and it confirmed a bit of what I've had a notion of about journo and higher ed: that something's not getting thru to academia about the importance of knowing about new media. Bryan Murley (who I've corresponded with) says:
“We don’t face the same problems economically that the industry is facing. . .” Murley, who found in a survey of college newspaper advisers that 58.7 percent in 2006, and 53 percent in 2007, thought campus media had not kept pace with the advances in commercial media. “But the industry is requiring reporters to have different skill sets.”
The easiest target to blame are the profs: they don't understand new media. They can't shoot video or do a podcast. They're all newspaper guys who hate bloggers. yadda-yadda-yadda. Yet David Wendelken, an assoc prof of journo at James Madison University, sees there's a bit of student culpability in this. Says Wendelken: "A lot of college students select their medium in high school. When they come onto campus, they’re already a TV person or a radio person or a newspaper person. . ." yep, I've heard this before, and oddly enough, from journo prof friends who *don't* hate bloggers.
So, in some sense, it may be that the people coming into programs have aspirations that are rooted in an old worldview of how the news business works. and maybe they're meeting up with profs who can't challenge that worldview, don't have the tenure to challenge that world view, or really don't want to deal with the hoo-ha they'd get if they challenged that worldview. (I wonder what Mindy McAdams and Dan Kennedy might say about this...hint, hint...)
I can attest a bit to this, based on a conversation I had with a UMass journo student at New England News Forum meeting in the spring. Now, I think Mike's a great kid, but I was a little stunned on his viewpoint of blogs and online interaction. He was a dyed-in-the-wool budding hardcore print journalist, who appeared, to me anyway, to not really have considered what he might have to do with new media once he got a job (and that includes interacting with people.) He'd bought a lot of the line that bloggers are pretty bad folks who distort the news and create echo chambers--esp. when it comes to politics.
So, I worried a bit about Mike--and hoped he'd be going to a good j-school for grad work, and hoping that some news org might actually push him to look at what's going on outside of his j-school classes...
And speaking of j-school classes, I was contacted about two weeks ago by Philip Meyer who's running a grad seminar out at the University of No. Carolina, who on a referral from Jay Rosen, asked me to come down and talk about Assignment Zero--which is an amazing honor considering Meyer's career. In talking with him, though, I found something that I've also found in talking to other pre-corporate owned and independent journo guys: a real desire, and knowledge about, connecting with people! Guys like Meyer, who spent years in the pre-corp trenches, really get how, if journalism's going to survive, it has to start talking with people again--not just observing them from afar, like lower life forms. And part of that talking may involve talking online....as Dan Rubin learned from Blinq....
So it goes...journo education has to move forward and find constructive ways to get the kids to think outside the box. Journo educators and newspaper editors can't rely on demonizing life online and referring to it as a lesser form of journalism as a viable strategy for keeping journalism education pure. It's too late for that. And if the kids don't catch up, they may find themselves outsourced before they even get started.
Journalism, citizen journalism, media, Blogging,
5 comments:
I wrote a post about this topic in January -- and there were 40 comments! Basically I thought, and still think, that some students come to college today with the mistaken idea that they can have a career as a print journalist, just like people 30 years ago could. Not all students are so naive, but more than we like to see. And when they have that idea in their heads, it can be hard to open their eyes to reality. But we try!
I read that piece earlier today and spent some time thinking about it. At Northeastern, we have one professor who teaches some of the hands-on multimedia tools, and another (me) who looks at the larger trends affecting the business.
Overall, I tend to agree with Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen, who (if I may put words in their mouths) argue that it's more important for students to learn to work with programmers than to be programmers.
It's certainly not difficult to teach students to use simple video cameras -- many of them are already doing that on their own. But how do you teach them to think of readers/viewers as collaborators, to re-envision news as a conversation (to use Gillmor's phrase)? That's not really a teachable skill ... it's a state of mind that we need to be talking about in J-school.
Blogging? You can't teach that. You just do it.
thanks for the great comments! I doubt I'll get as many comments as you got, Mindy--probaby because I'm not an educator (so thanks for the link back to your post and all that great conversation on the matter)
Both of you got me to think that maybe what's needed is to tie together what young people do in their spare time with a talk on what some of the new trends are, and show examples, like USA Today and Reuter's (they've got both blogs *and* Second Life.) Maybe have some discussion.
Perhaps this issue also plays to a lack of media literacy. We might use it, but aren't really evaluating how it's impacting our careers as much as our lives (for me, being very much online is sometimes a detriment. employers want to see old school before new school...it's just a confusing time.)
Tish,
Sorry I'm so late in commenting. Suffice to say I had no idea this article would be written, much less that it would generate the comments it did by people I admire greatly. The landscape is changing.
We in college media need to get with the program. I try my hardest in my small corner of the world. Today, I was explaining to a student how a blog didn't have to be like a story. It seems so elemental, but I have to keep remembering the diffusion of innovaiton graph. We're far along the curve. Many of our students are not.
That doesn't mean I disrespect the students. They are products of their education. But we are tasked with getting them ready for the future. I hope we are doing so. Too often, I get the sense we're getting them ready for the past.
Cheers,
Hi Brian...glad you finally stopped by :-) and, honestly, you do a great job in your corner of the world...
you might find this interesting: last week, while talking about Assignment Zero at Berkman, someone asked the number of teen-agers involved in the project. I said the youngest was college-age (and, I think junior level at that.) and he was surprised. I pointed out that while teen-agers use blogs, twitter, IM, downloads, etc., they're using it for social purposes--and that there was a huge difference between writing on someone's all on Facebook and getting involved in the community at Slashdot...
As much as I despair for the kids, I despair for those adults in their 40's and 50's who *should* be further along on the tech curve than most of them are. There's just as much an intractable "I know it all" mentality among them as much as there is among young people...
thank god there are some of us tenacious early adopters out there. keep up the good work :-)
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