For the better part of the last week, the redesign of the Central Michigan Life Web site has been my life apart from work at The Grand Rapids Press. So I haven’t really had much time to cruise around the Web in search of good reads on the journalism industry, social and new media, etc.
But here are two of the better ones I came across yesterday and this morning, and some of my thoughts in regard to them:
Fundamentally rebooting J school Daniel Bachhuber
This is a great read on what journalism schools need to do to keep up. How does J-school need to adapt for tomorrow’s needs? This was a question I purposely didn’t address when writing about J-schools and, from my experience, how they currently help aspiring journalists in teaching core journalistic skills.
Yes, those core skills still are important. But new ones need to be taught, and they’re not.
My J-school at Central Michigan went back and forth when deciding whether to stay accredited by the Accrediting Council on Education and Mass Communication, a distinction shared only by Michigan State University in the state. By following accreditation, the J-school had to impose credit limits for courses taken inside journalism (44 credits, including specific courses) and outside (80 minimum, including 65 in liberal arts and sciences). These requirements burdened our J-school because it sought to add an online journalism curriculum to teach Web skills and software.
After initially deciding to rid of the status because of its incompatible credit-hour limits with a desire to teach online journalism, students began an outcry that led to possible reconsideration. Former faculty even wrote in to complain.
I was vehemently against this outcry. Students weren’t doing their homework. They felt losing accreditation meant a hit to the resume without looking at what what it didn’t do for them: Give them the classes and skills they need to survive in tomorrow’s journalism. It’s the Accrediting Council’s responsibility to update its requirements for what students need and they had not done that, at least not last February.
Besides, I would argue losing any accreditation does little to nothing in hurting a resume in an industry where experience trumps everything and employers are looking for interns or new hires based on their previous work. Yes, studying at a well-recognized journalism college is helpful, but not as helpful as working with an award-winning college publication (i.e. CM Life), which is right at every CMU student’s disposal no matter what their concentration is. If CMU is worried about losing a selling point for prospective journalists, use CM Life as your selling point. You will learn these tools there better than you ever will in a classroom anyway. Bottom line.
This is not to complain about the CMU J-school. It’s making strides. Just last year, it received a renovated multimedia lab, located on the same floor as CM Life, with new Mac computers and a ton of useful software such as Final Cut, Soundslides, Adobe Creative Suite and more (thank you, former Board of Trustees chairman Jeff Caponigro). This helps students. Accreditation, in my opinion, doesn’t. At least not as much as people think.
I would ask our J-school not to sell out for what essentially is a meaningless stamp on a resume when you have so much more to gain from actual teaching of online journalism. These tools, along with social media stalwarts such as Twitter, can’t be learned overnight.
Speaking of teaching online journalism…
How to teach online journalism: Six questions Mindy McAdams
This is a good perspective piece on what journalism classrooms should be incorporating. CMU’s J-school does a lot of things to help students with multimedia – for example, in my Photo Editing class, we had two Soundslides projects in addition to laying out photos on centerpiece pages. Other classes get dirty with InDesign and Photoshop work. The online journalism curriculum offers Web work with Dreamweaver (although too much emphasis on the Dreamweaver aspect instead of regular HTML and CSS, from what I hear.
CMU’s J-school could use new techniques to compliment old ones, such as “speed stories,” in which students have to spend their 50- to 75-minute class time to go around campus, find a story, conduct at least two interviews, return to class and write the story. Why not incorporate video and/or audio work somewhere in there?
I’m also hoping classrooms incorporate Twitter, RSS and/or Facebook in some way. I’m afraid social media and aggregators have no place in most journalism classrooms right now. A major problem, if you ask me.
Also, be sure to check the links at the bottom of this page. All great reads, too.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at August 3, 2009
Journalism, Social Media