The newspaper you're currently holding in your hands may be obsolete within the course of a few decades, according to three-time Emmy winner and Experimental College Lecturer Glenda Manzi.
Manzi, who teaches the course "Television in the Age of Youtube," has focused her efforts on educating Jumbos about the constantly changing face of the media in the wake of new technologies.
"What happens when the newspapers don't have as much money because the advertisers are going online? What happens to investigative journalism? Who's going to pay for that?" Manzi said. "Old media, old mainstream media, is facing a huge disruption in its business model as a result of the Internet. [But] I don't think that is a bad thing."
Manzi speaks from experience. Raised in Indianapolis, Ind. as the second-youngest of seven children, she remembers her first experience as a journalist, when she decided to create a bi-weekly family newspaper.
"I might have been six, seven years old," she said. "And [the newspaper] had things like, 'The Baugh family cat, Kitty Lou, was lost for two days.'"
Things progressed quickly for the budding writer. After working as a college reporter at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Manzi went on to write for a series of newspapers until she moved to Boston with her husband, who was studying at the Fletcher School.
"I wanted to cover public affairs, stories that meant something," she said, remembering how desperately she'd wanted to escape from the confines of a particularly boring beat she'd worked on. "I'm like, 'Excuse me, I am not covering garden parties,'" she said.
Manzi segued from print journalism to news radio and eventually moved to Los Angeles to work for Newsweek Magazine. There, she began to learn about television and developed an intense affinity for documentaries.
After a final move back to Boston, Manzi finally joined the public television station WGBH-TV, where she spent the majority of her career producing documentaries that would eventually land her three Emmy awards.
"I like television the best because it involves all the mediums," she said. "Especially now, with the Internet, it involves text, visual and audio."
At Tufts, Manzi has taken her expansive knowledge of each type of medium, along with her observations of the Internet's effect on media, and created a course focusing on the changing face of media.
Offered for the first time this spring, "Television in the Age of YouTube" is a dynamic course, changing almost as quickly as the subject upon which it focuses.
"I would say 50 percent of [the syllabus] has been thrown out because the subject matter that I am teaching changes every single day," she said. "It's a moving target, the Internet and media. So if I were to name the class now ... it would be called, 'Media Literacy in the Age of the Internet' ... I really want kids to be media-literate about new media."
And for those who expected a course with the name "YouTube" in the title to consist of watching clips of panda bears sneezing, guess again. Rarely visiting YouTube.com herself, the former news reporter uses the Web site as an example of how entertainment through media is growing in variety and popularity.
"Some people think YouTube is just a garbage heap of junk," she said. "I disagree .... To me, YouTube is just another form of entertainment. I can go play my PS3, I can go to the movie theater, I can watch television ... or I can go on the Internet and watch YouTube videos."
Manzi educates her students on the inner workings of online journalism, blogging, and the phenomenon of online social networks.
"[It's] the whole concept of the Internet creating a democratization of the media world so that there's no longer these big gatekeepers," she said. "Everybody has a distribution tool called the Internet."
In spite of her long history in the field of traditional print journalism, Manzi is surprisingly excited about the possibility of a media revolution. Citing the ease of blogging, home video and the ability to reach huge audiences through the World Wide Web, Manzi's feelings about the future of the media are positive.
"I think it's great," she said, turning to her own MacBook Pro laptop to log online. "Because to me, the Internet is a platform that allows a leveling of the playing field so that a guy, a soldier in Iraq, tells his own story in a blog as opposed to it coming through the newspaper or the TV reporter that's there."
As the traditional media style Manzi grew to know so closely begins to decay, Manzi advises her students to embrace the attitude of the do-it-yourself revolution.
"Go online, create a blog," she said. "You don't need a newspaper to distribute what you report or what you have to say ... [and] if you're good, you can reach millions of people."
