As I stated in our class introductions, this is the class I had in mind when I started this program. I have done an internship with a community newspaper that focused primarily on its print product, and an internship with a website that acts as an aggregator while also generating original content (while printing nothing), and there is no question I find myself better suited for the latter. When I began the program, I found that I had almost every other journalism student I met asking a variation of the same question: what sort of journalism do you want to do? Meaning, what medium do you want to work in? All I could ever think of was, um, all of them? Obviously, now more than ever it is vitally important for journalists to be "jack of all trades" types and I believe this course will prepare us to work within that dynamic. I hope to learn in this course technical, practical skills such as how to best shape content for various digital media, as well as how to share that content. Beyond the skills I hope to develop, I am interested in learning about the convergence of journalism and technology, and how the latter is changing the former. For example, I often hear it asserted than the internet has "ruined" journalism, or the speed of the medium has led to the erosion of field's credibility, or something along these lines. This usually comes from an older journalist who has been in the industry for a bit. They seems to despise blogs, vlogs, twitter, whatever. I find this odd for many reasons. One, when was this supposed "golden age" of journalism when all was right in the world of reporting the news? It could be the fact that Noam Chomsky pretty much ruined my brain, but this seems woefully ignorant of the commercial interests that at best influence and at worst totally control commercial media outlets. Two, I would be willing to bet that almost all of the individuals making those criticisms of New Media would have been the types to have blogs and twitters and the like if they had been popularized in their formidable years. So, I am interested in how technology interacts with ethical expectations in the field. I am also intrigued by how technology has had a "democratizing" effect on the field, and what the implications of this are on, say, civic journalism, or the quality of the reporting being done. Finally, I am interested in what the proliferation of digital technology means for the business models of media outlets. Clearly, jobs will be more scarce. But I do not believe that, as many have bemoaned, "Journalism is dying." I believe bloated, massive profit-driven business models are dying, but that journalists provide a valuable service to the public. I'm excited about this course, and I'll leave you with this, a video that was created just 15 short years ago...