:: suzanne yada ::

Ryan Sholin was awesome enough to invite me to a Skype interview that was featured on PBS’s IdeaLab about tonight’s CollegeJourn.com chat (8-11 p.m. EST). If you don’t know about it, click here, then join us here. But if you can’t make it, read the recap that will inevitably be posted at CollegeJourn.com, and watch this here:

It was a fun interview, but I tend to ramble when I speak, so let me emphasize a couple of points:

• Yes, j-schools should be weeding out students who aren’t going to cut it. There are simply more journalism students than jobs. Perhaps we should stop coddling the tagalongs. And perhaps deficiencies in the journalism curriculum help sort out the people who are there to get a degree only, and those self-starters who see something they need to learn and will go out and learn it, whether or not there’s a class offered.
• Fancy modern tools are great. Telling stories is better. I will stand by that and plan to emphasize that in tonight’s chat.
• By show of hands, how many students know they can directly approach whoever sets the curriculum at their school?
• I want to give proper credit to my own school at San Jose State University. During many weeks of the CollegeJourn chats, I realize that I am lucky to have professors who at least acknowledge the need for new media. There’s still room for improvement, there always is. But most of my concerns about the future of journalism are not aimed towards the SJSU faculty. They’re doing the best they can.

I did want to clarify one point: I said print is dying. That’s not the full truth. The INFLUENCE of print is diminishing and the demand for print-side jobs are on their way out, which makes it even more important to shake old-school professors awake from their belief that they should teach nothing but print skills. However, there are still niches available for print, so it should still be included as one of many things students should learn.

Here’s some specific contexts where print still makes a lot of sense, off the top of my head:

• Free publications, particularly in low-income neighborhoods or downtown areas.
• Coffee shops.
• Waiting rooms.
• In-depth weeklies or monthlies, publishing articles too long to be read comfortably at a computer. That is, until e-readers become as commonplace as books, which still has a long way to go.
• Public transportation – planes, trains and buses. Again, until e-readers become ubiquitous.
• College campuses.

Yes, I said college campuses.

Print makes sense there because of its small geographic circulation (the campus and its neighborhood), the advertising revenue and, perhaps most importantly, its lack of competition for attention.

Look at the way students pick up the paper. They walk to class, minding their own business, perhaps thinking about how boring their next teacher is going to be. Then they see a newsstand and remember that yes, there is a campus publication, and they pick it up, just in case class is going to be as boring as they feared.

If the publication was primarily online, what would compel any student to go there first instead of Facebook or MySpace? The only chance you have of getting read online is to post an article that went viral in other classmates’ Facebook news feed.

Another argument for print, which comes from a surprising source: I stumbled on this recap from a student Editors’ Day conference in Southern California (full disclosure: I participated heavily in JACC when I was editor in chief at College of the Sequoias). I was completely surprised to see one of the top complaints from students is that instructors push new media too hard.

It’s the students who still want to focus on print. And why not? Anyone can post a blog; not everyone appears in print. And because print still makes the most sense for college campuses, news staffs are already stretched thin just trying to put out a quality newspaper.

Students want to produce in print, and students want to read print. Most of the money is made from print. So what’s the problem?

The problem is after graduation.

Not every journalism student is going to be employed in print niches. That’s why it’s so important to diversify. But because print still makes sense on the college campus, how can we ask them to do more video, audio, blogging and multimedia for a publication that they 1) typically aren’t paid to work for and 2) may only be taking as a requirement for graduation?

I think we better figure out a way, and quick.

We’re going to try and limit (or carefully control) the “print is dead” discussion at tonight’s CollegeJourn.com chat. But as long as it’s relevant to the subject, we will carefully tread the subject. It’s is the main reason why I am blogging here: to get it out of my system and be fresh and ready.

So join us. 8-11 p.m. EST.