Dan Gilmore's "Future Of Journalism Education"

Upon reading Gilmore's "If I ran a journalism school" blog post, I began to think that someone far more articulate than I had stolen my ideas and made them their own. I kid, but just about everything on Gilmore's list is something I have though about at one time or another. My undergraduate degree is not in journalism, but in political science. The only long-term experience I have in journalism is with pegasusnews.com, a non-traditional news service to say the least. Because of this, I have always been a bit reticent to criticize the ways of the media and the ways most in the media are trained. But to Gilmore's points...his idea of doing away with the common "track" system makes perfect sense to me. I am amazed this still exists. I have mentioned this on this blog before, but I have journalism students ask me all the time "what kind of journalism do you want to do?" I have always found this very odd. We need to be skilled and proficient in every way to provide information and content to audiences possible. His point about "encouraging cross-disciplinarian learning and doing" is the one that resonates most with me. My first course in this program was a "Readings" course. Most of the students in the course got their undergrad degrees in Journalism, English, some form of literature, etc. I was amazed that I was the only political science student. I was also amazed at how little my classmates had read on the topic of political theory. As I gave my first presentation on Noam Chomsky, I watched as the students stared at me blankly; it was obvious they'd never even heard the name. So, while all of the students certainly were better writers than I, it seemed they had a long way to go in understanding the world they were hoping to cover. The Mayborn had a professor for a year or so here from Israel named Dr. Avraham when I first started. He told me that in Israel, students are not permitted to just study journalism. They must study journalism and politics, or history, or, sociology, etc. I think this would go a long way in preparing students to be solid journalists in today's media landscape.

Ch. 2 Thoughts

It's tough to really have much to say on 7 pages that focus primarily on subjects and technologies which we are all very familiar with by now. In Chapter 2, Briggs focuses on how Web 2.0 has changed the way people consumer news and information and what these changes mean for journalists. It is tough for me to even remember what he calls 'Web 1.0' (a term that was retrofitted to describe the web before interactivity became the rule of the day). So while I am quite positive that everyone in this class is very well versed in Google, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg, I do think that the author makes some interesting points that about the nature of change in the business that are worth discussing. First, this quote from a December '06 issue of Nieman Reports: "Journalists new thinking needs to begin at the periphery, where change comes quickly among the younger generation of users, and a lot more slowly for us. Tomorrow's potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. Yet news organizations have been all too slow to notice movement in places that are away from what has been their center." Wow. I'll say. Since the time I began studying the field of journalism with any serious interest, it has always seemed to me to be one of the most poorly run industries business-wise in existence. Journalism is supposed to be an engine for positive social change, it is supposed to assist in moving us a society forward, yet it has been painfully slow to embrace technology and changes in the information sharing dynamic. I realize that the field is not some massive, monolithic entity. But in general, it has long seemed that the people running these media outlets have the mindset that "this will all blow over. This whole internet thing will just die out and we will be fine staying just the way we are." Change does start at the periphery, and it starts with young people. As much as old, grizzled journalism types like to rail against the younger generations, if they had paid more attention to younger folks information consumption habits, they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now. Which brings me to the quote about Google from the chapter: "They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels." Old media outlets had been doing what they were doing and raking in fat profits for so long that they turned a blind eye to innovation and the future. Why? Because innovation costs money, and it is risky. Change is hard, but it's not as hard when you're one of the ones driving the change.

I especially enjoy Briggs' characterization of news as a "conversation" in the world of Web 2.0 Users can leave comments on stories, they can post their own stories, etc. To me, this is how news is created anyways; this is how journalists work. After doing an initial story, you hear feedback from readers (previously maybe through the mail or by phone) and that gives you another angle, or another idea for a story. And you go from there. Now, it is just happening before our eyes.

Part of the reason I don't keep a personal blog or a twitter-feed is that I find it difficult to rapidly formulate and share content - which is pretty much a must for those media. When we finished class last week and were asked to come up with a blog post about what we had gone over that night, I was thinking to myself "Now?" We had just heard all this information, had no time to go ponder any of it or mull it over, no time to do any research on the topics we discussed at all, yet I listened as most of my the class hurriedly banged out hundreds of words and were leaving the room ten minutes after getting the assignment. I don't consider myself to be dinosaur-slow, but I am just not comfortable publishing thoughts that have only been in my head for 60 minutes.

Anyhow. I would first like to touch on the Supreme Court decision we spoke about last week, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Comission. Clearly, this decision alters the fabric of our democracy as we know it. However, I don't understand why people are so shocked by this. It seems it's been a long time coming, and this decision serves only as the final blow. This Slate article dubs the process "turning a corporation into a real live boy." Seeing how surprised and dismayed the people were over this decision reminds me of just how skeptical I am of the American political system in the year 2010. I have read in many places that the scariest part of this is that so many U.S. corporations are owned for foreign entities. I suppose this is a little concerning, but in my opinion, this process is inevitable. This is the age of globalization, and for anyone who believed that it would be possible to have so much foreign investment in the American economy without having foreign influence on the American political system, I would say you haven't been paying much attention for the past 20 years. Hopefully this decision woke you up.

Next I would like to discuss one of the issues we touched on in class last Thursday. Honestly, I am still sort of fuzzy on what exactly 'cloud computing' is, or rather, how exactly it works. What I do understand is that it involves massive concentration of data on servers that are owned by private companies. This article from cnet.com accurately summarizes the issues and concerns associated with cloud computing, and the writer points out several times that trust, or the lack thereof, is the name of the game regarding clouds. It's pretty simple: if you want to use these services, you have to be willing to make the sacrifices associated with data concentration. There will always be the chance that a massive breach will occur.

As far as some of the student presentations made last week... I personally don't think I would ever use a site like Foursquare. I see little use for it. However, I do like the idea of polldaddy and will probably try to use it in my work in the future.

I saw an edisode of Frontline this week called "Digital Nation" which I plan to bring up in class tonight and touch on heavily in my next blog post. It was particularly germane to the content of this course so I think it will make for interesting discussion.