Conferences Focus on Renewal, Innovation, and the Future

Pick up any school or college newsletter or alumni magazine on any given day, and you will see that journalism programs share concerns such as how to teach entrepre- neurship and innovation to students while simultaneously teaching the values of journalism.That's clearly true here in the United States.Yet, such concerns are not necessarily shared around the world, as the World Journalism Education Congress in the delightful medieval city of Mechelen, Belgium, made clear. Programs in other regions are more concerned, for example, with more basic issues such as the development of curricula, the formulation of syllabi, and the inclusion of advertising and public relations as part of the curricular mix.In his Welcome to the World Journalism Education Congress, Dr. Joe Foote, dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma, and convener and chair of the World Journalism Education Council, noted the different emphases: "Those from industrialized nations will be preoccupied with the massive change journalism faces as it struggles to reinvent itself for a new generation. Those from the developing world will be preoccupied with managing huge demand for skilled, educated practitioners as media accelerate rapidly. Both perspectives are important to understanding the direction of our field."Hundreds of educators from fifty-seven countries participated in the third congress whose central theme, "Renewing journalism through education," focused on the ques- tion of how journalism education can play a more directive role in shaping the future of the profession.Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and author of What Would Google Do? talked about how we need new thinking about outcomes, about our assumptions for teaching journalism.We don't know what's going to happen next, he said, but we do know that content is a trap. Journalism has been focused on making a product (newspapers, for example) and selling that product. Journalism, Jarvis argues, is no longer a content business but a service-one measured around whether people are properly informed for what they need in their lives. We need to teach new metrics and the skills of collaboration, work- ing live, and disruption as well as how to incubate businesses. It doesn't matter who is a journalist or a blogger, he said. What matters is that "acts of journalism" are commit- ted. We need to serve people as individuals or as tribes of small groups, he said, not as masses. We can only value people if we know them as individuals. "Google under- stands that content is a relationship that signals something about someone," he said. Therefore, Jarvis argues, schools of journalism and mass communication are passe. What we need to be is "schools of informed communities," he said.Anna McKane, European Journalism Training Association, questioned whether journalism might be regarded as part of a broad education rather than as the voca- tional degree it is sometimes considered. "In the United Kingdom, psychology is in the top three disciplines studied, but most people who study psychology do not intend to be psychologists," she said, adding that perhaps journalism should be perceived in the same way. Corporate communications and brand journalism are growth areas in the U.K. and represent a diversification of courses within the journalism curriculum, she said.Among the panel presentations were those on journalism education and profes- sional ethics, international reporting, media and information literacy, and investigative journalism in journalism education. Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor Dr. Mark Hunter of the INSEAD (Institut Europeen d'Administration des Affaires) Social Innovation Centre, Paris, and Global Investigative Journalism Network, questioned whether journalism programs are producing "operational journalists at the moment graduates get their diploma. …