James Loney

I labeled it as recession paranoia and ignored it (at first). After all, I’m a Radio and Television Arts student, I live within the safety net of a university, I have nothing to lose — right? Wrong.

Even the university is feeling the crunch. The operating budget used to run my program with will be reduced by 5% according to a recent email sent out to students. This has translated into a reduction in table I and II (non-core courses, think something along the lines of theory/production electives for radio and television students).

However, when examining what’s on the chopping block, I just can’t help but notice a trend or two. Below, I have posted a list of courses that are being canceled in Fall 2009/Winter 2010 due to low enrollment demonstrated over two years. While my peers seem to be content taking traditional broadcasting courses designed for conventional broadcasting business models that worked fine in a pre-internet age of scarcity (think tv commercial waste models, averaged-out Nielson audience metrics, tax credits to fund Canadian productions,…) I see little evidence that the School of Radio and Television Arts is rejecting tradition to embrace new business realities in a networked digital environment unaffected by limits of channel capacity.

Producing for the Internet doesn’t mean just posting your 22 minute episode onto an IP-video service on some broadcaster’s website. RTA has an obligation to respect the new online networks that displace conventional (satellite, terrestrial broadcasting, cable, DVDs) channels of distribution. Many people in my generation are now ditching their TV sets and using IP-video services (many of while are illegal but still rival the quality of over-compressed high definition satellite and cable service) to view content that they would have normally received over terrestrial or cable systems. Why are we still being taught to create (primarily for traditional methods of distribution) when such a paradigm shift is taking place? Are we really being trained to provide the YouTube generation an alernative where they can find quality programming targeted directly to them?

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are promising courses like digital media (intermediate and advanced) that enable students to specialize in the newer areas of our industry, but these are production courses not designed to focus in-depth on business models. Using Flash to design the latest IP-video platform’s front-end is great, but if you don’t have a client to pitch the project to because you didn’t study the changing business climate last year when you graduated, than you’re purely out of luck.

Courses on this upcoming academic year’s chopping block were cut due to low enrollment or folded into other similar courses if possible. But we can’t dismiss the fact that the student body as “course consumers” have been bred into an RTA culture that I believe hasn’t fully realized/promoted the displacing potential of non-traditional delivery/business models.

Does it not seem ironic that Advanced Media Management, Legal Aspects of Interactive Media, Economics of Media and others are on the course chopping block this year? Call me crazy, isn’t the idea of future course offerings being based on prior demand, despite being in an age where more consumers are going digital by the day kind of odd? How can you empower next year’s graduates to deal with tomorrow’s changing business models and methods of distribution when you’re living in past trends?

I’ll leave my valued readers to contemplate this question.

Electronic Media Sales (Curriculum from this course will be folded in BDC 901 – Advertising in Electronic Media)
Advanced Media Management (Curriculum from this course will be folded into BDC 402 – Management & Regulation)
TV Distribution (Curriculum will be folded into BDC 907 – TV Programming and BDC 908 – Independent Production I)
Legal Aspects of Interactive Media (Curriculum will be folded into BDC 915 – Legal Issues in Media)
Economics of Media
Media Research – Theory & Practice
Media Restoration & Content Management (possible course substitutions offered through Image Arts)
Special Project: Writing (will alternate each year with Writing for Animation)
3D Animation (possible course substitutions offered through Image Arts)
Digital Graphic & Web Design
PA, AD & Continuity
Corporate Media Production (Curriculum will be folded in BDC 917 – Public Relations)