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. It follows that journalism schools must adapt their old curricula to prepare their own students to be successful news producers, and to prepare the wider…

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. This is an increasingly corporate, concentrated, and commercial industry struggling to find its place in what has become a crowded and networked field (Hamilton 2004; Heinrich 2008; Van Der Haak, Parks, and Castells 2012; Anderson,…

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. Though the Condé Nast announcement “caused a stir in the media world” according to the Wall Street Journal (Perlberg 2015), it wasn’t much of a stir, since other major…

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: Innovation is essential for the survival of journalism: “We want to help produce the innovators and innovations our industry desperately needs,” writes Jeff Jarvis, Director of CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, of its educational mission (Jarvis 2012).  Journalists need to understand the business and economics of journalism: “It’s an imperative in the new digital landscape,” observed a participant at a 2010 international entrepreneurial journalism education conference hosted by CUNY (Vazquez Schaich…

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. The responses to this rapid transformation and destabilization have been varied, but two ideas with far-reaching implications have emerged in…