Networked Journalism Education

Mark Lee Hunter, an investigative journalist, researcher and adjunct professor at the INSEAD Social Innovation Centre in Paris, is giving a keynote presentation this week to the European Journalism Training Association in Paris.

The following are excerpts from an interview with Mark Lee Hunter about journalism education posted on the European Journalism Centre web site:

Kathlyn Clore, EJC: In the recent INSEAD working paper you co-authored on Disruptive News Technologies: Stakeholder Media ad the Future of Watchdog Journalism Business Models, you write, “with the exception of Norway, every European Union country is graduating approximately twice as many reporters from journalism schools as can be hired by the industry.”

What shifts do journalism educators need to make in order to better equip students to work for stakeholder media (rather than news media) which are indeed on the rise and likely employers for journalism school graduates?

Hunter: It means we have to think hard about ethics and methods. It also means we have to train them in entrepreneurialism and partnership skills. We also need to train them to understand how to collect, organise and mine data. It is not just about reporting and writing anymore. It’s about creating a future. The fundamental issue is that the news industry as presently composed will not provide a future for enough of our students.

EJC: In your working paper, you write about a shift in priorities, from “project focus to business development.” How can journalism educators help facilitate this shift?

Hunter: More strategic analysis: where are we going with this material? What are its future uses? How do we capture them?

EJC: You write in the working paper, “we have assumed that great content will solve our problems. It has not done so and it will not do so, because the historic and primary market for that content, the news industry, is in decline.”

Where does this leave journalism students or younger reporters who are enthusiastic about their work? Is the old maxim “content is king” no longer true?

EJC: No. I meant that content alone will not solve the problem if we think of content only as making one great story. We have to think beyond “this” story. We have to think about where we are going to be and what we will talk about in 10 years.

Craig Newmark wrote a post today on trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence

His key takeaway:

By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.

(I wasn’t able to get online to watch his presentation to Missouri students…will soon, hopefully.)

I’m thinking about how this might apply to education. Who has nominal power in a university setting? Administrators and faculty. Who is emerging from the grassroots? Students.

Can I imagine a scenario where a student’s grade was partially determined by a peer network? Maybe. We already have systems in place for faculty evaluations by peer networks. Could these be improved? No question. Can I imagine some nightmare scenarios from such networks? Yes, as bad as some of the nightmares we have from our current system of grades, evaluations and promotions.

Reading Newmark’s arguments, is it at least conceivable that some form of reputation management and trust currency could be applied in an academic setting in a fair and just way. These developments could help address some of the serious deficiencies in academic institutions that represent countless lost opportunities in today’s system.

For example, one serious failing in our current system is the reduction of evaluation to quantifiable measurements. In some cases, quantifiable assessment is sufficient – student answers to easily measured problems are right or wrong. Faculty publish or they don’t publish. Administrators bring in money or they don’t.

But we have few reasonable methods for assessing other types of behavior: does a journalism student exhibit the judgment and doggedness that will someday make a great reporter? Does a colleague contribute in meaningful ways to an online scholarly network? Does a student’s behavior in a class help others learn as well? Does a faculty member or student collaborate in ways that improves the productivity of a group? Do they contribute insights with others? Does their work stand out for its quality and clarity?

Quantifiable measurements can be gamed, and most professors I know have reluctantly given a high grade to a student who knew how to earn points without actually learning or giving much to a class. Faculty incentives can be dead on arrival when most the burning concern is whether this ‘counts’ at annual evaluation time. Administrators who resist change and hoard power reduce the ability of a university to prosper.

Maybe our incentives and measurements are contributing to the lack of energy I see in many college classrooms. Perhaps better systems for recognizing and rewarding talent, persistence, collaboration and success could help revitalize the academy. We should certainly try.

Here’s an idea for next semester: What if students produced a one-minute broadcast at the beginning of each class summarizing for a general audience what they learned in the previous class? Their peers – both in the class and outside — could evaluate the quality of the broadcast in some fashion that we designed together. The evaluation would be considered a part of the student’s grade, a peer input that would be transparent and make a difference. It would be a way to experiment with a reputation and evaluation system that was real and had consequences.

