In universities all over the world a serious struggle has opened for the heart and soul of journalism —and the Internet appears to be the battlefield.

Web-based journalism is shaking up the academy as journalism schools are fighting to offer students multimedia skills at the expense, some faculty worry, of traditional reporting.

The battle between teaching students how to cover a townhall meeting and/or teaching them web page production has opened some deep fissures in many universities.

«The net is causing a lot of turmoil», said Paul Grabowicz, from California. «There's a danger here that we're training a lot of people who will be technically sophisticated but who will not know the first thing about journalism.»

Often it comes down to time. Students who want to learn how to put digital audio on the web have to divide their time between that and learning basic interviewing techniques.

«Schools should not teach presentation, they should teach journalism. We didn't use to teach
typing», said Eric Meyer, from Illinois. «We should spend time on content.»

But others disagree.

«The presentation delivers the message. If you don't know how to present something, you are lost in today's marketplace», said George Rorick. «It has to be engaging, it has to get people's attention.»

And increasingly, students are demanding programs that offer them a web-publishing component, in part to learn the skills and in part to get the public exposure that professional journalists have.

New digital skills not only take time to teach, they take time to learn. The technology is changing so fast that faculty have a hard time keeping up. This is not new. But the anxiety surrounding the Internet is different, perhaps because the demands are greater. «You can't be a journalism instructor and a technical master today, you just can't do it», Rorick said.

More unsettling for journalism schools, though, is the way the net is changing basic ideas about what journalism is. Is journalism on the web a different beast than journalism in newspapers? Will journalism on the web become so specialized that business people will only see business news, and sports fans only sports? Will they break stories? Or simply repackage stories that already ran on the newspaper or on TV? «We don't know exactly what to teach yet», said Rose Ann Robertson, «because this new media has not yet settled into place».

Nevertheless, there are ways that web news differs clearly from print and broadcast. Writing on the web is often shorter and punchier than writing in a newspaper. On the web, readers can integrate text with pictures and video, which require a new way of thinking about presenting information. And layouts need to incorporate a computer's boxy screen, not the long, thin newspaper format. But the basic idea behind news on the web is, for the most part, borrowed from TV news: Present quick, easy-to-digest news nuggets.

The debate over what to teach in journalism schools simply reflects the big debate: How much is journalism going to change in the next ten years?

PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION

1. Answer the following questions according to the information in the text.

1. Gaining something often means losing something else. What skills may be disappearing from present-day journalism schools, according to some teachers?

2. Which basic features are common to Internet and TV news?

3. Find in the article one clear argument in favour of media-based journalism training.

4. One of these three sentences is true. Which one?

 Time has consolidated the way news are presented in the net. This makes the teaching role of journalism schools clear.

 News on the web are becoming very specialized. This requires highly sophisticated training in video, pictures and text integration.

 There is much uncertainty about the curriculum to be taught in journalism schools, as the new media are still changing.

5. One of these three sentences is true. Which one?

 The new media are very complex. It is not easy for journalism teachers to train themselves constantly in the new skills.

 Presentation is everything. Teachers should give up teaching content in journalism schools.

 Students want to learn the new techniques mainly because they find traditional journalism useless.

  PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.

From the news, papers, or perhaps from our own life experience, we all know examples of social problems —unemployment, homeless people, immigration killings...

1. Write an essay about the way news are presented in a newspaper, on TV and on the web.

2. As a student, describe your ideal teacher or the subjects you would like to take.

3. Vocabulary

Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example: struggle, skills, faculty, turmoil, to broadcast, layout, nugget.