E-Media Tidbits

Axel Rouvin, via Flickr (CC license) A J-school Dreamweaver class? Might as well be.

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.

That's a big problem, because tools embody mindsets. Focusing on Dreamweaver teaches exactly the wrong mindset for online journalism: that your Web site is mainly an island unto itself.

I'm serious. Look over Dreamweaver's feature list. Dreamweaver is a great Web design and development tool. It's fine if you want to create a slick corporate site, or a site to support an ad or advocacy campaign, or a free-standing, fairly static micro-site.

But Dreamweaver is NOT a content management system. You have to buy a separate tool called Contribute to even start making Dreamweaver functional as a news publishing tool -- and even then it's still rather weak compared to what a real CMS offers.

Furthermore, implementing basic features (such as comments or forums, or a flexible array of RSS feeds, or a decent site search engine) is needlessly complex and difficult in Dreamweaver. Journalists should be able to accept such infrastructure as a given -- not try to hack it together as an afterthought. Because online journalism without such basic features is crippled.

The vast majority of content that news orgs and independent news venues publish online are not the kind of thing you'd ever touch Dreamweaver for. Yes, news orgs do occasionally run slick multimedia online features packaged more or less as micro-sites -- but that's rare. If you want to teach journalism students how to create micro-sites, then Dreamweaver education might be appropriate. As long as you place it in its proper real-world context.

Content management systems have become the core tech tool of the journo trade. These days, journalists absolutely need to know how to use a CMS -- not just to file stories, but also at least the basics of how to set them up for projects, integrate stylesheets and themes with them, choose the right CMS tool for the job, integrate content from a variety of sources (including feeds, databases, and XML), and creatively distribute and promote their stories.

If your journalism classes are part of a larger communications program, I think clarifying which tools are right for the job is even more important. The journalism class online projects should use CMS tools like Wordpress or Drupal. Leave the teaching of Dreamweaver to the PR and advertising classes, where it's much more relevant to the kind of sites created in those disciplines.

In short, a working knowledge of real CMS technology and how it integrates with the internet is what gives a journalist's career legs these days.

Requiring journalism students to use Dreamweaver is about as useful as requiring them to learn calligraphy. It makes your content looks really pretty -- and it generally won't be worth a damn on a real journo job or project.

I've discussed this issue extensively with several other colleagues, including the Tidbits team. Some of them disagree strongly with me. I respect their views, and I hope they will share them in comments or future Tidbits.