Last year I sat in a room full of students while an experienced online news editor was giving a guest lecture. He said all j-school grads should have URLs to send to their prospective employers.

A young man raised his hand and said the students in our j-school are not taught how to do that. Of course the online guy said you’ve got to teach yourself. (Grumble, grumble, from the student.)

After the lecture, a colleague told me that student had taken her online news class, in which students are taught how to create and manage sites, and are assigned to do so. He must have turned in the assignment(s), because he passed the course.

So you can lead those ponies to water, Kevin, but you can’t force them to drink it.

We’ve started putting things in courses - using blogs as class communication tools, audio in some reporting classes. We did two, new multimedia classes this year - one a semester long one, one as a Maymester. We’re gutting our “Documentary Photography” course in the spring and making that our big multimedia journalism course.

A start, at least …

What we might do a better job of is advising those students about what to expect, and what to look for, in a career.

I think its something that could be a game changer. If a history major uses a camera for a project, they might not become a pro with it, and might pick it up once or twenty times while in school, but if they understand just what doing video is all about, I think they are going to be that much more of a discerning viewer for years down the road.

One of the problems that I see with colleges is that many students are young, and many don’t know what they’re doing at 18 or 19. I certainly was that way. And they don’t have a whole lot of experience, they really haven’t been working yet, and getting real world experience as opposed to college experience changes things and how you look at what you need to know and whats important.

I kinda wonder if it might not be better to stretch the college experience out over 5 or 6 years to allow students to carry a little lighter course load and to work part time to gain some of that experience.

It’s rare that a blogger is able to do investigative reporting. A lot of blogging is more about expression of opinion, or reblogging of what a handful do find by being close to some event or source. What is it that you think a prospective journalism student would actually learn from blogs per se in terms of their craft? Can you cite an example of a story that you feel could never have been unearthed if not for a blog? And no fair merely taking the echo-chambers of stories like Scooter Libby, where blogs are merely sounding boards for leakers. Take a story where a blogging “citizen journalist” actually had to do their own work. Go ahead, I’m sure there are such stories.

There is no substitute for the cold call. Email and twitter and Facebook and such may help, but at the end of the day, you need the cold call, the face-to-face interview.

RSS? Well, sure, anyone can click and fill up their Google reader with all kinds of stuff. How does this contribute, really, to acquiring the skills to become selective?

Citizen journalism? I have a link for you on this. It often doesn’t work, where it is most needed:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/citizen-war-reporter

If you look closely at how papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have transformed themselves in recent years, they’ve harnessed all these newfangled social media tools to encourage more reader participation. But that’s not about journalism, it’s about democratic participation. If anything, they’ve dumbed themselves down too much on quite a few stories in blog format where they are trying to play to readers’ tastes. But to accuse the mainstream media of being bogged down in old-fashioned print is out of date as a concept. They’ve all caught up and use all the tools they are “supposed” to. The question is whether tools product journalism. Likely, they only help; you still need to be a good reporter with skills, not just tools.

I was shocked that the students were not even taught the basics in investigative journalism through Blog Search and RSS feeds.

Matt’s right - journalism students need to prepare themselves as entrepreneurs. Two reasons. One, the traditional jobs are not there. You need to create one through the effective and innovative use of new media. Fortunately, it can be done.

Second, entrepreneurs force themselves to learn what they need to learn. Otherwise they go hungry. Guys like Matt end up learning more than most j-schools are prepared to deliver.

I left, went to work at a paper as an intern, and now am running my own magazine. I prepared myself. I learned web development, how to edit video, how to edit sound, and everything else I use everyday.

They taught us how to write, how to edit an article, how to be unbiased, how to interview with pen and paper. There was no web. There was no video. There was no sound. And the program is a big, 100 or more per year graduate with a degree in it. Its sad. I can’t even hire an intern from the program today, they have no idea what they are doing. It is truly sad.

I would love to chat with you about things off the blog sometime.

Best,

Matt Blalock
Editor
http://www.Vewd.org - For documentary photographers.