Any merit in this idea? Other ways to experiment with reputation, trust and authority in a college classroom?

Steve Kolowich has a story in today’s Inside Higher Ed  (J-Schools to the Rescue?), that questions the practices of j-schools in keeping enrollment numbers up and providing free labor for newsrooms:

Some believe journalism schools are exploiting students by maintaining high enrollment levels despite the contraction of the market for professional journalists — a system that guarantees a large population of out-of-work, debt-addled graduates.

If the purpose of journalism schools is to provide trained reporters to fill empty slots in professional news organizations then Kolowich’s concerns have some merit. By this line of reasoning, as the number of reporters and editors declines then j-schools should shrink accordingly. This self-reinforcing cycle would insure that the number of people trained as journalists will decrease. Since universities can’t afford to maintain non-productive units, they will help j-schools to responsibly shrivel up and disappear.

If, on the other hand, j-schools recognize that journalism as a vital public activity is being practiced in a variety of places and ways, often by people who have college degrees in subjects besides journalism, they could find a wider mission for their work.

As a practical course in the power and functions of journalism, with training in ethical communication, clear writing, visual design and networking tools, a j-school could serve a much wider population of students/citizens. If we have a smaller class of specialized journalists, it would help to have a much wider group of citizens trained in evaluating information and reporting in their own areas of expertise.

The question is whether j-schools, often staffed by professional journalists, will have the vision and will to make this kind of change in focus and mission. Can we reinvent ourselves in the same way that news organizations are having to reinvent themselves? Neither one is ‘rescuing’ the other, but both have a lot to learn in this transition from mass media to personalized, portable, participatory media.

We want to be an innovative, successful journalism school. We know we need to change. But why and how?

Why are we innovating?
(1) What we’ve been doing is increasingly less useful for our students or industry. Too much has changed.
(2) Demand for our current products is changing and possibly declining.
(3) The need for what we can produce is higher than ever.
(4) The state of our economy requires us to remain productive but spend less money doing it.
(5) We need to demonstrate our relevance and usefulness within the university to survive.

What are we innovating?
I don’t consider students “products.” But for the purposes of this thought exercise, I think it is useful to be very clear about what we are discussing. Innovation is so often conceived as a product-related activity that the analogy is useful for the moment.

We produce two products: educated students and new knowledge. Our purpose for both products is that they contribute in meaningful ways to a better quality of life for our community, state and country. This sounds lofty and abstract, but if we are able to make this purpose more concrete and real, our innovations will be more successful in the long run. The obvious need for improving public life, social conditions, culture, governance and economy in our state is highly motivating.

We can innovate in our methods: how we produce our products (students and knowledge). And/or we can innovate with what kinds of students or knowledge we produce.

Some might argue that journalism schools produce journalism, and that our innovation should be to produce innovative journalism. Our school does not produce journalism at the moment, other than through what our students produce. If we change this then we could include journalism as our third product.

PRODUCT 1: STUDENTS
We have defined our primary product as a student who is an excellent writer, versatile in the use of multiple media technologies and capable of creating accurate, ethical, and professional work in the journalism, advertising and public relations industries. To do this, part of our job is to weed out students who will not make high quality practitioners in these industries. Do we want to maintain this position? If so, then our innovation will be focused on how to make these future professionals more skilled, smarter and adaptable to compete for the increasingly scarce jobs available to them. We will position ourselves as a highly focused, demanding program for those who are motivated to compete in an exciting, challenging set of industries. We recognize that we would prove our worth not by size but quality.

If we chose to keep the production of professional journalists/communicators as our primary activity we will do so in the recognition that significant change in what we teach will still be necessary, given the deeply structural changes in the way journalism and media are created, produced, distributed, shared, linked, consumed and remixed.

If, on the other hand, we believe that journalism practices could be of value to a wider population, we could position ourselves to serve a much wider university population. In this approach to innovation, we could change or expand our product line. If we believe the demand for skilled journalism professionals is declining, what other type of student might we productively produce in our program?

