A sign of the times

Maybe everything really can be chalked up to timing.

Now, I love Ohio University and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism more than most things in life (other than TV and Diet Mt. Dew), but according to this article in the New York Times, J-schools around the country are struggling to mesh the teaching of new Web-focused journalism tactics with old-school journalism principles. The biggest difficulty lies in the fact that no professor or dean—or anyone, really—knows where journalism is headed.

"Right now, there may be no other field of education where 'I don’t know' is spoken so often," the article states.

For now, journalism schools are shifting their focus to making sure students are completely involved in Web initiatives, from posting the articles they write in "news writing" class (what normally would have been written solely for printing in a newspaper) to designing a Web site in "online reporting" class (which would have mostly focused on how to research, write and edit for a Web site).

The thing is, I was just a few years too late. I didn't take any of the online classes OU offered (which was very few at the time), nor was there any effort to mesh print with Web at the time (to no fault of my professors, just the times).

So now I'm sitting, waiting for a job to come along that doesn't require knowledge of CSS, HTML or any other acronym that I know what it stands for but don't really have any clue what it means.

But I bet this girl does: