The field of journalism is evolving. Journalism schools are a crucial part of that process, as they teach students the necessary skills to get starting jobs that hopefully turn into blossoming careers.
This task, aimed at equipping students for not just a job but a career, has grown increasingly complex.
Teaching a young journalist demands more than training them in traditional storytelling skills, and now must include, at minimum, a cursory understanding of the larger digital ecosystem, product management, audience engagement, user experiences, revenue streams, and more. If journalism schools want to succeed in their mission, they must teach students to succeed across the whole industry, not just as reporters.
Historically, the relationship between journalism education and the professional world was straightforward: Journalism schools are a part of a longstanding apprenticeship model, in which the industry outsourced the “greenest” of years to a trade school. Schools prepared students, who were then readily absorbed by the industry.
Most journalism schools focused on teaching the trade, not the academic study of journalism as an intellectual pursuit. Yes, Ph.D. programs exist, but that’s not the bread and butter of journalism education. Students sign up for these programs out of career ambitions.
Reporting and writing remain table stakes, but students now need to be equipped with skills that go beyond storytelling and lead to entirely different career paths, still within the confines of media and journalism. A great case in point is how the industry and schools adapted to social media. The growth of social media spawned entirely new entry-level job titles like “social media producer.” Whereas traditional entry-level reporting jobs led to a career path that would have ended in an editor-in-chief title, these new jobs moved onto careers that culminated in a title such as head of audience.
Perhaps because it could be understood under the “storytelling” rubric, many journalism schools were quick to adapt and adopt new courses, methodologies of teaching and a broadening of the trade they taught to prepare students for these new social media jobs. While some institutions have adeptly navigated this shift — going even further by incorporating data journalism, social media strategy, and even the basics of coding into their curriculums — others lag behind.
The next disparity that will emerge, however, will be between journalism schools that expand their charge beyond teaching “storytelling” to include teaching all the career paths upstream of product, revenue, audience, and more. A journalism school that does not prepare its students to at least understand these elements of our industry is limiting its students’ potential for success.
Too often, I come across journalism schools that only consider “storytelling” under the charge of things they are teaching students. This disparity will create gaps in the ecosystem, leaving some new graduates ill-prepared for the realities of the journalism landscape.
And yes, there are schools and programs making great progress in this vein, especially around product management. There are other schools, however, that are producing graduates only capable of stepping into the editorial space, and are ill-equipped to even recognize the important, well paid, impactful roles in media that keep the ecosystem driving forward.
The emergence of new career paths within journalism — such as audience strategy, product management, and the intertwining of editorial and revenue considerations — highlights the need for a more radical approach to journalism education. These roles are as pivotal as traditional reporting, shaping the way content is created, distributed, and monetized.
For journalism schools to truly serve their purpose, they must evolve just as the industry does.
