qualified instructors has been a struggle.

Mr. Ravindran knows that “while values remain the same, there is a need for a variety of skill sets which we wish to offer our students.”

Since the explosion of the smart phone a couple of years ago, Androids, iPhones, and their cousins have served to revolutionize the way we communicate; the journalism field is no less affected.

A pioneer in journalism education in India, the University of Madras was one of the first schools to offer courses in journalism, perhaps as early as 1947.

To read about journalists using smart phones, please click here.

Creative Commons Love: Nobuyuki Hayashi on Flickr.com

Written by Ling Shu