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J-schools need to teach online news delivery
Reporter: John Goodlove & Nick Bergus
The Fifth Estate
Oddly, as students graduate from their college journalism programs this month, there will still be some — many? — graduates who have no idea how to distribute news online.
This predicament begs two questions: How can a journalism program
remain relevant if it allows students to avoid what will be the next dominant news-distribution system? And how can these future journalists sleep at night?
The omission isn’t always inadvertent; some faculties resist adding digital tools and skills to the curriculum despite the fact that moving bytes will play a huge part in the future of the journalism.
So why, with the news industry hemorrhaging traditional jobs, would journalism schools refuse to address this knowledge deficiency?
The argument for leaving technology out of the journalism curriculum usually goes like this: The shift from analog to digital news doesn’t change the fundamentals of journalism. Regardless of medium or ever-changing technology, good reporters gather and verify information obsessively and then package it for ease of consumption. Why, then, should we waste precious class time teaching more than solid reporting, clear writing and good ethics?
But what that argument ignores is that journalism in the digital age requires journalists to use new tools. What could once only be a 15-inch story in the paper can now be a narrated slideshow, an animated infographic or an interactive database (beamed to a mobile phone for added convenience).
“We need to increase strongly the technological component,” said David Perlmutter, professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, who will take over as director of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication in July. “I think the students want it, and I think the industry wants it. We can't expect (students) to get the technology later.”
There doesn’t need to be a tradeoff between teaching the technological tools and teaching old fashioned writing and reporting. Teaching students how to record interviews for radio or podcasting, for example, has the added bonus of giving instructors a glimpse of a task that often takes place outside of class and help correct bad interviewing techniques. Requiring students to blog forces them to write regularly and consume enough news to regularly find fodder for posts. Twitter can teach students about concise writing, argues Steve Buttry, Gazette Communications’s information content conductor. “We have way too many ledes in newspapers that wouldn’t fit in a tweet.”
It’s not just technology that is getting short shrift in journalism education. Journalism schools must add training in entrepreneurial skills and offer a thorough grounding in writing, reporting and ethics, Mr. Buttry and Mr. Perlmutter both said.
“That adaptability, a willingness to learn new things, that’s going to be the most important training we give students,” Mr. Perlmutter said.
But after journalism schools incorporate technology into their programs, they may still struggle with the question about the value of a journalism degree.
“A parent might ask me, ‘What job will my son or daughter get (with a journalism degree)?’” said Mr. Perlmutter. “I say I have no idea because I don't know what are going to be the jobs five years from now. The jobs our students are going to have 10 years from now haven't even been invented yet.”
He believes academia, not corporate media, will lead the revolution by reimagining curriculum, listening to students and adapting to the marketplace. “The bazaar is open. Let’s try anything and see whether it works,” Mr. Perlmutter said. “We have to have that spirit at schools of journalism and mass communication as they do in Silicon Valley.”
It’s safe to say the traditional media jobs are dead. No longer will a journalism student work for a large media outlet after graduation, stay with one company and work in a niche for decades.
New graduates will be “working for themselves, or they’ll be permanent freelancers,” Perlmutter said. “They will be competing against other freelancers, or they'll be banding together with other people to do startup companies.”
Graduating Coe College senior Sarah Woods is trying to figure out where to start. “Students are stumbling around in the dark trying to define what makes them a journalist and the list gets longer the longer as journalists in the real world are doing the same,” she said.
While her school doesn’t offer journalism as a major, she’s taken journalism classes and helps run CollegeJourn, a weekly national online chat among students.
“Students are finding that they themselves must be capable of writing, training, balancing the budget, editing video and whipping up CSS at any moment,” she said. “Students are starting to voice concern about how they suffer from a surplus of general journalists and scarcity of journalists who specialize.”
Still, Mr. Perlmutter insists that the key innovators leading change in the information business will not be Google or Gannett, but people we haven't heard of yet.
“The future is the 18-year-olds,” he said. “They’re the people who are going to create the industry of the future.”
John Goodlove is a graduate student and teaching assistant in journalism at the University of Iowa, and a former Gazette staffer.
Nick Bergus teaches multimedia news at the UI.
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