The Internet has clearly changed the face of newspapers. But has it changed the journalism schools that prep budding writers for a murkier digital future?

That’s the subject of a piece in the online Daily Intel column of New York Magazine which looks at Columbia University’s esteemed J-school.

Bill Grueskin, the school’s new dean of academic affairs, admits that while “we’ve gotten pretty good at teaching the skills” of the new media, in terms of “understanding the integration of those skills into the creation and distribution of journalism, I don’t think we’re where we need to be right now.”

Grueskin wants to make multimedia skills and storytelling mandatory via the school’s core course, “Reporting and Writing 1.”

To which, RW1 program coordinator Ari Goldman quipped “F*ck new media.” He went on to describe new media training as “playing with toys,” according to a student, and characterized the entire digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

The issue was recently brought to the fore when The New York Times announced that its new hyper-local blog experiment “The Local” would be assisted by journalism students not from Columbia but from the City University of New York.

Making the change won’t be easy. There are practical considerations as well as philosophical ones. Because many of the tenured professors haven’t worked in new media themselves, their classes require the addition of tech-savvy adjuncts. The New York Magazine article quotes journalism school dean Nicholas Lemann as worried about “blowing out the budget.”

Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon, wrote on his blog that there’s no choice. “We need journalism schools like Columbia to take the journalistic traditions that they have long preserved and carry them forward into the digital age. But they will not be able to play that role until they take these new media forms seriously.”

Read the full New York Magazine story here.