Understand, though, that when they say "editor-in-residence," what they mean is, "You'll teach in just about all our department's courses, meet just about all our journalism students and advise every student publication you can get to in a week." So much for quietly observing.

Nevertheless, immersed to that depth I couldn't help but pick up an insight or two about the current state of journalism education. Two things were apparent from the start:

EIU journalism instructors are proud of the standards set by the university and their department, and of what they have been able to accomplish with limited resources.

That's not to say they wouldn't like more resources and more effective strategies for attracting new students that meet those standards.

Among Illinois' state universities, "We have the second toughest admission standards behind the University of Illinois," said Les Hyder, chair of the EIU journalism department.

But EIU, with enrollment totaling 11,700, is much smaller than its state-school cousins. The U of I has 36,000 students in Urbana-Champaign, and Southern Illinois University has 34,000 students mostly in Carbondale and Edwardsville.

I knew a thing or two about SIU-Carbondale, being a Saluki alum from the early '80s (the school's mascot is an Egyptian dog). The historic beef among students there was that some lecture courses, especially in freshman and sophomore general studies, were more densely populated than most towns in southern Illinois. At EIU, claims the campus literature, most courses have fewer than 40 students.

Gearing up for new media
Yet the shadows of the bigger schools sometimes cast a chill in Charleston. When competing for resources, EIU often has to get in line behind the others, I was told.

"SIU already has dorms wired with network Internet access," said James Tidwell, an EIU veteran professor. "The best our students can get is a modem connection, if they can get through to the campus network."

Still, in some respects the program is handsomely equipped. The student newspaper, the Daily Eastern News, has full production gear on site, including a three-unit Goss Community offset press.

The department's home building, Buzzard Hall, was recently remodeled and features sleek, well-lighted classrooms and labs.

I led several class discussions in one of those labs, which was filled with up-to-date Apple Power Macintosh G3-series computers. Each had a full complement of desktop publishing and web site management software, and a connection to the Internet via the university's internal network.

How does that stack up against other schools?

"Eastern probably has better facilities than we do. Or, at least, they will until next year," said Eric Meyer, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Illinois. "We just received a half-million-dollar endowment to re-equip and maintain our media design lab. We're also spending about as much redoing some other labs this year.

"Still ... from my windowless basement office, with clanging uncovered pipes overhead, I'm watching students next door struggle to do their final projects on seven-year-old Power Mac 7100/66s with one [Adobe] Photoshop 3 license for every three workstations."

Farther up Interstate 57, it's a different story at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Here's a sampling of Medill's gear, provided by Neil Chase, assistant professor and director of technology there:

Medill paid special attention to the configuration of computer labs.

"We had classrooms set up in rows of desks facing the teacher, just like Charlie Brown's classroom and every other one in the world," he said. "But when students are facing the computers and the professors are not, you get students doing e-mail, surfing the Web and playing games during class."

Now, Chase said, computers are on tables that are placed against the classroom wall, and students sit around the inside of the resulting "rim" in rolling chairs. In the middle of the room is a conference table.

"When it's time to work on the computers, I'm in the middle of the room and behind them," he said. "When it's time to talk, they roll over to the table and we're all looking at each other with no computers."

The labs at EIU had the same arrangement, and it was as effective as Chase described. But where other journalism programs increasingly split their investments between Windows and Macintosh platforms, EIU's department showed a distinct pro-Mac bias.

One reason for that was faculty familiarity. Most profs got their first taste of desktop computing running word processors, desktop publishing, imaging tools and the like on user-friendly Macs.

Still, I reminded the profs, roughly 95 percent of all Web traffic comes from Windows-based browsers, which render hypertext with a markedly different appearance from Mac-based browsers. How do you teach students to produce web sites when their web "viewfinders" don't see the same things the audience sees?

Remind students of the distinction as they do their work. That's what Brian Poulter did.

"Remember to try to find a PC you can use to preview your pages so you can see the differences," cautioned Poulter, associate professor and coordinator of web site development at EIU.

In the lab segment of his On-line Journalism class students lined the walls, tying up the loose ends on their individual web site projects while Poulter and I provided one-on-one assistance with several small problems and one big one:

Several of the students, in the process of moving their project sites from local disks to the Web server, had tried to employ a feature in Macromedia Inc.'s Dreamweaver that would make it easy to manage a web site map. But they made a mistake that severed numerous links from pages to related images.

