Four essential components to Journalism school curriculum (according to Tom Rosenstiel @tbr1): 1. Teaching of technical skills (how to use different platforms and technology). A critical dimension of this teaching is computer science, so journalists can invent new ways of reporting. But given the pace of technology change, technology and platform skill cannot be the singular core they once were. The key is to teach students enough that learn they can master these tools themselves on their own as the tools change. 2. Journalistic responsibility (including history, values, ethics, community, material that always made journalists better). Now that journalism is more than whatever journalists do, knowing what the public requires of a responsible journalism is even more important. 3. Understanding of business (how to understand audience metrics, revenue, entrepreneurship). Journalists are hamstrung if they are illiterate on these matters. 4. The intellectual discipline of verification, what some call evidence and inference, or what might better be understood as social empiricism. It is a more conscious, disciplined and clinical approach to what we once called knowing how to report, think and write. At its best, journalistic inquiry is a rigorous, numerically literate, skeptical and independent way of thinking, in the same way we describe law, engineering and medicine as teaching a way of thinking. As Jack Hamilton, the former provost and dean at LSU told me on the phone, these were always the core of the best journalism.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 07:59:49 +0000
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