Journalism programs should take a page from medical schools by immersing students in hands-on, real-life experience using teaching hospitals as models, a group of foundations argued in an open letter to university presidents on Friday.
Just as medical schools rely on doctors and academics to teach students, journalism schools should hire and reward more seasoned journalists, regardless of whether they have advanced degrees, the letter states.
The letter calls on scholars and practitioners to work with students to develop deep, subject-specific knowledge about their beats and to create new, digital means of distributing news to local communities. While some leading journalism schools have adopted such changes, most have not, the groups say.
“Schools that do not update their curriculum and upgrade their faculties to reflect the profoundly different digital age of communication will find it difficult to raise money from foundations interested in the future of news,” states the letter, signed by leaders of the Brett Family, Knight, McCormick, and Scripps Howard and Wyncote foundations, as well as of the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. “The same message applies to administrators who acquiesce to regional accrediting agencies that want terminal degrees as teaching credentials with little regard to competence as the primary concern.”
The letter cites Arizona State University’s journalism program as a successful innovator of the teaching-hospital model. The Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism’s News21 program, headquartered at the university’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, invites top journalism students from colleges across the country to produce in-depth news reports. This summer’s project is a national investigative report on voting rights. Advanced students in print, broadcast, and digital media can also participate in a news service that produces reports published across Arizona.
Technology and Entrepreneurship
The foundations called on the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, which is reviewing its standards, to place more weight on technology and to give students more flexibility to take courses outside the liberal arts in areas such as technology and entrepreneurship.
More than 13,400 jobs were slashed in newspaper newsrooms across the country between 2007 and 2011, many of them in specialty beats like education and national politics, according to a report by the Federal Communications Commission. At the same time, opportunities have opened up for enterprising journalism students to provide coverage for local communities, says Eric Newton, a senior adviser at the Knight Foundation and one of the letter’s authors.
Businesses and nonprofit groups are also hiring more journalism-school graduates to write articles and maintain Web sites, he says. Students who have combined their journalism study with courses in entrepreneurship and technology are also finding jobs with Internet start-ups, he says.
“In the digital age, you have a two-way relationship with your readers. It’s not the old ‘we write and you read,’” Mr. Newton says. “You can’t teach students what that’s like unless they’re working in a community that can talk back.”
