The syllabus for the class I teach at Stanford, Digital Journalism, aka Communication 217, is now available:

Over the past two decades, shifts in media technologies, corporate structure and the organization of public life have combined to change the practice of journalism. This course explores these shifts, with an eye to seeing how they affect journalism’s role in society. At the same time, the class will introduce you to the techniques of journalism in digital media and offer you conceptual and practical tools with which to join the fray. By the end of the course, you should have a clear sense of the various ways journalists have taken up digital media and a sense of how you might use those media yourself. You should also gain a broad understanding of the ways in which recent social and economic developments have changed both the practices of journalists and the nature of the publics with whom they communicate. You will actively blog, wiki, RSS, tag, and podcast. Each class meeting will involve collaborative work in small teams, class discussions, hands-on work with participatory media, and brief lectures about the coming week’s reading. On occasion, we’ll have guests. Last year’s guests included Craig “Craigslist” Newmark, citizen journalist (and author of one of our texts) Dan Gillmor, Ross Mayfield (founder of wiki company, Socialtext), Zack Rosen (creator of the group blog for the Howard Dean campaign), Creative Commons founder Professor Lawrence Lessig, and others.