With one exception (the keynote address by Robert Picard), all of the essays in this volume are expanded versions of presentations made at the conference “Toward 2020: New Directions in Journalism Education,” held at Ryerson University in Toronto on 31 May 2014. Testifying to the urgent interest in professional renewal among journalism educators, more than one hundred people from Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia attended the conference. The papers published here represent a reasonable cross-section of the issues discussed. The authors advance different ideas about where journalism education should go from here; at times they disagree with one another, but all share the underlying view that if business as usual was ever a viable option, this clearly is no longer the case.
Introduction
By Gene Allen
With one exception (the keynote address by Robert Picard), all of the essays in this volume are expanded versions of presentations made at the conference “Toward 2020: New Directions in Journalism Education,” held at Ryerson University in Toronto on 31 May 2014.
Deficient Tutelage: Challenges of Contemporary Journalism Education
By Robert G. Picard
Speaking to a group of journalism educators about what is wrong with journalism education is like encountering a pack of wolves in the woods and lecturing them about dinner etiquette. It will probably end badly.Nevertheless, I agreed to make this speech because I believe in journalism and teaching, and because I hope we share a common commitment to improving the lives of young people and preparing them for the future.
To Turn or to Burn: Shifting the Paradigm for Journalism Education
By Ivor Shapiro
Journalism education means preparation for a career in journalism: true or false?
The best answer is, sometimes. This paradigm – journalism education is preparation for a career in journalism – has been self-evident to most educators, students, and others since the discipline’s beginnings. Yet it has long been equally self-evident that a substantial number of journalism students’ futures lie elsewhere than in journalism careers.
A Foucauldian Foray into How Power Operates When Journalists and Public Relations Officers Meet
By Chantal Francoeur
This paper addresses two pressing questions facing journalists and journalism educators today: What are we to make of the ever-increasing presence of the public relations industry on the contemporary journalistic landscape? And how can we modernize our teaching so that it accurately reflects the current relationship between these two professions?
A Mobile Responsive Expertise: Learning Outcomes, Journalism Education, and the “Teaching Hospital” Model
By Mary Lynn Young and Janet Giltrow
Much of the curricular discourse over the past decade around innovation in journalism education in North America has focused on developing and expanding learning outcomes related to digital media and online journalism environments. These developments, while generally fruitful for students’ ability to recognize, know, reproduce, and apply journalism technologies, have occurred against a backdrop of` deinstitutionalization of news and mainstream media organizations (Picard 2014) and generational anxiety among the professoriate about emergent journalism practices and identities, and about the role of journalism education in a digital era when educators have uneven experience in digital media environments (Nikunen 2014; Zelizer 2004).
Interrogating Our Past Practice as We Scale the Walls of the Box We Call Journalism Education
By Sally Haney
Many journalism educators in Canada arrive in the academy with deep, varied, and direct journalism experience. This paper examines some potential impacts of our mainstream media experiences on the seemingly urgent need to reimagine journalism education. Drawing on industry and academic research, interaction with students and colleagues, and twenty-plus years working as a journalist, I invite colleagues to explore with me some of the ways our industry experiences may be hindering our work as journalism educators.
Selling Digital Dreams: “Entrepreneurial Journalism,” the Decline of Public Service Reporting, and the Role of Journalism Education
By Paul Benedetti, Meredith Levine, and Mike Gasher
New, disruptive technology has had enormous economic repercussions for the media industry and, consequently, on the practice of journalism. Fragmented audiences and declining advertising revenues have resulted in widespread closures and layoffs in struggling legacy media organizations. Simultaneously, the rise of new media outlets that blend news, gossip, entertainment, rumour, and humour, and that use Web metrics and audience tracking to maximize page views, have challenged the hegemony once enjoyed by traditional media.
E is for Empirical: How Scholarly Business Texts, Blogs, and Trade Journals Conceptualize and Critique Entrepreneurism
By Meredith Levine
Read through the modest but expanding literature on entrepreneurial journalism education and you’ll discover embedded in the texts a sort of syllogism that unfolds as follows:
The Big Sellout: A Critical Snapshot of the Rise of “Entrepreneurial Journalism”
By Paul Benedetti
In January, 2015 Condé Nast, the publisher of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ, and other magazines, announced it would be using its editorial staff to write advertising copy in a new initiative that would allow marketers to work directly with editors to create “branded content.” Branded content, native advertising, and sponsored content are all new terms for advertising that mimics the look and feel of editorial content.
What Is Journalism Education For?
By Mike Gasher
What we are witnessing in journalism education today is a tug of war over what we call journalism – a struggle over its definition and purpose as well as over who gets to decide these questions. Pulling on one end of the rope is the news industry, which continues to try to appropriate journalism as a commercial enterprise serving markets rather than publics.
A Campus-Wide J-School: News Literacy as an Avenue for Journalism Schools to Connect with New Students and a New Generation
By Jordan Press
The digital age has created an existential crisis for news media, with legacy outlets trying to reinvent themselves in order to remain profitable and relevant in a rapidly changing information ecosystem. They are trying to adapt their traditional business and journalism models to situate themselves within a new reality, one in which legacy media – the traditional news gatekeepers – must compete with a multitude of new voices that are creating and sharing news.
Like Reaching for the Pen: Towards a Greater Place for Digital News Video in Newsrooms and Journalism Curricula
By Gavin Adamson
This study is inspired by the results of an experimental approach to reporting live in a student newsroom. On 16 November 2012, two fourth-year undergraduate students at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism ventured to the University of Toronto to cover a men’s rights activist’s speech. There they would produce, by some measures, the most successful editorial content published by ryersonian.ca (Lagerquist 2013) to date.
Using Analytics: A Round Table Discussion
Moderator: Gene Allen
Participants: Marissa Nelson, Senior Director of Digital Media, CBC News; Erika Tustin, Digital Editor, Toronto Star; Kenny Yum, Managing Editor, AOL Canada, Huffington Post Canada;
The rapid and profound changes affecting journalism make it difficult for journalism educators – many of whom have not worked regularly in newsrooms for several years – to keep up with new developments. In the continuing digital transformation of journalism, one of the most important recent changes has been the ability to receive rapid and essentially constant information about audience response.
Working as a Journalist in 2020: What Will It Take? A Round Table Discussion
Moderator: Gene Allen
Participants: Derek Chezzi, Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo Canada; Steve Ladurantaye, Twitter Canada; Jonathan Whitten, Executive Director of news content, CBC News
It’s no longer news to anyone that journalism is facing a crisis; nor is it news that this presents opportunities for those who are willing to reimagine what journalism is, or might be. Every week brings new evidence of both trends: continuing declines in advertising revenue for newspapers, along with newsroom layoffs; and the emergence of new, mostly Web-based journalistic ventures and methods. Sometimes the two go on simultaneously under the same organizational roof, but often not. Underlying everything is a historic shift in power away from journalists and journalistic institutions and toward audiences.