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InsideHigherEd.com reflects on a meeting of journalism school deans, editors and news executives on the role of journalism schools in an age of new media:

Criticisms of journalism schools have ranged from questioning whether the institutions are necessary in the first place (since many journalists, and most senior ones, don’t have journalism degrees) to debating the merits of teaching practical skills versus theory and whether curriculums should emphasize broad knowledge or specialization in individual fields.

The post was picked up by the citj site, NowPublic.com, with an entry under the headline, “Are journalism schools dying“:

If someone can write well, let them learn the rest on the job - the sink or swim method of natural selection.

As a professor at a graduate journalism school, you would expect me to argue that there is a need for j-schools. But this is answering the wrong question. The right question is what should j-schools be teaching students in a time of participatory journalism.

If anything, there is a greater need than ever for j-schools. The challenge for journalism educators is to prepare students for the newsrooms of tomorrow.

The pathways into media jobs are changing, as Richard Sambrook highlights in an entertaining post. He writes about how students would get into journalism by going to university, preferably Oxbridge, and take an arts degree to develop the mind, and the join a local newspaper or radio station.

Sambrook speculates that by 2015, the Media Career 3.0 will be:

Take a series of highly vocational courses to give you the widest set of skills you can manage - coding, video, business, psychology, economics, law, web science, marketing. Blag your way in. Network constantly and aggressively. It’s all about who you know.

The role for j-schools, then, is to evolve and adapt to the changing media landscape. In this digital age, this means knowing how to use digital technologies. But more importantly, it means knowing how to best use these new tools, such as blogging, to produce quality journalism.

This involves more than teaching multimedia skills, such as how to put together websites or create slideshows in Flash. This means teaching students how to tap into the potential of multimedia to tell better stories.

Journalism is a mix of practical and critical skills. What will set apart the successful journalists of the future is their ability to bring analytical and contextual skills to a multimedia, news environment.

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