You had two people from the CU Independent in the class, yet when I asked if anyone blogged or wrote for the online publication of any sort only one person raised their hand? I will stick with the observation I made: a class on journalism and mass communications, a class of seniors less than two months away from graduation, should have more than one out of 25 students writing with some frequency for the online world. If people were shy and in fact almost everyone in the room is contributing a blog or online publication, mea culpa, I’ll apologize and feel much better about CU’s School or Journalism and Mass Communication.

You can shoot the messenger, you can talk about how I don’t exhibit “journalistic training”, that’s fine. But you can look at any number of trends in the newspaper business (as an example) to see how the world is turning away from traditional journalism and towards blogs, online reporting and opinion, and yes, highly opinionated writers who don’t have any formal training at all.

I knew we’d lost the thread of what I wanted to discuss, when I was accused of not writing frequently enough to develop good grammar. At that point I gave up on the conversation. Let’s hope this doesn’t similarly devolve.

Oh, and did you know that I asked whether I could attend senior presentations so I could learn more about what’s going on in the department, and whether I could meet some of the students doing great stuff, and was summarily – and rudely – rejected? It’s hard to fact check, and hard to post a retraction or update, if all I get is the rhetoric of a few, don’t you think?

My core point remains: are CU Journalism students learning how to be successful in the extraordinarily fluid world of online/print hybrids and blogs? I’m listening. Here’s a fact I’d like to see: what percentage of students are employed in the field 90 days after graduation?