With more newspapers moving online, it would seem appropriate—even essential—for today’s aspiring online journalists to learn a program such as Dreamweaver, a web design and development tool. Martin Stabe suggests otherwise on his website—arguing that forcing journalists to learn this program is a “waste of time”.

Dreamweaver either proves unnecessarily complicated for those journalists whose knowledge of HTML is limited to basic bolding and italicizing tags, or inefficient for those who wish to build more dynamic, CMS-driven websites. In other words, Stabe argues that Dreamweaver either provides too much or too little in the way of programming training—depending on who’s asking.

In an article examining the same question, the Poynter Institute affirms Stabe’s argument by suggesting that Dreamweaver’s static features fail to live up to the fast-moving, dynamic pace of online news.

“Requiring journalism students to use Dreamweaver is about as useful as requiring them to learn calligraphy. It makes your content looks really pretty -- and it generally won't be worth a damn on a real journo job or project,” the Poynter website explained.

If an online journalist wants to equip herself with the tools to work in an increasingly multimedia environment, the key is to learn real CMS technology, Poynter suggested.

While it is uncertain whether journalism students will continue to learn Dreamweaver, the question raises important questions about technology’s place in today’s journalism classroom.

Source: Poynter Institute and Martinstabe.com