– Students skilled in innovative thinking, practices, and creativity relevant to journalism and communication
– Students committed to active public citizenry through the use of journalism and communication practices
– Students skilled in the academic study of communication and journalism
– Students literate in using and contributing to media/journalism informally
– Students capable of using media technologies for use in a wide range of disciplines
– Students capable of using journalistic forms of communication for use in a wide range of industries
– Students focused on communication/journalism in one discipline — environment, business, law, politics
Others?

The more ‘products’ we chose to include in our mix, the more challenging it will be to maintain focus and direction. It may be that we have one focus for students in their freshmen and sophomore years and different choices for juniors and seniors. Or, we may have faculty members group themselves together, not in departments or sequences, but according to the type of products they want to produce together. We could have multiple focused minors or multiple majors.

PRODUCT 2: NEW KNOWLEDGE
As part of a land grant university, our mission is to create practical and intellectual forms of knowledge that benefit our state and community. Historically, this product has been developed solely at the discretion of individual faculty members, with little consultation or coordination. We can continue this practice, or we can discuss alternative ways of aligning our collective research direction. We can continue to separate our ‘product lines’ (students and knowledge) and assume little overlap between them or we can decide to align our innovative energy in a particular direction.

Deciding the direction of our innovation requires taking stock of the resources we have at hand and the most important of those are the skills and interests of our faculty. We have strengths. We have holes. How might we expand our strengths and fill the holes? In what areas might some of us want to re-focus, change, contribute?  Too much attention to existing interests will limit our reach and ultimate success but at the same time, ignoring existing interests could lead to failure.

Once we know what we want to innovate, we can use all our creative energy to figure out what it would take to do it. Questions of curriculum, teaching methods, majors, minors and credits will flow from the decisions we make about the direction and purpose of our innovation. We could be very innovative even within our existing curriculur structure. We have a lot of freedom within our courses to change examples, emphases, skills and assessment to adapt and reinforce the choices we make in the direction of our innovation.

Two final points: We have the tools to include students, past, current and future, in our conversations about the direction of the school. How much do we want to enlarge the conversation? Will it be deliberate or informal?

And second is an acknowledgement that we have the freedom to innovate a working environment for ourselves that is stimulating and rewarding. What kind of place do we want to work? Can we combine our skills and work together in ways we haven’t done in the past? Can faculty group themselves together in new ways and produce pods of innovative activity? If so, can we develop ways to evaluate, assess and reward such activity?

Our colleagues in the journalism industry are facing similar questions without the safety net of university employment. Will we learn from their plight and rouse ourselves to contribute to the renovation of our discipline? Or will we repeat the same mistakes and ultimately suffer the same fate?

Michael Shudson has been elaborating on the value that journalism schools can contribute to the “reconstruction” of American journalism. In a recent talk given at USC Annenberg and in a interview on KPBS, he elaborates on themes identified in his co-authored report “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.”

I would add that – as with culture and the arts – the universities have and should have a growing role in supporting journalism. Walter Robinson, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter at the Boston Globe for several decades, returned to his alma mater, Northeastern University, two years ago and began teaching an investigative reporting seminar to both graduate and undergraduate students. In two years, those students have produced twelve front-page stories in the Boston Globe. Robinson proudly told me “In all the stories so far we’ve not had a single correction or substantive complaint.” More journalism schools are going into the business of actually producing journalism. Here at USC, integrating the California Healthcare Foundation’s impressive health reporting initiative into a university has not, Michael Parks told me, been a piece of cake and maybe he will one day produce a handy guide for others moving in the same direction. At any rate, his effort is part of a movement that is changing journalism.

J-schools have been “doing” journalism since their earliest days (see the University of Missouri as Exhibit A). In the current environment, these efforts are seen less as student exercises, and more as valuable contributions to the journalism necessary for healthy communities.

I think it’s also important to recognize:

(1) Reproducing some of the journalism of the past is not necessarily a high value activity for j-schools. For this work to have value, the standards, organization, editing and networking of new models must be incorporated into the creation and distribution of the journalism. We owe it to students and to the health of the discipline to push for new skills and mindsets for the future, and avoid absorbing all energy into reproducing work we already know how to do.

