Michele K. Jones

I returned from the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication yesterday afternoon and slept for 12 hours last night. It was an exhausting, but interesting and motivating week. Because I’m on the job market, I spent much of my time in interviews and didn’t have as much opportunity to attend panels and presentations as I would like. (Not that I”m complaining– it’s good to be in job interviews!)

From what I did hear, including my conversations with representatives from schools who are hiring assistant professors of journalism, the overarching theme of this year’s conference was that journalism is in major upheaval and journalism educators don’t know exactly what to do about that.

That theme was the topic of a research panel where which I presented a paper titled “What is Taught & What is Sought: An Analysis of Online Journalism Course Syllabi and Job Ads.”  My two co-panelists, Serena Carpenter of Arizona State University and Zhegjia Liu of Iowa State University presented papers with similar themes. Basically, we all looked at what journalism employers were wanting in their new hires in order to suggest what we should be teaching in j-schools and programs. The discussion that followed was interesting.

There has always been the debate in journalism education about whether to emphasize a broad-based liberal arts curriculum or teach mostly professional skills, including specific technical skills. With the emphasis on online journalism, this debate grows a bit louder: should we teach Flash, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, etc. or should we emphasize the concepts behind communication online and encourage students to explore content fields, such as political science, health, or business?  What will best prepare them for their professional lives?

My thoughts, some of which were echoed in the research panel and in various conversations I had during the week, and are based on the study I did and my own personal observations and professional experience:

• Skills will prepare students for their first job. But the technology changes rapidly and students need to be equipped with the knowledge and critical-thinking skills necessary to identify and self-teach whatever new programs come along. Therefore, spending a lot of time on Flash or advanced programming is a waste. Let the students with an aptitude for that pursue those skills further, but don’t force-feed it to all journalism students beyond the introductory level.
• Writing, reporting and editing skills never get old. Those are the backbones of good journalists. The new needs are for journalists who can write and report in a variety of ways. So if you have students who want to learn to be newspaper reporters and not worry about anything else, tell them they’ve got another think coming. Likewise, if your photojournalism students think they don’t need to write, they need a bit of a wake-up call. Students need to learn to write for online audiences, for video, for audio, and for professional publications. And they need to write short, breaking stories and long-form features. And they need to know the difference and when each style is appropriate.
• New journalists should be jacks or janes-of-all-trades who are masters of at least one. In other words, they need to be media generalists, but be particularly skilled in at least one area and have strong expertise in a content area. The best example of this new type of journalist is a friend of mine who went to Medill at Northwestern and got her degree with a specialization in broadcast. She then went to do an internship at the Tampa News Center where she worked with TV, newspaper, and online, got hired on as a newspaper reporter after her internship, and now works as an online video journalist in the White House Press Corps for the AP. She can do everything, but she can do video particularly well and now she has a focus in politics. (When we worked together, she also put in 18 hour days on the regular, so being an insane Superwoman is also apparently part of the recipe for success.)
• Employers also want certain abstract, intangible qualities in their employees that are hard for us to teach and even more difficult for us to find out if students are learning. The ability to work collaboratively while still being an independent self-starter is an example. Students need to be able to work with people from a variety of departments and organizations, not just other journalists. They also need to be able to take initiative and direct themselves. The term that we use a lot now is “entrepreneurial.” Flexibility and adaptability are key. The problem with this is that it is impossible to recreate the professional world in the classroom or lab. So, emphasize the need for internships, job-shadowing, work on student media, and practicums to get this type of experience.

So what else do we as journalism educators need to do? More bullet points:

• I think we need to continue breaking down the walls between the sequences and departments to enable students to be media generalists. No one should major in broadcast journalism or print journalism. Students can specialize in video production or news writing, but those are specializations that come after gaining a familiarity with everything.
• Work on redefining what online journalism and multimedia actually are, because it’s changing in and of itself. Many schools equate online journalism with visual communication, specifically graphics, photo and Flash. Certainly, that’s a big part of it, but what online journalism is really about is having myriad ways to present information to many different audiences. Flash presentations with audio and video are great ways to tell a story and present features and human interest stories. For presenting investigative journalism, database-driven mashups that incorporate maps or searchable interfaces might be the way to go. And for breaking news, blog-style reporting and social media like Twitter might be the best options. We have to broaden our concepts of what online is all about.
• Learn from students, professionals and audiences. This involves leaving egos at the door of the classroom and acknowledging that we are not authorities on journalism here to bestow our wealth of knowledge on previously empty minds of students. We have experience and knowledge to guide our students, but we have to continue to learn constantly.

This means opening our minds to new technologies and concepts and letting go of the so-called “good old days” of newspaper and broadcast journalism. Instead of lamenting losses (though I realize it’s hard if we’re talking about job losses), recognize the promise of this new age of journalism and be excited about all the possibilities. One of the keynote speakers at AEJMC, Carole Simpson, formerly of ABC News and now at Emerson College in Boston, talked about those good old days and the fact that many veteran journalists are being dragged kicking and screaming into the new era. That attitude is not productive. No one needs to kick and scream. Instead, embrace and seize the opportunities.