A busy night in Boise tonight. So many great meetings and opportunities to choose from. The Idaho Press Club has a forum on the impact of the internet on television. Meanwhile over here at the Washington Group building the Boise Web Technologies meetup is hearing about PHPUnit testing and Zend Framework from Brad Benner and Rich Benton.

My position on Dreamweaver is no secret. Last fall I was talking with a colleague and journalism professor about the need for journalism schools to teach content management principles as part of their programs. A communications professional who knows nothing about Dreamweaver can have a bright future. A communications professional who knows only a little about content management is in big trouble.

After we were discussing the course yesterday evening I opened up Google Reader and read Ken Rickard's post about Amy Gahran's wonderful Poynter Online article about just this topic. Here are some of the high points from Gahran's article:

Apparently, this j-school (like many others) offers little or no training in true CMS-based tools. Their online courses focus on Dreamweaver.

That's a big problem, because tools embody mindsets. Focusing on Dreamweaver teaches exactly the wrong mindset for online journalism: that your Web site is mainly an island unto itself.

Our local public radio station is at the end of the second week of it's quarterly fund-drive and with the extra week the donations are still more than $80,000 short. I gave up quite a while ago on the station because it doesn't serve us at all well. The only brief encounters I have are the clock-radio in the morning where I haven't setup a good podcast alternative yet. Apparently KNPR is aware that we listeners will turn to podcasting but there still seems to be a disconnect when it comes to how poor their services are for listeners in Southern Nevada. With that in mind here are some suggestions that might bring listeners back and get our donations to flow to them instead of the stations producing great programming:

Though it is heresy for someone with a degree in journalism I have to agree with Unclutterer's assessment that folks would be wise to drop print newspaper subscriptions. As the article points out even in the case of papers that have paid online subscription models (i.e. Wall Street Journal) the online subscription is cheaper and has features you'll never find between the pages in the morning. Candidly the only reason to get a print paper these days would seem to be a form on information snobbery of being able to show you get the New York or Los Angeles Times while the neighbors only get the Las Vegas Review Journal. Even with commutes and assuming not everyone has an iPhone there are tools like Google's offline news reader, not to mention countless desktop RSS news reader programs. The time has clearly come that if one's interest is really in information that the laptop has replaced the newspaper. If image is worth killing trees and you don't mind not having information on a business trip and the clutter a newspaper adds then by all means keep on with the print subscription.