Web editing: Literacy skills for 2007

The old question “Should we teach journalism students HTML?” has a new twist! The or part of the question used to be “… or a WYSIWYG editor?” Today, the or phrase has changed to “… or a CMS?” (That’s a content management system.)

I saw the issue summed up this way (and followed by a ton of comments) in a blog post written by a graphic designer in England:

As I look around on the web today I am seeing fewer and fewer static websites. Most sites seem to be build around a content management system (bespoke or otherwise) or blogging platform. So should we all be learning PHP/ASP or finding a suitable content management system that we can use to learn apply our newly acquired XHTML and CSS skills to.

Like most either/or questions, this one has more than one correct answer.

I teach this stuff, and have been teaching it for eight years now, and taught myself HTML back when there was almost nothing to it (life was easier then; there were no WYSIWYG editors), so allow me to try to summarize the added questions that can help lead to the right answer for you (and your students, if you are an educator).

Are you (or is the student) preparing to work on the Web site of a publication, or as a content editor or producer at a Web pure-play?

Get solid, regular practice with a CMS. Any reasonably good CMS will do, but the easiest choice is to set up a free blog at WordPress.com, modify the “theme” (template) and post to it regularly. I recommend that students keep individual blogs so they can modify and enhance them at will, instead of simply writing in a group blog. Some students will really get into it — and teach themselves a lot in the process! Others will kind of tiptoe along, doing only what the teacher requires them to do.

Chances are, they will be using a CMS at any job they get. Which CMS? There are many. The great thing about running your own blog is, you’ll get experience doing about 80 percent of what you will be doing in an online producer’s job. It doesn’t matter that a newspaper’s CMS costs the corporation hundreds of thousands of dollars, while WordPress is free. The principles are the same.

Are you (or is the student) going to design Web sites or packages from scratch, e.g., for clients?

A CMS is not enough for you. You need to learn CSS (cascading style sheets) even more thoroughly than you need to learn XHTML (which you must learn). You need to learn how to optimize images for on-screen display, and how to spec typography for the Web. These are all different from the print standards, and the differences matter — a lot! In other words, you do need to be able to write HTML fluently, but that’s only a small fraction of what you need to get good at.

You can start learning CSS at the excellent HTML Dog site.

In addition, you might also need JavaScript, PHP, Django, some knowledge of XML … These all go hand-in-hand with building online projects (and sites) from scratch.

Do you want to open a door, or are you too afraid of failing?

We have an intro-to-the-Internet course, taught by my colleague David Carlson, in which the students must learn to write XHTML and CSS by hand. It’s not a programming course. What they learn is quite basic. But they learn enough to let them know if they like that kind of work — or not.

This is quite important, because if they do like it, we have a second course that will allow them to go a lot further toward designing original projects. I’m an advocate of offering things to students so that they can try them on for size and see how they fit. If one single Web design course attempts to cram everything in — from beginner to expert — it’s going to have a negative effect on many of the students. If instead the goal is for all to attain a moderate level of competency, then almost everyone can succeed.

The result: Those students can then sit down at a CMS and understand very well what they are dealing with. They are also equipped to handle basic troubleshooting and corrections — which every CMS requires on a daily basis. Several weeks of CSS and XHTML practice will enable most of them to tweak bad code and fix it.

So, for educators — get your journalism students to set up and modify blogs as part of their classes. I mean ANY class, including reporting and editing. It can be done, and it won’t put a great burden on you; you can adjust a couple of existing assignments and change them into blogging assignments. If you teach print design, then add some CSS and XHTML assignments. If you teach an online-only class, I’d recommend hand-coding for at least half a semester — but don’t expect the students to become programmers by the end of 15 weeks.

For journalists out there in the field — there’s a heck of a lot more to being an online journalist than HTML. I’d venture a guess that many online journalists today don’t even know HTML. Designing the page layout or the package is the job of a designer, not the reporter. But using a CMS? Writing a good headline on your blog post? Writing good link text and choosing appropriate material to link to? That’s what online journalists are doing — as well as uploading photos and audio files, creating spreadsheets, and making mashups.

So, don’t sweat the HTML — learn a little, start using a CMS, and it will take you a long way.