(2) We need to be experimenting with new models and practices, and that doesn’t always lead to the type of journalism that some people expect from j-schools. Expanding our definitions of what journalism is and how it is practiced is an important dimension of our work; we need to avoid becoming further wedded to an idealized form from the past.

(3) In addition to doing, j-schools can contribute to learning from the many experiments already flourishing. As Schudson points out, we lack concrete measurements of quality journalism. Scholars attuned to the formation of new organizations and the dynamics of community information flows can contribute significantly to identifying and defining value and then begin developing effective practices.

The schools Schudson points to are important leaders in helping us learn what is possible, valuable and desirable in the j-school of the future.

What other j-school projects would you point to that are doing similar work?

California Healthcare Foundation and the USC Annenberg School for Communication: Reporting on Health

Walter Robinson, Investigative reporting at Northeastern University School of Journalism

Rich Gordon and colleagues at Northwestern University have been producing innovative projects news companies and others are learning from: Medill–Innovation Projects

You could argue that with the massive downsizing going on in American newsrooms, the last thing we need are journalism schools churning out graduates by the thousands. No one argues that medical schools are critical to the practice of medicine but arguments about the relevancy of j-schools are endless (a recent example: The end of the world as we know it).

Yet, this could be a moment for j-schools to escape their sometimes second-rate status and become central players in some of the most important questions facing society. How do we improve public discourse? How can people most reliably become their own critical information editors? How can we reinvigorate public decision making systems? What should the university of the future look like?

This isn’t just wishful thinking on the part of a j-school prof thinking about her own future. Here are three (important) notes on the potential importance of journalism education in the coming year(s):

(1) C.W. Anderson, writing for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, wrote a post in December on “Next year’s news about the news: What we’ll be fighting about in 2010.” He identifies five questions worth exploring in 2010, #4 of which is the future of j-schools:

4. What’s the future of journalism school? This one’s fairly self-explanatory. But as the profession it serves mutates, what’s in store for the venerable institution of j-school? Dave Winer thinks we might see the emergence of journalism school for all; Cody Brown thinks j-school might someday look like the MIT Center For Collective Intelligence. Either way, though, j-school probably won’t look like it does now. Even more profoundly, perhaps, the question of j-school’s future is inseparable from questions about the future of the university in general, which, much like the news and music industries, might be on the verge of its own massive shake-up.

Since the links in C.W.’s post didn’t come through, this post is also worth reading: Dave Winer’s “What does a J-School of the Future look like?” (His answer: I think everyone should have a basic education in journalism, at least one semester. We need people to understand the basic practices: How to do an interview, the structure of a news report, what does integrity mean and why it’s so important. What should we expect as consumers? Or are we users now? Audience? Participants? How to write up a bad experience with a company. With the government. With the university you attend. … How to be a citizen in the 21st century.”

(2) The October 2009 report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age made 15 recommendations to help meet the information needs of communities. Five are relevant to journalism schools:

Recommendation 3: Increase the role of higher education, community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.

Recommendation 5: Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.

Recommendation 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.

Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.

Recommendation 15: Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.

(3) Len Witt is doing a series of interesting interviews on the future of journalism on his site for the Center for Sustainable Journalism. In an interview with Michael Schudson in December, Schudson touched on a role he sees for j-schools:

A lot of qualified and experienced journalists are losing their jobs and there is a gap opening up, it seems to me, in mainstream local accountability journalism in particular. And that needs filling for the sake of our society, for the sake of our democracy. How to do that? …

We are interested to see universities step up to the plate as well and they are doing it too, journalism schools in particular. But we’ve seen it at environmental studies programs and ed schools as well are getting into the publication business, writing directly for the general public. … We need a mixed model of funding streams and we need society to take a kind of common responsibility for providing news to the democratic public.

None of this will come to pass if j-schools continue to conceive of themselves primarily as educators of tomorrow’s newsroom, public relations and advertising agency workforce. That’s part of what got us into the current predicament: failing to educate for more than the first job, focusing on the latest technology more than on what our work was really accomplishing, getting mired in professionals v. scholars debates instead of producing useful work.

