Quick Restructuring of J-Schools Reaffirms Total Failure of Mediastablishment, Need for New Leadership

Here's an excerpt from something I wrote during April 2008:

"The options in the new media route allowed me to study and prepare for print, radio, broadcasting, and web journalism all in one degree. I think this is essential, to prepare for any kind of media route. Media is converging.

I also minored in Entrepreneurship because I anticipated the collapse of the industry. Business classes I took that I think should be incorporated into journo programs include:

Advertising
Marketing
Economics
Entrepreneurial Business Management
Personal Finance
Accounting
Business and Professional Speaking
Business Law.."

***

As of more current..

“J-Schools Play Catch-Up”
By BRIAN STELTER, Published April 14, 2009

Excerpt:

The changes are forcing colleges and universities to rethink what a journalism education should look like. The perennial debate about journalism programs — theoretical teaching versus professional skill building — has been displaced by more urgent questions: How can you help students find sustainable business models, while introducing the formerly verboten subject of the business side? What are the implications for the craft of journalism in the shift to digital? And how do you position students for an uncertain future in the media?

“I don’t know a journalism dean in the country who knows what the solution is, or where the journalism industry is going,” says Christopher Callahan, the dean of the Cronkite School. “I am convinced that those answers are going to come from people of their generation,” he says of the students. “Not my generation.”

To raise its national profile, Arizona State has invested heavily in its journalism program. In a new curriculum, Mr. Callahan is trying to instill an ethos of innovation — a sea change for an industry that has acted for decades like a slow-moving train, with J-schools the caboose. “Newsrooms have tended to be highly inflexible; innovation was not encouraged,” says Mr. Callahan, former associate dean at the University of Maryland’s journalism school. Deans across the country say they can’t afford to be the caboose anymore.

The new forward-thinking approach is to bracket traditional journalistic values withWeb classes and an entrepreneurial spirit. Take the weekly entrepreneurship course at Arizona State taught by Dan Gillmor, a former columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, in which students create products for news consumers — last fall, a team built a site for local filmmakers. The purpose of the course, Mr. Gillmor says, is to learn to “invent your own jobs.” (Because they may have to.) Mr. Gillmor also runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, a catalyst for the student projects; that the center even exists is a testament to the changes that are afoot within journalism education.

First-year students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University now take “Multimedia Storytelling” and “Introduction to 21st-Century Media.” In the fall, the school of journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be adding an immersion experience in “communication, business and entrepreneurship.” With $8 million from the former newspaper executive Leonard Tow, the graduate schools at Columbia University and the City University of New York are creating two centers for new media innovation.

Rich Beckman, a professor of visual journalism at the University of Miami and a guru of new media education, confirms the evolution:“There were deans all over the country saying, ‘We’re never going to teach computer programming in J-school.’ Well, now they are.”

***

Oh, how the stale cookies of the mediastablishment continue to crumble..