A pre-conference workshop at the annual AEJMC conference focused on the changing role of journalism schools.
Karen Dunlap at the Poynter Institute expressed some optimism about student journalists filling the void left by declining news coverage.
She said the students might see communities in new ways and explore new forms of story-telling, guided by faculty.
But top of her worries was the assumption that student journalists could fill the void. But she was also concerned that students would lose out on a liberal arts education.
She was concerned about editing of student work and above all the liability that comes with publishing. This was a big one, she said.
Role of j-schools
Geneva Overholser from USC Annenberg said she was a big believer in having students do journalism that is seen by the world.
She agreed that it doesn’t fill the void but supplements it. It serves students as they are doing work that makes a difference and ties them more closely to communities.
Among the issues she identified was working with legacy media such as the Los Angeles which has its own set of expectations, such as having an exclusive on a story produced by a student.
Another was local figures complaining to university officials about the hard-hitting reporting by students.
“We ought to be to our craft what business and medical schools have been to their discipline,” said Overholser.
Connecting with audiences
Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism said with the advent of the internet, the logistical cost of producing journalism dropped like a rock.
Every class that produces journalism at Columbia has to have a website. In every academic year, dozens of websites are produced.
But Lemann said that the websites bloomed and withered quickly, so they do not have substantial audiences.
The big hurdle at Columbia, said Lemann, was how to be a continuous content provider.
“We would like to have a direct, local coverage site that operates year-round and posts every day.”
His idea to achieve this is to follow the medical residency model. So graduating students would get a modest one-year fellowship and this would keep the site populated all year round.
Columbia is now exploring how to fund such an operation that would, in Lemann’s view, enable the school to build and engage with an audience.
Encourage innovation, reward failure
Lynda Kraxberger of Missouri explained how the journalism school has a history of publishing and broadcasting student work.
She said that while she appreciated some of the concerns expressed about student journalism, Kraxberger argued that it was better for students to make mistakes on what she called “a small stage.”
Many students, she added, come to j-school already having published online, albeit to usually small audiences.
“If I want to model innovation with my students, the last thing I want to do is squash it due to some fear in the future.”
Kraxberger said that grading mechanisms are one of the challenges. The current system does a very poor job of encouraging innovation as grading does not reward failure.
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