How To Make J-school Matter (Again): A blueprint for the future of journalism and journalism education

In the fall of 2000, when I was a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, I sat in a large seminar room listening to a lecture about whether journalists should be allowed to use digital cameras. It was meant to be a complicated discussion about ethics, but I felt there was a bigger issue that needed to be addressed. I’d just moved to New York City from Tokyo, where I had direct access to a brand new world of emerging technology, including some of the first Internet-connected, mass-market camera phones. To me, it seemed more useful to talk about the ethics of accepting and publishing photos from readers, since we’d all be using similar phones within five years.

I raised that point, acknowledging that while the technology had not yet taken hold in the U.S., soon my classmates would see a dramatic change in their mostly analog mobile phones. Consumers would be able to snap photos, email them to friends on the spot or even post them to the Internet, without ever having to use a computer.

But I was immediately, and somewhat embarrassingly, dismissed. “Why on earth would anyone print a low-quality photo in the newspaper or show it on TV? That won’t happen,” my professor snapped back, returning the conversation to the ethics of digital cameras.

Of course, the rest isn’t history; it’s the present. In classrooms across the country, students are being taught about a media ecosystem that’s already been eclipsed by new platforms, devices, and business models. Some of them might be wondering, as I did, whether they’ve made a mistake in attending journalism school at all.

I am deeply concerned about the future of journalism education in America. Journalism isn’t a licensed profession in the United States, and so anyone—journalism degree or not—can call herself a reporter. It can be argued that universities exist solely for scholarship and pedagogy, and that they do not play a role in the day-to-day practice of modern news media. I disagree with both assertions. Universities must propel the profession forward and become the connective tissue between what’s come before and what’s still yet to come. Journalism’s problems are journalism education’s problems, too.

There have been many efforts to rethink journalism education, including at my alma mater. Many individuals and institutions are working on various aspects of this issue: Dianne Lynch, president of Stephens College in Missouri; Geanne Rosenberg Belton, media law professor at CUNY’s Baruch College; the American Press Institute; and, of course, the ongoing Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. Indeed, all of these worthwhile endeavors have crystallized the need for reform. Now, we must advance the foundation they set, creating a new blueprint for the future of journalism education that exists in a constantly evolving digital environment where the means of transmission are being built and controlled outside of the core profession and where anyone can produce content that looks like–but isn’t necessarily–reported, vetted news.

Some schools welcome the disruptive change. They’re offering classes in virtual reality and wearable technology. Some are betting on code, mandating courses in data science, even if the syllabi don’t integrate well within the rest of the curriculum. Still others are yielding, slowly, to transition away from traditional concentrations, shifting the focus from the print and broadcast mediums, as well as PR, toward entrepreneurial, convergence, and data journalism.

Meanwhile, the ways in which news is reported, written, packaged, and produced are being redefined by decidedly nontraditional organizations. Sites like BuzzFeed have been so successful in acclimating us to listicles, aggregated social posts, and native advertising that our digital behaviors have shifted to anticipate similar story formats from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Startups such as NewsCred and Contently have built wildly successful content marketing tools in that spirit, enabling brands such as Pepsi and Dell to create websites that feature a mix of social content and what looks very much like news.

But that’s content. Organizational management structures within media companies, too, are evolving: Vox Media, which operates The Verge, Vox.com and a number of other sites, does not have traditional newsroom roles. Instead, staff work in various functions across all the usual silos. Trei Brundrett, Vox’s chief product officer, leads the team that develops homegrown internal systems and tools. Melissa Bell, vice president for growth and analytics, is also an editor.

What about distribution? The means of transmission are being built outside of journalism schools and without the input of news organizations. In 2015, Apple and Facebook each launched new platforms for content with launch partners including The Economist, Time, The New York Times, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Business, and Wired, among others. Algorithms decide what we are shown and when; and that includes whether those services deem certain content appropriate. As part of its community standards section, Facebook includes the following: “To help balance the needs, safety, and interests of a diverse community...we may remove certain kinds of sensitive content or limit the audience that sees it.”

In June, Philadelphia-based photojournalist Jim MacMillan noticed that a photo he’d posted had disappeared from his feed. The photo, showing a fatal accident but not the victim’s body, seemed newsworthy to MacMillan—in recent years, a number of fatal duck boat accidents like the one he photographed had occurred in Pennsylvania, as well as in Lake Michigan and in Arkansas. Reacting to the removal of his photo, MacMillan posted: “I’ve been scrubbed. I haven’t photographed breaking news in years, but this seemed important and newsworthy.”

