A pre-conference workshop ahead of the 2010 AEJMC annual conference in Denver brought practitioners and educators together around a specific claim: that journalism schools were filling gaps in news coverage through student journalism, and had become news providers in their own right.
Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation opened by setting out four transformational trends. Journalism schools were becoming better connected to other university disciplines and departments, which widened the definition of what it means to be a journalist. They were taking on a larger role as content and technology innovators. They were emerging as teachers of collaborative, open approaches and models. And they were becoming news providers that understood the ecosystem of their own communities — in the digital age, Newton said, j-schools were trying to engage more deeply with “the people we used to call the audience”.
None of the four was a break with the past, he added: each was built on practices the schools already had. His test for whether the transformation had actually happened was a plain one — the point at which these were “not emerging trends but our new traditions”.