The inspiration for this post comes from this well written piece by Lauren Rabaino (who you should be following on Twitter, too, if you’re at all interested in journalism).
It was around the summer of 2009 when I began participating in Twitter chats such as #journchat, #wjchat and #collegejourn. If you’re unfamiliar with these, they are weekly discussions on Twitter that people participate in by using the hashtag in their tweets. I began getting involved in some serious talks about how to improve college media, in particular. What do student newspapers need to do? What aren’t the departments teaching?
The consensus we reached in 2009: Student newspapers need to move off College Publisher, innovate and adapt to the web. J-schools need to engrain the web into their core curriculum and spend money wisely on tools the students need.
Reading Lauren’s post got me to thinking. We’re nearly three months into 2011. Dozens of Twitter chats and college journalism conferences around the country have passed. What has changed since 2009? Practically nothing.
Student newspapers are still on College Publisher. Many more student newspapers haven’t moved to a web-first workflow. J-students are still not inspired to work online. J-schools are still overrun by old-timer professors who have little to no clue where their industry is going. (And if they do, all they’re doing is whining about how journalism is nothing like it used to be)
This is the time when college media needs to step up, when the young generation of journalists come in and steer this profession into the right direction… yet very few are taking the wheel.
What I’m seeing is a severe lack of leadership on the part of both the J-schools and the student newspapers. Instead of taking the risk of reinventing the wheel and innovating, they’re coasting. Doing the bare minimum, going risk-free and making menial changes when large changes are called for.
Sound familiar? That’s because newspapers are doing the exact same thing — and it’s costing heavy losses in revenue and jobs. There’s nobody willing to step in and say, “Okay, we really need to do something everything different.”
To me, the root of the problem in college media lies in the J-school. There are many J-schools, including my alma mater (unfortunately), who are still offering “online journalism” as a curriculum option within the department.
Are you kidding me? If you’re looking for a way to kill a journalism student’s inspiration to innovate, there it is. “Online journalism” is not an alternative or a specialized form of journalism — it’s journalism, period. And it’s the wave of the profession’s present and future. There’s a reason why I’m typing “online journalism” in quotes — it’s because I despise the term. It’s today’s journalism. It’s the future of journalism. Professors today should teach how to link like they teach how to write a lede.
To make matters worse — One CMU professor, who will remain nameless, taught an “online journalism” class last year without owning a cell phone. When it came to the video editing unit of the class, this person needed someone else to teach because they couldn’t teach it to themselves in time for the unit. Is this what journalism education has come down to? How can our industry’s leaders inspire students to work online when they absolutely stink at teaching it?
Unfortunately, I think this negative attitude toward “online journalism” reverberates into the student newsroom more than some might think. Many student newspapers take pride in being independent from the J-schools they’re commonly associated with, but when “online journalism” is treated like an option — an alternative — by the professors and leaders across the hall, it influences more than a handful of students to do the same thing. I’m here to learn how to be a reporter, why should I bother to learn the web? Why should I use social media?
Easy answer — because if you plan on being a journalist in the next decade, it will be your job. Period. Too bad your professors won’t tell you that.
Want to make a difference? Want to try something new? Want the chance to turn things around at your J-school or student newspaper? Here’s a list of three things I dare journalism students to do before they graduate.
Yeah. I know I wrote it in July. Unfortunately, it’s just as relevant today.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at March 17, 2011
Journalism