We
issued the call, and we got an overwhelming reaction. Here is what a number of our most bright — and deadline-oriented — student journalists and teachers had to say about innovation in our journalism schools:
- We need to develop skills for reporting in real-life communities.
- It needs to be collaborative: students and professors need to take risks together.
- Students need to be taught skills in other media sources as well as print and online.
- Business courses must be a part of journalism curriculum.
- Students can teach each other about video, design, social media & etc.
- Students should be taught how to develop content and how to receive revenue from that content.
- Students must know how to edit audio and video content.
- Students need to be radical journalists.
Here’s the full roundup:
- Joe Grimm (@newsrecruiter), who is a visiting professor at Michigan State University and writes the must-read Ask A Recruiter blog at Poynter, confesses here that he has a lot to learn about new media tools, and he’s already learned so much from his students. But he also writes, “I am proud of some of the things we do and sometimes find it is the professors, not the students, who are leading the charge.” Still, he is always wanting “to learn and do more” and looks forward to discovering something new.
- Tim Burden (@TimBurden) says in his post that he knows too many interns who end up miserable in their placements and are seriously thinking about abandoning journalism altogether. J-schools need to tell students straight up just how difficult it’s going to be to get jobs — and to get jobs students will want to keep. If it means emphasizing non-traditional skills to give a competitive edge, then by all means, do it.
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Jim Stovall wrote a positive post about what the University of Tennessee’s journalism education is doing right. 1: The staff for TNJN.com, student-operated news Web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at UT, holds a weekly staff meeting that draws at least 35-45 students. ”Their enthusiasm is palpable,” the post said. University of Tennessee also founded an organization of campus news sites, educators, students and professions — and anyone can join. More info here.
- Andy Dickinson (@digidickinson), a journalism professor at University of Central Lancashire, UK, updated the five W’s of journalism to additionally cover online content and created a checklist which turns the gathering process into content. In his post, “A Process and content checklist,” he writes, “By thinking digital from the start you can begin to create content for the newspaper AND for the web.”
- Lauren Rabaino (@laurenmichell), a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and mulitmedia editor at mustangdaily.net, sets the tone of the “Bring A Professor” Collegejourn event this Sunday as students calling on their professors to join them in taking risks. ”The classroom should foster that innovation, not hinder it,” writes Rabaino. “We can take the risks together.” Rabaino sets out a good foundation for how journalism courses can be recreated at her school and what she seeks in a journalism professor.
- Joey Baker (@joeybaker) responds to Lauren in his blog post and outlines exactly what his school, Syracuse University, can do to become relevant again. For one, he suggests a radical idea of eliminating the broadcast concentration and making three tracks instead: a writing track, a visual-content track, and a tech track. [EDIT: Joey responded to this post with this clarification: "I'm not suggesting that we eliminate broadcast journalism study, just that it, and photojournalism hare similar enough to be folded together."] Other ideas he brings up include having students teach social media and introducing media business courses. But he argues against spending a lot of time and effort into teaching every single beginning student how to shoot video.
- Sarah Wood (@hidama), a senior at Coe College, Iowa, focuses her post on risktaking. “If these are radical times then we ought to be radical journalists,” writes Wood. A bullet list of Wood’s expectations for journalism education, including “business models on how to create revenue for an individual’s content or a corporation’s content.” Wood ends her post with attitude, “and if I’m learning my essential skills of online media and journalism on my own, then bravo to me and give me my money back!”
- Jackie Hai (@jackiehai), a freelance videographer and designer and senior at UMass Amherst, Massachusetts, presents the idea that the old and new are to learn from each other. Hai argues the point that new media skills isn’t the only thing that students need. “There is the lack of guidance when it comes to developing skills for reporting in real-life communities,” writes Hai, “I think that’s something college professors can teach us right now, whether they “catch up” or not.”
- Kat Wells talks here about how her internship at a major daily opened her eyes to the importance of design and the pressure of writing headlines quickly. She advocates journalism professors to help students use the Internet to its fullest potential and include radio and tv broadcasting as part of the training, and she pleads with them to be 100% honest and offer advertising and PR as options for students who just may not make it in the journalism world.
- Suzanne Yada (@suzanneyada ) responds here to her own Seesmic video question that she wants to see more entrepreneurial journalism and social media skills taught in the j-school, but red tape and bureaucracy can hold professors back from incorporating these skills in the curriculum. She still agrees that the nuts and bolts has to be about how to tell a story.
- Daniel Bachhuber’s (@danielbachhuber) post and Seesmic video said there is no way professors can “catch up,” but it’s not a bad thing. In fact, he doesn’t know what role professors will play in the “one-to-many” style of top-down education to a “many-to-many” style of networked education. Journalism schools, he argues, need to become catalysts for education via experimentation. He also suggests dropping multiple-choice testing and making curriculum collaborative.
- Karen Kho (@karenkho) said in a Seesmic video response that she wants to see crossover among new media, communication and journalism programs to eliminate the huge amount of focus on print. She said most of what she’s learned was in her own time and at conferences. What she’d like to see in the classroom: blogging, Twitter, flash and Soundslides, just to name a few.
- Mark Coughlan (@mark_coughlan), a freelance journalist from Dublin, Ireland suggests here it’s not a matter of how professors can train students, but rather can professors train students for the real world? He argues there is no point in teaching journalists to be Flash or Dreamweaver experts because newspapers can hire programmers to do the technical work. He likens learning Flash today to learning HTML 10 years ago — eventually, there’s an easier and more user-friendly way to do it. A must, though, are audio and video editing.
In addition to fresh posts whipped up just for this occasion, we also received some classic links related to the topic of revamping j-schools:
Suggested links:
And in case you didn’t know about these amazing resources:
Journalism education resource links:
Now, get researching and come prepared to join the discussion Sunday, Feb. 22, 8-11 p.m. EST (5-8 p.m. PST).