There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the professional media and higher education over the state of journalism schools.
Are they worth it? What are kids these days really learning? How are schools testing the waters in this digital era, when iPads are replacing reporter’s notebooks and pens?
There’s merit to these questions, for sure.
While I still consider myself to be a young buck (Hey, I’m not 30 yet), there’s no doubt that much of the training I received when I was a print journalism student at the Philip Merrill School of Journalism at the University of Maryland was decidedly not digital. Thankfully, I was a digital rebel in my free time.
It all started in high school, when I would build anime and pop music fan sites on GeoCities (now defunct) and I became an active participant in several online message boards and online communities, spending every spare minute on the computer. I ramped up my online activities even more once I went to college and gorged on the sweet high-speed ecstasy of the university-provided broadband. My rebellion was almost complete:
- I learned HTML and CSS by trial and error, continuing to build personal sites
- I mastered PhotoShop and perfected my GIF skills (which is very important, by the way).
- I became a mainstay on several message boards and AIM chats; we were live commentating TV events on those platforms long before Twitter came along.
- All of this led me to a leadership role with The Eclipse, the university’s black student newspaper, as the online editor for the paper.
I thought it was all coming together.
But when I took the Online Journalism class at my journalism school in 2005, we were taught to build a very basic 3-4 page website about ourselves in Microsoft FrontPage (Really? FrontPage?!). Several of my peers were mesmerized when I presented a bling’d out, highly customized site for the site’s final presentation. They asked if I’d taken programming classes but little did they know that I’d picked up many of my HTML skills by playing around on the Internet. Geocities paid off!
But those days of digital ignorance for journalism students are (thankfully) long gone.
In a great article on why entrepreneurs should stay in school (Hint: Because not everyone is Steve Jobs) by Adam Penenberg, the editor of Pando Daily and an NYU journalism professor, he explains how he’s training today’s journalism students to be as comfortable with many of the digital media tools that I sought out on my own in my spare time:
Almost every week I come across yet another critique of j-schools. They have headlines like “Journalism schools aren’t changing fast enough,” “Rebooting journalism education means constant state of change,” “Can journalism schools adapt to new media landscape?” “Where is journalism school going?” and the standard arguments go something like this: J-schools aren’t keeping up with the times and don’t adequately prepare students to succeed in this creatively destructive era. We should teach blogging, live blogging and live Tweeting, coding, curation, social media, multimedia, and Photoshop. We should expose students to new storytelling platforms like Storify and help them create their own media businesses. Sometimes it seems these pundits urge us to do everything but teach actual reporting, writing, and ethics.
I wish those who are writing about the role of journalism schools would visit us at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, or at least email me for a comment before they hit publish, because we do all of the above and more.
I’m the assistant director of the graduate level Business & Economic Reporting program. Students take half of their classes in journalism and the other half at the Stern School of business, where they are thrown in with the MBAs. In my classes, in addition to all the reporting and news writing we do, students create content strings on Storify, host their own blog, live blog, and live Tweet events, and many have been blogging for Forbes.com. Later, I’ll have students participate in an interactive treasure hunt in the library and create a Xtranormal explainer. We offer HTML and CSS coding, and a seminar on data journalism. Multimedia is required and during their time here, students learn to shoot and edit video and create photo slideshows. In another class I teach, Entrepreneurial Journalism, students create their own media businesses that they ultimately pitch it to a panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. If that’s not learning by doing, I don’t know what is.
Penenberg’s model is spot on. The digital journalists of today have to navigate the middle ground between traditional journalism (solid reporting and writing skills), programming (fluent or semi-fluent in HTML and CSS), graphic design (comfortable with PhotoShop) and marketing (attracting and building a following through social media).
Kudos to this j-school for encouraging their students to get their hands dirty early on. Though my parent’s computer served as grounds for my digital rebellion, these students can practice (and practice, and practice!) in the comfort of their own classes.
Do you think j-schools are sufficiently preparing for the digital future?
[Image: Flickr/University of Denver]