Sans images, the wayward project sites weren't much to see. For those whose sites were broken, the task of reconnecting images to pages would be tedious.

"Welcome to the world of web site publishing," I mused.

Where does the 'Net fit in?
When it came time to add new media to the curriculum at EIU, the On-line Journalism course was born. Poulter and Tidwell teach it in tandem. Tidwell leads the lecture/discussion meeting each week, and Poulter runs the hands-on lab sessions for a dozen students.

Yet students eager to learn the Web get a much deeper immersion in tools and methods outside formal coursework.

Almost universally, faculty in the j-department pointed with pride to the real-world-style lab opportunities for students: putting together a newspaper at the Daily Eastern News; producing news programs in the Weiu-TV studio; dealing with real projects and clients in The Agency, a student-run public relations firm; and managing a web site, Where It's @ Magazine (http://www.atmag.com/).

With so many learning-lab outlets, I wondered why there was so little integration among them.

Though the on-line magazine staff included some of the most talented students in the department, their efforts were almost wholly separate from the work of the newspaper staff. The Daily Eastern News had its own web site, with one student assigned to shovel content onto it.

I told faculty members how newspapers and broadcast outlets in many cities -- including the Indianapolis Star-News, where I work -- were engaging in cross-promotion and even content-sharing partnerships to help deal with competitive threats from new media.

If media partnerships are where the "real world" is headed, I suggested, maybe it's time to cross-pollinate the student-run newspaper and TV station, and especially the newspaper and the magazine-style web site.

At the end of the semester I received a letter from Poulter that reported some progress on the second point.

"I have gotten the @Mag and Daily Eastern News people talking about a co-branded site," he wrote. "I also have managed to recruit some very talented students who are interested in working on the site[s]."

Additionally, Poulter said, new media curriculum had moved onto the front burner.

"The journalism department has just approved a plan to create a new media concentration," he said. "We are working with the speech communications department. We are going to add another on-line design course, and use a networking course and an on-line advertising course from speech.

"We also require students to take our existing introduction to photojournalism, and our reworked mass communications law course. This and some other courses will build a concentration in new media," he said.

That concentration includes a healthy dose of core courses: writing, editing, photojournalism, law. An hour north in Urbana, U of I's Meyer said, the methods are comparable.

"We try very hard not to let students get too specialized," he said. "To function well in a convergence environment or even in a team environment within a traditional newsroom, every student -- even the ones who will never shoot a photo or lay out a page in their lives -- must know how to think visually."

And at Medill?

"Our inherent problem is that things like visual journalism and on-line journalism have to be part of every class, but most of our faculty aren't qualified to teach them," Chase said. "And some have no interest in including them.

"So we end up with some classes that ignore them, and others in which instructors try to include elements that they're not too familiar with, resulting in confused students and below-average work," he said.

Who teaches the teaching staff?
Medill recently added instant expertise by hiring Rich Gordon away from on-line management at the 428,000-circulation Miami Herald to lead Medill's budding new-media program.

But how does a j-school infuse its existing faculty with experience in web site publishing and other new technologies?

"Pardon my bluntness, but that's a bullshit concern," said the U of I's Meyer. "It reminds me of a business reporter I once knew who was promoted to business editor and suddenly needed to know how to design pages. If designing pages was an essential part of the job, the higher editors should have picked someone else."

Meyer said the U of I j-school deals with the training challenge by having its faculty remain as active as possible in the business.

"Virtually none of our faculty members go the 'juried journal' route -- spending all their spare time writing obscure papers for scholarly research journals no one reads," he said. "We go out and lay out pages, design web sites, take photographs, cover stories, write general-audience books, etc. Do that and the question of how to keep faculty members current is no problem."

If the faculty isn't getting out that much, another option is to bring in working stiffs from newsrooms as adjunct instructors. That's how I was tapped to teach web site production at the Indiana University j-school in Bloomington.

Similarly, the folks at EIU count on a working photojournalist from a nearby newspaper to teach introductory photo courses. But that has a down side, as I learned during my week in Charleston.

Working stiffs are often only available to teach at odd hours. That photo course convenes at 7:40 a.m.

You try getting students inspired at those hours.

-- Jay Small

Eastern Illinois University,
(217) 581-6003;
Northwestern University,
(847) 467-1882;
University of Illinois,
(217) 333-2350.

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.