![[New] Media Savvy](http://www.umainetoday.umaine.edu/files/2009/06/media-thumb.jpg)
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story contained erroneous information about the Le Picture Book project.
Trying to define the term “new media” is like: 
- (a) Herding cats.
(b) Catching raindrops in a net.
(c) Stopping time.
(d) All of the above.
The answer, of course, is d. Part of the conundrum lies in the very essence of the term: what is new is always changing. And in the fickle world of media, new becomes old very quickly.
Is it film? Game design? Vector graphics? Art? Documentary? Does it involve websites and social networks? Animation and art? Is it a new way of looking at traditional media?
In a word, yes. But at the University of Maine, new media is so much more than that.
“The way I look at new media is as a frame of mind, as opposed to a field of technology,” says Eryk Salvaggio of Ogunquit, Maine, who is working toward a double-degree in new media and journalism. “The program is really focused on innovation and creativity, and you really can apply that to everything.”
Salvaggio hopes to use the lessons he’s learned in innovation and creativity to help traditional journalism thrive through the use of technology.
“Traditional storytelling is at the heart of journalism,” says Salvaggio, who, when he’s not in classes, works for the Bangor Daily News and the University of Maine’s student newspaper, The Maine Campus. “New media gives a new set of tools to tell that story and engage people.”
Those tools always are in flux. Software updates happen every six months, on average, and while new media has some of the most cutting-edge technology on campus, the ways students use technology are ever-changing. But the message behind the media has remained constant since the program’s inception.
The seeds of UMaine’s New Media Department were planted in the early 1990s, when a group of faculty members collaborated to introduce cross-disciplinary studies in computer science, the arts and humanities. It started as a minor and blossomed into a major in 2000.
“It really was unique, not only in the state of Maine, but in many ways, the country,” says Owen Smith, chair of UMaine’s New Media Department and a professor of art. “It truly was interdisciplinary.”
It still is, although the course of study is more formalized now than it was in its “Wild West” phase, as Smith calls it. Today, students choose two of five sequences: digital reporting and documentary production; information and interaction design; digital narrative and hypertext; time art and design; and networks and distributed creativity. The project-based curriculum allows students to tailor their studies to their own interests.
