What should journalism education be about?

I think I need to think about this a bit. Blogging about it is a start, I guess. In the US, things seem clearer. The ideas of a journalism education, of a university-based journalism school, of journalism degrees in general - all are well established over there. People know what they're talking about - the acquistion of certain skills and certain professional codes of conduct (double sourcing, impartiality, fact checking, objectivity etc) aiming to legitimate/guarantee a particular form of public writing/knowledge (and to establish the status of the journalist too).

Over here, we're less clear cut about journalism and its social/political mission. We're more inclined, as a society, to see journalists as people who write stuff for money - hacks. The closest thing to US journalism education over here are the training courses run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

These are news focused, and are often aimed at training the next generation of local newspaper journalists. They're more like old-style trade apprenticeships. You need an NCTJ qualification to get work on some local papers... But you don't need it to earn a good living as a magazine journalist, for example. I'd imagine that most of the people working on newspapers - in the expaning sports/culture sections, don't have NCTJ qualifications.

Journalism degrees in the UK have tended to follow the approach of the NCTJ courses but have fleshed things out with bits and pieces of media studies (amongst other things). Our old course used to do the NCTJ basics and then a lot of critical theory. I have a feeling other places did the same. Our new course is more open and teaches a wider range of practical skills, across different media pathways.

The thing is, the more you talk to students who want to do Journalism degrees, the more you realise that they have a much more expanded idea of what journalism is, compared to the kind of thing validated/taught by the NCTJ. Many don't want to learn how to be local news journalists. Most want to work in areas dismissed as 'not journalism' by trad journalists - i.e. they want to write about music, fashion, sport, celebrity, culture in general. They want to be critics or columnists as much as they want to be 'news journalists'.

Is that a problem for a journalism degree? Not sure - if you want to hang on to the sense of a moral/political mission that clings to journalism education, perhaps it is. But maybe what we should do is think of the journalism course as an education for content creators of all types (sorry for the clunky jargon), for people who create/circulate different forms of public knowledge across a variety of different media.

It should still teach the codes of conduct, explore the ethical issues and instill a general critical/analytical approach to creative work, but it doesn't have to be prescriptive about what journalism should be - it doesn't need to be focused purely on the news and journalism's role in a democracy. It should still teach that but not make it the sole focus.

I think that's what we're trying to do with our new Journalism degree. But do people get that from the name? Or do a lot of students think that we're doing old style news and think we're not the course for them as a result. Should we come up with another name - creative media maybe? I don't know. Like I said, I need to think about all this a bit.

But I started via something on Henry Jenkins' blog about, amongst other things, a recent Time story, 'How to Build a Student for the 21st Century' and his own work on how education needs to change to keep pace with society and its needs. Responding to the story (and the US report it's based on, 'Tough Choices for Tough Times', put together by the New Commission on Skills in the American Workplace), Jenkins argues that 'American schools have not kept pace with the times and are not preparing young people to be competitive in a global economy where creativity, innovation, media literacy, and social networking skills represent the edge needed to succeed.'

Creativity, innovation, media literacy, social networking skills - they all sound like the things we're starting to teach on the new Journalism course. Jenkins hightlights a few things from the Time story:

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy--the ones that won't get outsourced or automated--"put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that's been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations--design and technology, mathematics and art--"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

Now I could do without some of the Time Mag biz guru jargon, but Jenkins is right when he talks about placing a new value on 'being able to access and meaningfully process new sources of information, being able to participate in social networks and knowledge communities, and being able to think creatively and act globally.' That sounds like a suitable skill set (sorry, I'm getting jargonistic here too) for would be modern journalists.

Going off on a complete tangent, perhaps another key focus for journalism education needs to be reporting - actually getting out there and gathering knowledge. This doesn't have to be focused on 'news' in the traditional sense. But it's clearly something that all journalists - NCTJ-trained or not - do less of today...

BTW - the pic comes from Time.

Comments

[toby dyter]

Nice blog Jim! You've inspired me to attempt some longer, mini-essay-style posts on my blog (ie rather than cryptic notes).
Regarding journo ed: it seems to me that any attempt to design a comprehensive course covering all aspects of what 'media writing' can be (from Walter Benjamin to John Pilger to Russell Grant, say) is doomed. The field is just too broad. I'd like to think that certain skills are always central (clear writing, good general knowledge, a critical eye, etc), but really this only shows what I think journalism should be. Rhetorical skills - in the worst sense - are probably more important than any of the above.
You seem to skirt around the issue of What The Industry Wants (in many cases, something very different from the kind of journalism that safeguards democracy). I was mildly surprised to hear that journalism education with a 'social/political mission' is more established in the States...but not at all surprised to see that it is now under pressure to better conform to the requirements of the workplace, as Jenkins reports. 'Thinking outside the box', 'becoming smarter about new sources of information', 'developing good people skills'...this all sounds well and good, but also slightly sinister. I prefer missionary discourses to careerist discourses, if you see what I mean...