James O’Shea has moved from Chicago where he would stop by Columbia and tell our students to bone up on their web skills out to Los Angeles and the LAtimes (registration required) where James Rainey reports that O’Shea announced that Latimes.com is going to the center of their news organization, not the “dead tree” edition, according to Rainey. <p>There will be an “editor for innovation” and “a crash course for journalists to push ahead the melding of the newspaper and its website.” </p><p>


Staci Kramer in paidContent presents some of the inside information and links to reaction to the story.</p>

The story is vaguely reminiscent of what went on about 10 years ago in higher education. All of a sudden our students were getting digital. Internet was new but you could tell it wasn’t going to go away. We had scads of teachers who kind of acknowledged that the web had educational uses, but failed to bring any reference, much less connection to Internet into the classroom.

I had a grant to improve education through collaborative, project-based learning that had a “stealth” objective of having faculty non-techs work with faculty who used email and the web to do some on-the-job, just-in-time training. The result was that the non-techs all increased their use of email and internet, and in fact brought digital tech into their classrooms. I thought I was set for life with my “model” and I would just continue teaching faculty to be digital. What I learned was that my model was only a temporary measure. Time, the great healer, moved non-techs on to retirement and every new young faculty had better skills than the one before. There is a lesson there for news organizations and for journalism education programs…