The Latin American journalism blog Clasesdeperiodismo.com published an email interview in Spanish in December 2010 with Alfred Hermida of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.
His answer on curriculum split the field in two. One approach assumes journalism is much as it always was, only more technologised, and shows up as multimedia classes bolted onto an established degree. The other starts from the premise that networked digital technologies have changed the media environment itself, which makes the task a rethinking of the curriculum rather than an addition to it. The role of journalism education, on that reading, is to prepare students for the journalism of tomorrow rather than the newsrooms of today.
First-year students at UBC had a blogging assignment framed around professional identity: a blog on an area of expertise, analysis in a conversational register, interaction with readers. Established journalists were advised to own their name online: buy the web address, set up a professional site, hold a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter — social media being core to the journalism, not an extra.
On Twitter, the point was that distribution is the least of it: the value lies in listening, and in going where audiences already are. The obstacle named was the noise-to-signal ratio; what had changed since the 2009 ambient journalism paper was tooling — Twitter lists, services for reading a user’s social graph. An in-house social network could tie readers to a brand, but few would open a second account with a news outlet when Facebook and Twitter existed.