New media vs old values- let the healing begin

The RSS feed and online interactive time-lines and maps makes the internet even more user friendly. Through tools like these finding and using information becomes much easier. It is the new generation. people will read what they are interested in and they will find the information that is relevant to that despite what the headline of the New York Times is. This must change the role of the journalist in this new era... right?

In a 2007 modern journalism classroom in a a high tech building where classrooms are equipped with mutli-media and computers and where there are labs that allow students to broadcast themselves through radio, television and internet, students are still expected to read about journalistic ethics, tools and skills that were used 40 years ago when a pc were simply 2 insignificant words and the world was connected through telephone and telegram wires.

Why are we learning the same techniques of quoting that were used in this pre-historic era with computer dinosaurs? Is there something we can learn from the cavemen journalist?

Of-course!!!- one may argue- a good quote is as important now as it was then and truth was as important is as important now as it was then.

So maybe instead of discarding our predecessors good values we can build on them.

We now have top quality recorders that most journalists use in any interview good note taking skills may seem obsolete. but what's a recorder without the brain. a hand without the brain to tell it to write? or a story without good old fashioned sense.

So yes maybe the industry is changing and morphing into ways that will be unequivocal to old style journalism, but we still need to learn. because you cant learn calculous without first learning to multiply, even if you have a calculator to do it for you.