Improving journalism education: Join us tonight!
Author: Suzanne Yada Date Posted: February 22nd, 2009 (4:40 pm)
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.
Category: journalism students
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:27 am
Speaking as someone in the field — working at a newspaper — I think you make some great points about how j-schools need to change. I work with a lot of interns, and, honestly, they don’t know as much as they need to about multi-media or blogging or new media.
Much of that, I think, is because new media is as new to j-professors as it is to working journalists, as you point out. And, just like in newsrooms, there is a bit of a class between the old and new ways of thinking. (Let’s have both. Please.)
I hope that will change. I also hope that student journalists will understand the need to embrace new media, social networking, crowdsourcing ideas and even enterpreneurship.
When I graduated from college in 1989, I had a tough time finding a job in my field. I was lucky to get a job at a weekly, making too little to live on my own. It’s never, at least in the past 20 years, been easy for journalism grads to find jobs, and the jobs don’t necessary pay well compared to other fields.
Now things will be much harder. J students won’t have the luxury of learning on the job as people in my cohort did. They’ll need to hit the ground running, ready with the print skills and new media knowledge to kind of do it all.
It’s easy as a student to think: “Oh, things aren’t that bad.” I don’t want to depress you, but it is. I don’t think that means abandon journalism. But I think it means you must embrace the future of journalism as students, and you must “get it” even more than the people who will end up hiring “get it.” The bosses who hire you likely won’t know half about new technology as you do, but you’ll get the job because you know this stuff.
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Excellent points. I’ve often thought about how the college press seems to be immune to the changes in the industry, because they’re highly localised, free, and convenient.
And have incredibly low running costs. As a matter of fact, when it was recently suggested that sub-editors were irrelevant and should be the first to go, I was struck by how quickly student journalists pick up the knack of sub-editing when they’re forced into it by small staff numbers.
I think the problem with the new media uptake is simply that college societies and organisations tend to be niche enough that there’s likely another body in most colleges (audio visual, computer clubs) sucking the talent away from the traditional media organisation. It’s not an unwillingness to change- as a matter of fact, I’d say that if the manpower and talent existed, we’d see plenty of college papers experimenting.
March 5th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Your right. Print can still service certain niche markets. Although the value of print diminished, I don’t think it will completely vanish.
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:53 pm
The problem is that so many students at the community colleges in California (and are part of JACC) are not taking the next step as journalism students. They view the newspaper as just a newspaper, and more problematic, on the same level as an interest club, with work being optional. It isn’t until the university level that it becomes a more serious environment. For these people, a lot of them just want to write – they don’t make the connection that its more than ink and paper.
I think, with new media, its what I will call the “Dr. Cheers” effect – the constant nagging for students to do something with no knowledge of how it works or how much actually goes into it. Many professors on the community college are going at new media with reckless abandon, but never take the time to cut something together or do it. They don’t see how some tools are useful, and many of them don’t learn enough to be effective teachers of those tools.