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SYLLABUS

• Assignments
• Attendance
• Books
• Cheating
• Critiques
• Discussions
• Diversity
• Extra Credit
• Grades
• Instructors
• Lab Times
• Objectives
• What’s New?

TOOLS

• CSS
• Flash
• Photoshop
• Soundslides

DESIGN

• Color
• Cropping
• Design
• Photography
• Typography

MULTIMEDIA

• Audio
• Maps
• Multimedia
• Video

WRITING

• Blogs
• Captions
• Headlines
• Sidebars

RESOURCES

• Copyright
• Jobs

Objectives

NEW WAYS TO TELL STORIES
The World Wide Web gives us wonderful new ways to tell stories, but it demands new ways of thinking and new skills. Thinking in interactive and multimedia terms is both fun and challenging.

This is an advanced course in producing Web sites. To succeed in this class, you must bring to it Web-searching skills, journalistic writing and a willingness to work hard. Online work is very demanding, but it’ll pay you back in satisfaction ten-fold. Just decide that you’ll be a little short on sleep and high on adrenaline this semester, and you’ll be rewarded with an extraordinary amount of fun and satisfaction that comes from creating Web sites.

Will Kirkland A flame tree blazes above a wall in Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz.

BY THE END OF THE SEMESTER
If all goes well, you should know about the following:

• capabilities and tools of the Internet
• online journalism trends (where the industry is headed)
• Web design and usability principles
• business and revenue issues, such as how to generate traffic, how audiences are measured and how advertising shapes the Web
• copyright, fair use, legal and ethical issues facing online journalists

If all goes well, you should know how to do the following:

• critically examine Web sites and recognize excellence as well as mediocrity
• think critically and design Web sites that connect with your audience and meet their needs
• work alone and on a team to produce original, compelling Web stories that use interactivity and multimedia; be an innovative thinker and a creative, collaborative problem solver
• plan, storyboard and design a Web site with good usability and effective navigation
• prepare photos, write captions and record audio for a narrated slide show

WHAT YOU WON’T LEARN
This class won’t make you into a Web designer or techie. Instead, it’ll focus on the Web from the perspective of the journalist. You’ll gain hands-on experience in developing the skills needed to be an online journalist or Web producer or to work with an online team.

• shoot, edit and prepare video for the Web
• use basic CSS, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash to produce a Web site, recognizing that software will continue to change
• trouble-shoot and upload Web pages

Finally, you’ll produce pages that will demonstrate your skills to employers seeking good journalists who know how to tell interactive, multimedia stories. Skills in online journalism can help you get a job and earn up to 30 percent more than someone without this knowledge.