J-school reboot?

 

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Some probably know I have no formal training or education in journalism (did the grammar and headline burying give it away?), so I tend to feel less comfortable talking to journalist-specific topics.  I have the luxury today of stepping out of my comfort zone thanks to a crafty piece of writing from Guy Berger (@guyberger).

 

The rhetorical premise behind Guy’s post was whether journalism schools should be a mirror of the industry’s requirements or a enablers of change for the industry.  I cannot do Guy’s words justice and I really do encourage you to read his article.

Guy does close by asking,

“Anyone out there agree that journalism education needs re-booting?”

As I mentioned, I probably wouldn’t know a j-school if it hit me, but my answer is a resounding “YES.”  Guy isn’t just stirring things up for fun – this guy understands that the media customer is already on the other side of the fence.  He participated in a book panel and provided input, of which I wanted to share a couple sentence.

In a time when cellphones are becoming the mass communications device of the masses, this realm is increasingly important to look at. And what becomes complicated is that the “traditional” mass communication roles now become merged with private interpersonal communications in the uses to which these new technologies are put. Audience expectations of the roles of mass media are arguably changing under this meshing of one-to-many with one-to-one and many-to-one communications.

Go back and read those sentences again, please.  That really takes the mirror v. change agent a different and, in my opinion, mostly relevant direction: the audience.  Oh yeah, those dreaded readers and customers?  If that’s your reaction, I submit that Guy’s words fell on deaf ears.  The fact is that he is spot on.

There is no question the audience expectations are out in front of the industry.  When and where the audience and their expectations got out in front of journalism is a fruitless debate.  What is of concern is the audience expects content, in context (their context, not some editor’s choice of context), in real-time and from whatever device they choose.  Journalism by the inch and line, however comfortable, convenient and profitable (decreasingly) it might be argued to be, is dying. 

J-schools are where the bounds of innovation towards atomization of content, technology-enabled/driven networking and customized delivery and consumption must be pushed.  By now, at least one person is rolling their eyes and chuckling about the paucity of proven business models, whether pay walls are the way to go, and concerns about the trustworthiness of all this new-fangled stuff.  News flash for you – at no time in the future are you going to wake up to a neatly packaged print article that describes a totally packaged answered to all that.  The answers are going to be small, dispersed and  available only to those who are truly willing to hit the reboot switch (repeatedly).  Where else is better suited for those reboots than the beginning of the industry pipeline, the journalism schools?