What about near-future distribution? Google, Microsoft, and Apple are building intelligent mobile operating systems, which use our email, calendars, contacts, location, digital behaviors, and search history as inputs in order to deliver us just the right information at exactly the right time, acting as a sort of personal information layer on top of our digital experience. Soon, these personal information layers will become as ubiquitous and indispensable as the utility layers—the Internet, the Cloud, word processing software—we all take for granted today. News content will be part of that ecosystem; stories will be matched with our individual needs and preferences, delivered to us not via a news organization’s app acting as an intermediary but, instead, directly through the smart OS itself.

This may all seem far fetched to you now, but this research is already underway. In this scenario where would a journalist even fit in? Or better yet, how would we define journalism then?

And in the far future? Historically, information has been taken in by our five known senses, and our information output has been restricted to language and gesture. But at the University of Washington Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, researchers have built a system allowing one person to transmit her thoughts directly to another person. Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, one researcher sent a brain signal to another person elsewhere on campus, causing the recipient’s finger to tap a keyboard. Scientists at Barcelona-based Starlab fitted a brain-computer interface on a man in Kerala, India and instructed him to simply imagine how he was moving his hands and feet4. His thoughts were sent to a man in Strasbourg, France wearing a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) robot, which delivered electrical pulses to his brain. When the man in India thought about moving his feet, the TMS caused the man in France to see light, even though his eyes were closed. What will happen in the far-future, when everyone becomes a roving reporter, watching and transmitting events as they unfold without filter or intermediary? This may all seem far-fetched to you now, but this research is already underway. In this scenario—where would a journalist even fit in? Or better yet, how would we define journalism then?

Research and development teams within single organizations cannot have a transformative effect on the entire industry; nor can the fruits of forward-thinking practitioners working on individual research fellowships affect the industry in total. News organizations must collaborate on building the forefront of the industry, but they are hampered by day-to-day operations can cannot devote enough focus on practical experimentation. Universities have the time and flexibility to think about the future of news, but they lack funding and real-world laboratories.

If we recast undergraduate and graduate journalism education beyond teaching the fundamentals to include preparing young people for a modern media ecosystem—as well as providing a reliable base for experimentation and meaningful research and development—it would be difficult to argue against the need for journalism programs and schools. We therefore must figure out a way to make the degree matter more.

As part of my 2014-15 Nieman Visiting Fellowship at Harvard, I  spent several months developing a new blueprint for journalism education.

When asked: “If you were
to redevelop your entire curriculum now, what steps would be necessary?” one survey respondent wrote, “Three retirements and an act of God.”

The best legacy we can leave for that future generation is to reconsider how we define and teach journalism today. That means thinking beyond journalism’s traditional silos and envisioning it as an interdisciplinary field that is setting the pace for how we create and consume information. The future of journalism cannot be ceded to distributors; rather, it should be researched and tested within the realm of academia, just as the future of other disciplines—such as biochemical genetics artificial intelligence, behavioral and experimental economics—is being imagined and built by the world’s best research universities.

The Nieman Foundation published my findings in the short book How To Make J-school Matter (Again): A blueprint for the future of journalism education. In it, I identify six hidden challenges facing journalism educators today and I offer a new approach to curriculum and classroom education:

The Six Hidden Challenges in Journalism Education

• There are long-standing tensions between universities and their journalism departments or schools.
• There is no culture of academic leadership within journalism departments and schools.
• The current system prevents curriculum development from keeping pace with the changing realities of modern newsrooms.
• Accreditation in journalism is a paradox, making things simultaneously better and worse.
• Journalism departments do not fundraise on par with their peers within the university.
• Journalism schools have not cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the industry.

My three-pronged approach includes a foundation of exceptional liberal arts coursework; a holistic survey of modern journalism and newsrooms with deep-dives into specialized concentrations; and a compulsory experiential learning component that can better mirror the educational background and expectations of young Millennials.

My aim with this book is to strengthen journalism education such that it becomes the engine propelling the news media into the future. My hope is that it catalyzes real-world, durable action rather than temporary didactic reaction, and that the academic community will commit to collaborative, long-term planning. Academia, in a true partnership with industry, must set a vision and course for the next twenty-five years of journalism. If the six hidden challenges in university programs can be overcome, and if curricula and coursework are recalibrated, then all of journalism—perhaps all of our knowledge economy—stands to gain, beginning today and continuing well into the future.

The book is downloadable here for free in multiple formats.