InsideHigherEd.com reported on a meeting of journalism school deans, editors and news executives in January 2008, and found the familiar complaints: whether journalism schools are necessary at all, given that many working journalists and most senior ones hold no journalism degree; whether they should teach practical skills or theory; and whether curriculums should push broad knowledge or specialisation. NowPublic.com picked the piece up under the headline “Are journalism schools dying”, with the judgement that anyone who can write well should learn the rest on the job, by sink or swim.
The response here was to change the question: not whether journalism schools are needed, but what they should be teaching in a time of participatory journalism.
Richard Sambrook’s sketch of how entry routes were changing supplied the evidence. The old path was university, preferably Oxbridge, an arts degree to develop the mind, then a local newspaper or radio station. His guess at the Media Career 3.0 of 2015: “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 conclusion drawn was that digital tools are the precondition, not the curriculum. Teaching students to build a website or assemble a Flash slideshow is not the same as teaching them to use multimedia to tell a better story, and what would separate the successful journalists of the future was the analytical and contextual skill they brought to it.