This article, written by New School faculty, Heather Chaplin, highlights the launch of the new Journalism + Design program.

Heather Chaplin is an assistant professor of journalism at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, and the director of the Journalism + Design Program.

Here is an excerpt, full text is here.

“Journalism + Design is about experimentation and innovation. That’s the whole reason we started this thing — to build a community of forward-thinking practitioners and students who want to invent what journalism could be like in the future. In other words, I’m asking our students to do things they’ve never done before. But what I perhaps didn’t realize is this meansI’m doing things I’ve never done before.”

“Journalists are required to master a lot skills these days. They have to be adept at video and audio, as well as writing. They should know some coding, how to deal with data — the list gets bigger every year. But increasingly, I find myself thinking that my most important task is to help students become comfortable with discomfort. If my students are to become the journalism innovators of the future, they can expect to be surrounded by uncertainty, fear, and failure all the time. They’ll never know where they’re going until they get there. And then when they’ve gotten there, it’s likely everything will have changed and they’ll be back to innovating.”