For the revived Carnival of Journalism in January 2011, David Cohn asked the academics and journalists taking part to think about where the university sits in the information ecosystem. The answer offered here started from what a university is for: fostering critical thinking, and graduating students able to ask the right questions and work through the answers.
Journalism schools were already filling gaps left by shrinking newsrooms — the students at the University of British Columbia covering local stories in Vancouver and producing investigative work on international subjects. The argument was that producing stories is the smaller part of what a school can do. With the barriers to publishing effectively gone, anyone could commit an act of journalism, which meant that what counted as journalism and who was doing it were both changing. That put schools in an unusual position: able to teach students to understand how media were shifting, and to hand them both a theoretical framework and practical tools, first as informed consumers of news and then as people capable of making media with some of the rigour of journalistic practice.
Journalism, on this reading, had stopped being something that only happens in newsrooms; across a university, academics and students alike were doing work that qualified. The conclusion was a reorientation rather than a defence — treating journalism as a space to be shared rather than a profession to be protected.