Universities need to begin teaching online journalism

With our growing work on LexMonitor and teaching the art of blogging, citizen journalism, and social media to what’s about 1,000 lawyer clients, LexBlog hires journalism and communication students, both as interns and as full time employees upon graduation.

Unfortunately, for new media companies like LexBlog and traditional main stream media companies, graduating journalism students are woefully unprepared for the real world. A world where online investigative reporting via blogging and the effective use of RSS, citizen journalism, and social media are as, if not more, important than print.

The irony is that newspapers and traditional media are laying off high paid senior people and would love to have students with a hungry work ethic skilled in the ways of new media. Instead of these kids getting journalism and media jobs where they’re needed, they’re underemployed serving tables and lattes while begging to get their foot in the door for an opportunity to learn the skills they need.

Believe me, I’ve got a stack of emails and resumes from kids like this. And I feel guilty that I should be paying them more than the value they’re equipped to offer.

The people who should feel guilty are the deans and directors of journalism schools at Universities who took hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition moneys without telling students and their parents the school will be graduating your sons and daughters without the skills they need to get a job.

LexBlog hired Rob La Gatta, then a junior at Seattle University, as an intern 18 months ago. We were fortunate to get him to join the team as a full time employee this summer.

When I called the chair of Seattle University’s Communication/Journalism department as a reference and told him about what Rob would be doing, he bragged that the school doesn’t teach students about things like blogs which are just things used by people ranting on the Internet. When I referenced some of the things LexBlog offered students, he seemed to dismiss them as some sort of ‘tech school skill.’

When I asked the same department chair about what student interns are paid, I was told I would never be able to compete with what newspapers like the Seattle Post Intelligencer paid the school’s journalism interns. Turns out the Seattle PI paid Rob nothing when he interned there before LexBlog and we paid Rob $10 per hour with an increase when he went full time for a quarter.

And as far as I know, Rob was the only graduate of Seattle University’s Communication/Journalism program who had a job on graduation this summer. A job directly related to the journalism and communication profession.

Mindy McAdams joined the faculty of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida in August 1999 as the Knight Chair for journalism technologies and the democratic process. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in online journalism.

McAdams’ perspective on teaching online journalism.

We online evangelists in journalism education are often accused of advocating a lot of technology training — ‘vocational skills,’ some would say. I recommend that a lot of journalism — both real-world examples and practical assignments — accompany the skills instruction. If the lessons come out to about 75 percent journalism and 25 percent technology, I would suggest that you can’t get that from the computer skills class at the community college.

McAdams, who also blogs at ‘teaching online journalism,’ shares a presentation at slideshare she gave yesterday at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Related resources are linked on this page, which she prepared for journalist training in Vietnam this summer.

My aim in this presentation (to visual communication educators) was to lay out a framework for introducing basic multimedia skills for journalists. There are four to six modules, depending how you choose to slice them up. The total instruction time could be as little as 15 hours. Certainly your students won’t be experts after only 15 hours, but they can begin producing the type of work that news organizations are looking for. Whether the students produce work of sufficient quality depends on what kind of assignments you require them to do — and how much effort they invest in the work, of course.

It’s understandable that Universities employing professors, deans, and department chairs who did not cut their teeth in the world of online journalism, are lagging in this area. But it’s inexcusable for such schools not to immediately explore ways to educate current students on the skills they need to succeed in today’s world.