The Web began its shift towards journalism in 1994, when two seminal events occurred: Canada's first publication online, eye went live in March, and in October HotWired—the first major webzine—came online.

Over the past few years, journalism schools have started to take online journalism as a serious part of the fourth estate. Some offer it only as adjuncts to the student publication, but others have taken it a step further.

A Canadian pioneer is the School of Journalism at Halifax's University of King's College. Headed up Stephen Kimber, the school began an email service in early 1993 called Morning Line along with an online editing course.

One year later, NovaNewsNet went live on the Web. As far as I can tell, it's Canada's earliest example of true online journalism. Now, four years—and four redesigns—later the site has a solid subscriber base, and given its local content, a dedicated readership.

More importantly, the school is making a strong effort to train journalists in the online medium. "The thing I'm happiest about is that we're attempting to develop an online writing format rather than simply using conventional news story formats," Kimber said.

"I'm not sure how successful that's been but it at least gets everyone thinking about this as a new medium with new possibilities and challenges."

Each term, senior students spend half a term on the print newspaper, and the other working online. Reporters at NovaNewsNet start at 7 in the morning, complying local, national, and international news digests that'll be posted to the site and sent out to their subscribers.

In addition to the digests, students are given one day to produce a fully researched and reported story, and are given two weeks to develop a news feature and a special feature report.

But the 'grammar' of online journalism is also taught; students learn HTML, Web design, as well as online researching. Kimber, and thereby the school itself, is not content to repurpose news stories by dropping in some HTML tags.

"(Online services) will need a new kind of journalist—technically adept, editorially savvy, graphically creative—to make this medium live up to its potential."

And grads from the university's program have taken their skills to some media companies that might not have hired otherwise. Traditional companies like Wall Street Journal Interactive, the BBC, PBS Online, as well as new media like CNET, MSNBC, and Yahoo! have all hired grads.

This school year, King's College added a new course to its online suite of courses, one that lets students develop documentary project-orientated Web sites. And more changes are in the works:

"(The) faculty is considering revamping the entire program," said Kimber, "which would likely see online become a separate stream instead of simply part of the print stream."

Were that to happen, King's College would become the first Canadian university that I'm aware of giving people a chance to concentrate in a online journalism. Kimber feels it's a growth area, and one that's not yet set in its ways.

With few webzines offering true online journalism, especially in Canada, the more J-schools can produce new media-literate journalists the better. It's good for the school, the graduate, and the industry.