A Genre-aware Approach to Online Journalism Education

New media has brought along constant evolution to professional journalism practices and news genres. Online/digital/multimedia journalism courses, where both online and multi-platform expertise of journalism is taught, are then a core element of those convergent curriculums. Drawing upon four theoretical traditions, i.e., genre analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, the theories of media logic and communities of practice, the present study proposes a genre-aware approach to facilitate the design and assessment of online journalism courses with a methodological triangulation of classroom observation, qualitative interviews with students and instructors, analyses of students’ online news assignments and a student questionnaire survey.