Mindy McAdams argued in January 2011 that journalism schools were not rising to the challenge of teaching in a fast-changing media ecosystem, and put the hardest question at the centre of it: how to determine the best ways to prepare the journalists of tomorrow. This page began as a comment on her post.
The response was that the argument starts in the wrong place when it starts with skills and equipment. Before deciding which tools to teach, journalism schools have to change how they think about journalism itself — the mindset, not the curriculum list. Conceiving of journalism as a profession to be defended leads to one set of decisions; acknowledging that media is developing into an open and shared space leads to another, in which the voice of the professional journalist is one among many.
That reframing carries a specific job for the schools. Their task becomes helping students work out how their own voice makes a valuable contribution to that shared space — whether they end up in traditional news organisations, in non-profit start-ups, or in media forms the students will invent themselves. Preparing people for the media of tomorrow rather than the newsrooms of today is the distinction the whole argument rests on.