Alana Taylor, a junior at New York University double-majoring in journalism and history, wrote a piece for PBS MediaShift in 2008 assessing her own undergraduate journalism classes. Her complaint was that NYU taught students how to work their way up the traditional journalism ladder, when what she had wanted was to understand digital media and to learn from someone who knew not only where the internet was but where it was going.
Her specific example was a class called “Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers)”. She was careful about the professor, who she said was very talented and had written two books drawing on extensive research into generational issues. The objection was to the method: every journalism class she had taken required students to bring a hard copy of the New York Times, and none allowed the online edition, another outlet or the paper’s iPhone app instead. She called the requirement a waste of trees and refused the premise that the Times was the only source of credible or prize-winning journalism.
Underneath the complaint sits the problem most journalism schools had at the time — a faculty whose professional experience predated the change it was being asked to teach. The reasonable response is not to abandon the old material but to notice that students are getting news in different ways and to make that a subject of the class rather than a rule to be enforced against. Taylor’s own course, as she described it, managed to be old, then new, then old again.