When you were younger you may remember your father reading the morning newspaper over breakfast. Today, however, news can be found on your phone, ipad or other mobile devices and many printed papers are going out of business.

Northeast Community College recognizes these changing times and is therefore transitioning the Journalism degree to Mass Media, which will begin this fall.

The Vice President of Educational Services, John Blaylock, says this change came about with the loss of an English teacher. It was decided then that the program of Journalism needed restructuring, it needed to break away from the English department and focus more on technology.

The planning and strategizing for this new major took administration 18 months to finalize. The final plan is to dissolve the Journalism program as a major and bring Mass Media, Mass Communications, and Journalism students under one umbrella of Mass Media.

According to Nancy Sutton Smith, the Mass Media instructor, “Journalism is the root of Mass Media, but media now represents different types of Journalism and we have to grow the program to include all the ways news is delivered.”

This degree is important to Northeast because it contains classes like video editing, media graphics, script writing and the ability to work on the Northeast student-run online newspaper, The Viewpoint. These classes will give students a solid foundation in journalism, multimedia, video and audio production and allow them to transfer into print journalism, broadcasting or film production.

Despite the fact that the programs of Broadcasting and Mass Media  require a lot of the equipment, which does tend to be expensive, the college keeps it as state of the art as possible. The Dean of Business and Technology, Dr. Wade Herley stated, “We remain close to the cutting edge, we are at least at industry standards and will remain there.”