The future of journalism education conference (Part 5)

Although, Hans-Henrik Holm from the Danish School of Journalism at Aarhus University points out this is easier said than done: "With so many international people present today, this should be an easy topic to address ... however, there is no global WE, no global mind ... Media is national ... Languages are national, as are subjects and politics." In order to address this issue, the school joined forces with four other universities to create a unique Master's programme that does not belong to any specific country nor requires students to speak any additional languages.

Meanwhile, Heather Purdey, director of the MA international journalism programme at City University, London, said that courses with a focus on internationalisation enabled an exchange of knowledge, with lecturers often learning more than students.  "We draw on [international] student experiences to inform us and our programme," she said.

Bust for journalism, boom for journalism schools?

In many ways, the conference on the future of journalism education gave journalism schools an opportunity to "justify their existence," as Charlie Beckett, writing on his Director's Blog at Polis points out.

One point worth mentioning is the contrast between the number of trained individuals ready to enter the journalism profession in the developed world, compared to those in developing countries, as the South African representatives were keen to emphasise. Coincidentally, the number of journalism school applications has risen across the westernised world and, this is particularly true in America and Great Britain, with Columbia University seeing a whopping increase of 38%. A case of bust for journalism, boom for journalism schools? In reality, this should not come as a surprise and is true across many disciplines. "In the past more students have tended to do postgraduate studies, in particular Masters degrees, during a recession" said Malcolm McCrae, who chairs the UK Council for Graduate Education, in an interview with the Independent newspaper earlier this year.

Power to the people

All of the panellists agreed that new technologies, in particular, those emerging from the Internet, were profoundly changing the dynamics of journalism and the relationship between the public, the agents of news and the news itself. Social media is no longer a phenomenon, it is a fixture, and journalism schools have a perfect opportunity to ensure students understand the value of using this in a professional capacity.

One could expand on this by saying that the Web has helped to subvert the idea of the traditional "audience" as a passive, homogeneous entity. While we have always known that news consumers are made up of various social groups, the Internet has helped to magnify just how diverse societies' tastes are, contributing to audience fragmentation by picking up where Cable TV left off. This is arguably one of the reasons that established journalism has lost its authority, as it struggles to compete with the blogosphere and a dedicated news-monitoring public willing to "work" for free.

At the same time, the Internet has been a wonderful instrument of internationalisation, connecting people the world over. Therein lies the paradox. As Doreen Weisenhaus notes, the public are the shareholders of journalism. This was always true, of course, but the Internet has brought traditional media back down to Earth with an abrupt bump. People are empowering themselves through the Web, as the contested elections in Iran recently demonstrated. Still, while the general consensus was that social media plays a significant role in journalism, why did a search on Twitter reveal only a handful of panellists with an account? Surely, journalism educators should be practicing what they preach?

User-generated content and crowdsourcing are likely to play a bigger role in journalism moving forward and the Guardian.co.uk recently showed how a traditional media outlet could do this to great effect. Nevertheless, Nicholas Lemann of Columbia University is right when he says that traditional media complements new media as much as this is true the other way around: "Traditional media enhances our claim to signficance," he said. People may scan the Internet for alternative reports and opinions, but they still turn to the mainstream press to substantiate what they see elsewhere, particularly when the implications are huge. This is, after all, what happened with CNN recently, in its failure to cover the protests in Iran, although it was by no means alone.

In response to the times, many journalism schools are now offering programmes which nurture technological creativity, with journalism students creating their own applications and tools that may one day become a journalistic staple. If this trend continues, perhaps the business model that we have collectively been looking for will emerge from one of these schools? There are concerns by some within the industry that too much talk of technology is distracting from the core issue of how journalists generate and treat stories. Some of the educators were particularly concerned about branching out into different strands of journalism with some arguing that an ideal graduate is not an online graduate or print graduate, but one who feels comfortable using a variety of media platforms. The web is a useful vehicle for communication and within this, there are a myriad other tools and networks, but everyone should have a basic grasp of these functions, although, journalism schools are right to give students the choice. In the meantime, courses such as Jeff Jarvis' - who was not at the conference - interactive programme at City University New York (CUNY), are exciting and may prove to be the template of choice for an education in new media journalism.

We are the future

The one thing that was not discussed at the conference was the issue of disappearing traineeships and this should not be underestimated. One of the reasons that journalism schools are so important (and therefore relevant) is that the industry relies on them to produce ready-made journalists requiring little extra training and, as such, offer excellent value-for-money. Gone are the days when an organisation is willing or able to invest its resources, time and money in training a rookie from scratch. In practice, even journalism graduates on a job are constantly learning and there will be some opportunity for personal development, but newspapers and other media outlets no longer take fresh-faced youngsters in under their wings like they used to. Sadly, traineeships are on the decline as Channel 4's Samira Ahmed, a former graduate of the MA in Newspaper Journalism at City University, observes: "What worries me is that when I started there were great trainee schemes like the BBC, most of which have been shutdown, now there's a great pressure to go into very low-pay or even free aspects of journalism, like blogging, some of the online stuff where I've yet to see it earns you any money."

The press is often criticised for its lack of proportional representation in relation to the society it purportedly serves, but if the only journalists coming out from journalism schools are those who can afford to go there in the first place, what will the journalists of the future look like, as training budgets disappear? Will journalism and journalism studies become the preserve of the wealthy? What can societies, governments and journalism educators do today to ensure this is not the case tomorrow?

Beckett is right, "the biggest fortresses are in the mind" and a debate on what constitutes journalism (and journalism education) must also look at not just who our audiences are, but who we want our journalists to be.

A conference on the future of journalism education should rightly involve the educators, but how about engaging with the public and with the students that will one day become the leading voices in journalism, whatever form this may take? For instance, while some students were present at the debate none were invited to participate in the talks and only one audience question was accepted, just as the day was coming to an end. Could this be why students no longer have the confidence to follow their own agendas?

Sometimes, it takes an outsider to see things as they are and perhaps as they should be and someone new to the industry may be able to offer a fresh perspective, one that we have not yet considered. Journalism education will continue to play a vital role in preparing journalists for the challenges that we face, yet the future of journalism education depends largely on the future of journalism itself. Whatever the future of journalism entails, you can bet the public will play a pivotal role using all the tools at their disposal to tell us when we're doing something right and let us know when we're not; it is then up to us as journalists to listen.


Sources: Polis , Forbes , Independent.co.uk , YouTube

For other articles on this series on the future of journalism education conference, please visit:

Part 1: Reinventing the journalism curriculum
Part 2: Integrated journalists for integrated newsrooms
Part 3: Reinventing journalism & Network or die
Part 4: Tomorrow's journalist, an entrepreneurial spirit