Good news at CUNY: My colleague Sandeep Junnarkar has been promoted to my old post as director of the interactive journalism program. I’ve been pushing for this to happen for sometime because, truth is, Sandeep has been doing all the hard work to manage and improve the program since even before I started directing the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY.

I’m proud to say that not a bit of the interactive curriculum I wrote when the school started six years ago is still in force. With Sandeep’s inspiration, leadership, and experience, we’ve changed it all, updating constantly to take account of our lessons learned as faculty, of new opportunities, new needs, and new technologies (who’d have guessed six years ago that we’d be teaching Twitter?).

When we started the school, students were required to select a media speciality: print, broadcast, or interactive (just as I had to in my j-school days, picking newspapers). We soon saw that this was not the path to creating a truly converged curriculum. So the faculty and administration quickly agreed to eliminate the requirement and instead we teach all students all media, requiring them to work across media as they continue through our program. The track of courses we started with — Interactive I, II, III — has been disassembled as Sandeep and our interactive colleagues and the curriculum committee have reassembled them with innovative new modules in technology, web video, data, photography, and independent studies, along with my course in entrepreneurial journalism. That work continues. It is never done. That’s just the point of interactive.

From the start, Sandeep has been a great friend and colleague and I wanted to publicly congratulate him on a move well-deserved. The program I had the honor to help start could not be in better hands.