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.