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Nieman Reports Fall 2007 Issue Teaching Journalism in the Digital Age Passing Along the Value of Humility ‘Students need to be open-minded about the best way to tell each story rather than seeing rich media as mere add-ons to word-driven narratives.’ By Mike McKean Convergence journalism, as we teach it at Missouri, is more about new attitudes than new skills. Don’t get me wrong. We do our best to train students in audio, video, photo, graphics and Web production. We emphasize strong writing skills. We put them to work in all of our news operations—a daily newspaper, an NPR affiliate, a commercial TV station, plus various Web sites and mobile services. Students blog, make podcasts, create Flash animations, design interactive databases, and widgets—things they have to know to find good first jobs in today’s media environment. Still, who among us in the profession or the academy can predict the exact hardware, software and distribution systems that freshmen entering j-school this fall will need to know by the time they graduate and hit the job market in 2011? Sure, we’re trying to develop
The attitudes we need to instill in our students, however, seem clearer to me. They need to thrive on constant, rapid change. Students need to be open-minded about the best way to tell each story rather than seeing rich media as mere add-ons to word-driven narratives. They need to embrace teamwork. Very few lone wolf, backpack journalists can do it all with equal skill and panache. And they need to be humble in the face of overwhelming social changes made possible by digital media. Humility is not something journalists model well. Professionalism, integrity, social responsibility—sure. Humility? Not so much. But a YouTube/Facebook/Blogger world demands we do better. Our dwindling, skeptical audience is increasingly capable of creating and sharing its own news, however they define the term. Traditional journalists can belittle these “amateurs” or embrace them in a new reporting system that makes us both better. But we can’t stop them. User-generated content, citizen journalism—whatever one wants to call it—is here to stay. Teaching Convergence Journalism There’s still a crucial place in society for professionally trained journalists. So here’s a glimpse at what’s been happening at the Missouri School of Journalism since we created a formal convergence
It is at this point, if it hasn’t happened already, that our students typically decide how to solve their “jack of all trades, master of none” challenge. We don’t want them to leave Missouri until each has a strong grounding in at least one journalistic specialty. So we require them to choose one of several, two-course concentrations designed by the faculty with a focus on newspaper and magazine writing, radio-TV reporting or producing, investigative reporting, photojournalism and design. While completing their concentrations, students sign up for their final required course—Convergence Capstone. Again they work in teams, this time to research a practical problem or need, then create a journalistic product to address it. Students have designed everything from an interactive voter guide and a high school video-sharing service to a cross-platform advertising campaign for a local auto dealer and a Web 2.0 collaboration with a local documentary film festival. Is our approach working? Two years is too soon to reach a conclusion. But our first graduating class in May landed some great internships, and they’re now finding well-paying jobs as online sports editors, magazine designers, newspaper video editors, TV newscast producers, and Teach For America volunteers from Billings, Montana to the Rio Grande Valley to Orlando, Florida. The convergence sequence has quickly become a popular major, and it can be difficult to get into. We’re limited by a relatively small faculty (three full-time teachers) and lab space
Collaboration and Convergence Let’s return to the value of humility and our desire to imbue students—and ourselves—with it. We know we don’t have all the answers to teaching and practicing convergence journalism, but we push ahead with various approaches to keep well-trained journalists relevant at a time when we believe they
The convergence faculty at Missouri makes significant changes to each required course every semester, and yet we still can’t keep up with all the new ideas and best practices. Our convergence major is just two years old, but most of the faculty already see it as only a temporary solution. If we’re still here in our present form five years from now, I’ll be surprised. In fact, we’ve already started a wholesale, schoolwide curriculum review designed to ensure that all students are exposed to convergence journalism skills. Now that’s a humbling experience for any turf-protecting department chair. Mike McKean is the department chair of the convergence journalism faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism. Next Article: Jerome Aumente Table of contents Printer-friendly format |
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