David Dunkley Gyimah has a long, excellent post, New media training for the newsroom, that comes along at a time when I’m giving a lot of thought to journalism education.
First, some highlights from his post:
Today, no such luck, the seams of a profession called journalism are being picked and rewoven into a new, some say exciting, others believe a shapeless tapestry.
Added to the normative variables of journalism e.g. storytelling, ethics and writing, we’re witnessing new parameters – which in many cases we might argue have nothing to do with the profession.
~snip~
However one of the biggest tasks besetting training, a sort of pot-noodle of a word, is not neccessarily the technical and theoritical skills we need to learn, but the paradigm and creative bent that is required to comprehend changes; changes which don’t look like slowing down.
~snip~
Training matters because without it we become anemic, we atrophy, we become bored at what we’re presented with and if not industrious we fall behind our competitors whom today are world wide.
Training, or at least the desire for it, was a constant of my newsroom days. We need to write better cutlines, better headlines. How do we do these spiffy new graphics? How do I write/photograph/design better?
I’m on the other side now, training the journalists-to-be, and at the end of another semester, looking back on the successes and failures, the good and the not-so-much of the classroom.
What I’m discovering that as the demands on journalists change (and the pace of change heats up), it’s harder and harder to keep up, without all of it being integrated throughout the program – the coming together of what were separate disciplines, the end of news flow as we knew it, the wide (bewildering) array of storytelling tools and potentials.
Students see classes in distinct units: this one for photography, this for media theory, this for writing. It is rare that the best work they do in each is reflected in classes where all of the skills are brought together. We pile more on: photography extends to audio slideshows and video, graphic design to interactive packages, writing to lists and chunks and hyperlinks. There are a dozen ways to tell a well-presented story and only a few of them involve the traditional way newspaper folk have told stories.
The deal I make with my students (and the deal that I’ve made with myself) is it doesn’t matter if they don’t master video or audio editing, a touch of Flash, a bit of Google mapmaking. They need, along with a bare minimum of tech skills, to understand that things are changing and will keep changing, and to know the potential for each of these new forms, and the combinations of them, for news reporting and storytelling.
Even at that, it’s hard to keep my side of the bargain. During the course of a semester a half-dozen new technologies (or new uses of old technology) bloom as new storytelling tools.
I wonder if the semester system isn’t broken, beyond the bases of media theory, law and ethics, reporting and writing, writing, writing. Better, I think, to immerse them in distinct skills training more like the real world, or at least the best of it: intensive, short, skill-driven and story-based, based on doing real-life storytelling, not classroom exercises. Push hard to make them jacks and master of all trades, a concept David pushes often.
Educating and training journalists has always been hard work, I imagine. But, I suspect, from my own experience and from what I read on other instructor’s blogs, it is harder than ever, not so much because of the incredibly diverse skills that are being requested of new hires, but because of what David called the reweaving of the tapestry of journalism.
While I stumble through this new world of journalism skills, trying to keep up with change, learn the tech I have to teach, consider the different ways of laying out the details for students, I’m left with one constant. The message that (I hope) I’m hitting hard enough, impressing deeply enough: you have to keep learning.
At the very least, given the constant, rapid evolution of journalism, I know I do.
TAGS: JOURNALISM, TRAINING, EDUCATION
