#41: Getting SJSU’s journalism program to the new world

November 17, 2005 By

I just got back from speaking to San Jose State University’s journalism faculty. They are seeing huge changes happening to the journalism industry. Knight Ridder, for instance, is up for sale (that company’s headquarters are a few blocks from the school). They are seeing massive changes to advertising, circulation, and news gathering techniques.

So, I came in and showed them things like Memeorandum, Digg, WordPress, Channel 9, Community Server, ZVents, and had an open and frank discussion about what the journalism world is going to look like in five years.

They are making sizeable changes to their curriculum in response to these changes. They asked me what I’d do. I said I’d merge the radio/TV/newspaper classes and programs together. I showed them Eric Rice’s blog. He writes, does podcasts, and does video blogs. That’s the prototype of the new journalist. Then I said I’d partner with the computer science department. Why? Cause journalism students need to know how to work with geeks to build new media properties. If a journalist doesn’t know what RSS, OPML, CSS, is how can they expect to get a job at, say, the BBC where there’s already RSS feeds on their home page?

There’s lots of market for people who create content, I said. It’s just that you’re more likely to work for a guy like Craig Newmark than working for a newspaper brand.

If you were teaching tomorrow’s journalists, what would you be teaching them?

Update: Steve Sloan recorded the session and put a picture and a report on his blog here. Student Ryan Sholin reports on the meeting here.

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  • Christopher Coulter

    Why does every argument with bloggers always end with ‘you just don’t get it’? After John’s casing of that classic cultic line, you’d think they’d of have gotten a new catch-phrase but no, it’s always, “you just don’t get it”. Yeah, I sure don’t.

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,91590,00.asp

  • Christopher Coulter

    Why does every argument with bloggers always end with ‘you just don’t get it’? After John’s casing of that classic cultic line, you’d think they’d of have gotten a new catch-phrase but no, it’s always, “you just don’t get it”. Yeah, I sure don’t.

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,91590,00.asp

  • http://www.ryansholin.com/ Ryan Sholin

    Hi everyone – I was the student in the room. To be fair, I’m a graduate student, and it’s hard to figure out what undergraduates know and what they don’t. Nevertheless, I’ve taken the classes, I’ve worked on the website for the school newspaper, and I’m part of a small team that’s working on creating and serving multimedia and other new-school content online.

    I can tell you firsthand that recruiters are looking for students with Web skills. Upon looking at my resume where I claim to be some sort of multimedia guru, one recruiter asked “Do you know Flash?” I answered that I would by the time any internship would start in the summer. He told me to go ahead and put it down on my resume if I applied for the internship, because the large California-based newspaper conglomerate he works for had already trained 14 reporters to use Flash, and they were training 14 more this winter.

    Another bigger-but-struggling newspaper conglomerate recruiter explained to me that their newsroom and their Web people barely communicate at all. The online versions of ALL their papers are run on the same template so the national advertising fits in the same place. They can’t get local breaking news up quickly on the Web site for their paper unless it ends up in an AP feed. They desperately need someone who can bridge that gap between the newsroom and the online publishers.

    In fact, yet another recruiter from a Bay Area paper told me that her company had just created such a position — a “bridge desk” — so they could have more interaction between Web site and newsroom.

    What I’ve been trying to figure out is what undergraduates need to know in order to compete and succeed in this market.

    Here’s my take: journalism students don’t need to know code; they need to know the Web. Photojournalists need to know what Flickr is, and reporters need to be using a feed reader. Broadcast students should be listening to podcasts. PR students should be reading business blogs, and Advertising students should be learning about Google AdSense and other context-based advertising systems.

    Editors, on the other hand, in each and every medium the J-School teaches, need to know how to post content on the Web — and not just by shoveling stories and photos into a content management system.

    Editors need to know how to bring together all the elements, they need to know how to add functionality to an online news site that creates a community, and they need to understand that a different medium requires a different type of communication.

    In an RSS-based Daily Me mediasphere where the newspaper is exploded into its parts and then reassembled and mashed up as the user chooses, the online news sites that thrive will be the ones that create a community.

  • http://www.ryansholin.com Ryan Sholin

    Hi everyone – I was the student in the room. To be fair, I’m a graduate student, and it’s hard to figure out what undergraduates know and what they don’t. Nevertheless, I’ve taken the classes, I’ve worked on the website for the school newspaper, and I’m part of a small team that’s working on creating and serving multimedia and other new-school content online.

    I can tell you firsthand that recruiters are looking for students with Web skills. Upon looking at my resume where I claim to be some sort of multimedia guru, one recruiter asked “Do you know Flash?” I answered that I would by the time any internship would start in the summer. He told me to go ahead and put it down on my resume if I applied for the internship, because the large California-based newspaper conglomerate he works for had already trained 14 reporters to use Flash, and they were training 14 more this winter.

    Another bigger-but-struggling newspaper conglomerate recruiter explained to me that their newsroom and their Web people barely communicate at all. The online versions of ALL their papers are run on the same template so the national advertising fits in the same place. They can’t get local breaking news up quickly on the Web site for their paper unless it ends up in an AP feed. They desperately need someone who can bridge that gap between the newsroom and the online publishers.

    In fact, yet another recruiter from a Bay Area paper told me that her company had just created such a position — a “bridge desk” — so they could have more interaction between Web site and newsroom.

    What I’ve been trying to figure out is what undergraduates need to know in order to compete and succeed in this market.

    Here’s my take: journalism students don’t need to know code; they need to know the Web. Photojournalists need to know what Flickr is, and reporters need to be using a feed reader. Broadcast students should be listening to podcasts. PR students should be reading business blogs, and Advertising students should be learning about Google AdSense and other context-based advertising systems.

    Editors, on the other hand, in each and every medium the J-School teaches, need to know how to post content on the Web — and not just by shoveling stories and photos into a content management system.

    Editors need to know how to bring together all the elements, they need to know how to add functionality to an online news site that creates a community, and they need to understand that a different medium requires a different type of communication.

    In an RSS-based Daily Me mediasphere where the newspaper is exploded into its parts and then reassembled and mashed up as the user chooses, the online news sites that thrive will be the ones that create a community.

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