J-schools in transition

Current challenges in the newspaper business coupled with the swift changes on new digital platforms and applications, have required this sharp focus on business as well as technology.

For instance, at the University of Missouri last year, 40 journalism students and 40 computer science students were divided into teams of four and told to develop either a news or an advertising application for the Apple iPhone. The five teams with the best projects were flown to Apple’s California headquarters where iPhone developers offered critiques.

In May, the winners were announced, Brooks said.

“The first-place team was an advertising application. The second-place team was a news application, and one of those teams is actually forming a company around what they invented,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that journalism schools never used to do.”

That one-time contest has now become a course.

“I’ve got students like that coming to me saying, ‘How do we get the business skills we need to make a business out of what we’ve come up with here?’” he said.

Apparently, students believe they can find these skills in university mass communications programs.

Undergrad enrollment in journalism programs is up 35 percent over the past 10 years, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey released in September.

That trend is seen at Arizona, Missouri and the University of South Carolina, where Carol J. Pardun, heads the school of journalism and mass communications. Of course, not all of these students will become journalists. Many are interested in public relations and advertising.

“One reason we’re not seeing a decline in enrollment in our ‘print’ sequence is because students, for the most part, understand that print now means newspaper and the Web and a whole host of multimedia applications,” said Pardun, who is president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

That’s the case, too, at the University of Kansas, where enrollment is strong, and students in the J-school can choose from two tracks: news and information or strategic communication.

The student journalists in the news and information track come out with significant exposure to storytelling across media platforms through its multidisciplinary educational concept.

And more changes are on the way.

“We’ve discussed a number of changes for next year that include intensifying Web-based research and computer-assisted analysis; Web design and other visually related coursework; and multiplatform content development and editing,” according to Pam Fine, Knight Chair in News, Leadership and Community.

“This includes bringing students together in advanced media courses in TV news, online, reporting and editing courses, so they can work together on coverage for our student newspaper, TV station and Web site,” Fine wrote in an e-mail for this article.

Changing course

Kansas isn’t alone in its curriculum review. Arizona, Missouri and South Carolina are all doing it, as are most J-schools, Pardun said in an e-mail.

“Part of it is because universities work so slowly for the approval process that by the time you make a change, you have to start working on the next change,” she said.

“But, I also think that schools are finally waking up to the idea that we’re not making changes for today, but for tomorrow.”

“I’ve seen more thought and change go into the curriculum in the last five years … than I have in the previous 30,” said Brooks, who’s been at Missouri for 36 years. “And I think that pace of change is going to do nothing but accelerate, at least until some of these changes shake themselves out a bit more.”

“We are doing things; I think it’s just nuts if you don’t,” McGuire said.

The students, he said, “understand the changes better than we do. They understand the power that consumers now have.”

Out of the ‘editorial womb’

McGuire said newspaper editors he has talked to about curriculum “want students to understand the business. They don’t want people to be in an editorial womb.”

He said he “makes it clear to them that I don’t think old guys like me are going to figure it out. I think it’s going to be them, and so I try to equip them.”

Pardun agreed: “This is key. There are more and more programs within journalism schools that are starting to address this issue.”

At the University of Kansas, for instance, understanding the newspaper business and how it has changed will become part of the core curriculum next year, Fine said.

And today’s students themselves are different.

“These students truly are natives when it comes to new technology, so things that some faculty still think are insurmountable, aren’t issues to the students,” Pardun said.

But knowing that they’ll have to fend for themselves and be responsible for media solutions have stresses of their own.

McGuire cited a paper one of his grad students, Erin Reitmayer, wrote about the best seller “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” (Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, 2008, Penguin Group).

“This is very likely a concern of many young people heading out into the workforce. I think many of us feel a pressure to either adapt to soul-less corporate structures or individually be the driving force behind some great revolutionary idea to create a place for ourselves,” she wrote.

“They do feel that pressure,” McGuire said. “They do understand that that’s the dilemma they face: That there are a lot of corporations right now who aren’t getting it, or they’ve got to go invent their own darn future.”

Anchored by the basics

Amid the anxiety of change and the gee-whiz appeal of many technological developments, Brooks and the others are resolute in the need to focus on the basics of good journalism.

“I still feel very strongly that the world needs the information that journalists provide, and I don’t think you can look at what’s going on with the citizen-journalism movement and so forth — as valuable as I think that is — that will ever replace the need for people who are trained in the profession, know how to vet information and know how to verify, make sure things are accurate.”

For those reasons and others he does not think the job picture is as bleak as it might seem from industry news dominated by buyouts and layoffs.

“The one newspaper (in a town) will employ more journalists than all the radio and TV stations combined. Even with all the stress in the newspaper industry,” Brooks said. “There are still a lot of jobs out there in that area. We’re not losing sight of that either.”

Fine echoed the point.

“I’ve worked at metro dailies my whole career, in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Indianapolis, and our primary mission was to cover our community as well as possible and certainly better than anyone else. Today, editors in those and other communities are even more clear and vocal about the importance of that mission.”