The days of scheming journalists smoking cigarettes in the back room and pasting layouts by hand are long gone. But aspiring journalists today must master the skills needed to report for a range of media as Internet sources gain prominence in the news world.
“Our core assumption right now is that it is crucial that we teach students to be reporters within the new cycle of journalism, and this would be through the Internet,” Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, said.
The field of print journalism has faced challenges throughout the past decade. With extensive technological developments, newspapers started to lose their financial standing while Internet news sources took off. Mainstream news organizations have faced significant losses as readership increasingly shifts to Web sites, blogs, and other new media.
“If you go back to when the Journalism School was first established, we were training people in journalism to become writers of papers in New York City,” Lemann said. “In this sense we have already become oriented to media all over the world. But reality now is that things have changed.”
At his lectures on “Journalism’s Future,” Lemann has highlighted the prevalence of Internet news. He said that frequently, J-School graduates’ first jobs at newspapers, TV stations, and magazines are to write for Web sites.
Although the print news establishment might be facing the situation with dread, the J-School takes a positive view.
William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at the J-School and previous deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, wrote in an e-mail that “while everyone is heavily (and rightly) focused on the economic disruption that the digital transformation is bringing to journalism, we also need to focus on the tremendous opportunities, including the ability for many new voices to be heard and linked, the ability to distribute your content globally and instantaneously, and the nascent but promising opportunities for new media businesses to grow and flourish.”
In terms of its curriculum, the school is focusing on guiding students toward Internet-based news organizations.
“There are many news organizations on the Internet, and every time these organizations emerge, the school does its best to get students connected,“ Lemann said.
The J-School has also launched its Executive Leadership Program, under executive director Douglas Smith, which provides advanced management training to executives in news organizations.
In addition, the school has created an increasing number of new media majors, faculty, and courses.
The new Master of Arts in Journalism program, which directs students towards subject-based programs—e.g., a program in science journalism—is “oriented towards deeper subject matter expertise,” Lemann said.
Grueskin also emphasized the importance of not only preparing students for the changes in media with new skills, but also with a new mentality. “We need to provide our students both the basic skills they need to do journalism in a digital world and also, more broadly, the mind set that will make those skills applicable to a much bigger audience,” he said.
Journalism students have largely welcomed these changes. According to Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, “the school has been making excellent progress in weaving multimedia storytelling to the entire curriculum and the students want as much as we are able to provide. They are absolutely eager to dive into this.”