So, we have some moments of opportunity for j-schools to remake themselves as leaders in shaping the post-newspaper information environment and worthy partners for innovation and experimentation. Building relevant public scholarship, engaging in community conversations, inspiring university students will insure that we become genuine contributors to the future of our communities and our discipline.

Does “community engagement” belong in the j-school curriculum?

Robert Niles, writing in the Online Journalism Review, Doing journalism in 2010 is an act of community organizing, says absolutely, yes:

The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters… they’ve become community organizers.

Consider these examples:

Jonathan Weber, the new editor-in-chief of the Bay Area News Project, spent the past four years building New West, a multi-platform, multi-revenue stream media network covering local news in the west. In an interview with Baynewser, he talks about what he’s looking for in some of his new staff (he’ll be hiring 15 editorial staff to start with):

a part of the staff will be devoted to the community development relationship-building, collaboration-building with both other media organizations and with bloggers and lots of other kinds of contributors [like] UC Berkeley, not only the [journalism] students but also the faculty, perhaps other departments at Berkeley. So some of the full-time staff will be devoted to developing and nurturing those kinds of relationships, and that is a somewhat different skill set than a traditional journalism skill set.

Because Weber has solid and successful experience doing this kind of work for New West, he knows what he’s talking about. It’s not a theoretical conception of journalism, but a working knowledge of how journalism works online.

Another example is this job description from John Temple, the new editor of Peer News in Honolulu. He’s also looking for reporters and says: “The job will require more interaction with readers and the community than is typical at most local news operations.” (I’m moving to Honolulu…)

Interacting with readers takes a different approach to journalism than we teach in most j-school courses, where students are taught to develop news sense, story ideas, sources and writing style independently from contact with people in the community. Calling expert sources for a quote doesn’t count. Listening to what people need and want to know about and building journalism around that premise, rather than building our journalism sense in isolation, would get us much closer to the kind of journalism that I think will be successful online.

Umair Haque has a Harvard Business Review post on “Google, China, and the New High Ground of Advantage” today that continues his theme on new capitalism. It’s made me think about how news organizations of the future can build on the high ground that Umair describes:

The old high ground was built for 20th century economics: sell more junk, earn more profit, “grow” — and then crash. An ethical edge operates at a higher economic level. It is concerned with what we sell, how profits are earned, and which authentic, human benefits “grow.” It’s a concept built for the economics of an interdependent world.

I could never understand how large scale news capitalists could sustain a business model that treated reporters like hamsters (as a Gannett reporter friend used to describe it) while funding lavish corporate expenditures. That’s a stereotype of course, and there were many exceptions, but in large part, ours was an industry that expended little energy on building the human capital of newsrooms and a great deal of energy on building the financial capital of corporate investors.

In this frustrating transition from the large corporate newsrooms of the 20th century to the smaller new organization of the future, we can’t just downside what we have. We have to start from fundamentally different premises:

It’s time for a great reboot. Today’s great challenge isn’t blindly building countries, companies, or households on a broken set of institutions. It is reimagining new institutions for a hyperconnected world. Answering that challenge begins, from my tiny perspective, with an ethical edge as the cornerstone of every kind of organization. Seeking an ethical edge is the truest test of a Constructive Capitalist.

The ethics he describes aren’t the rights-focused narrow conception of ethics taught in many j-schools today. It’s an ethics that encompasses the entire organization — not just reporters and editors, but publishers, human resource managers, community journalists and all of the organization’s participants — and places the entire organization within the context of the community in which it operates. This is not impractical. It’s the path to the economic and social future for sustainable news organizations. J-schools need to be one place that forge and build this new vision for journalists and their emerging new organizations.

Google Labs, The New York Times and the Washington Post are experimenting (together, itself a noteworty point) on creating “Living Story” pages that aggregate information about a topic with a timeline, pictures, summary and links to major stories. Readers can read stories without navigating away from the main page, getting deep information on a single issue without the cumbersome, incomplete and slow process of searching on multiple news pages. Once the prototype is complete, Google says it will make the technology available to any publisher who wants to use it (Google Unveils News-by-Topic Service, NYT)

The project builds what Jane Stevens, on Web shells, and Matt Thompson, on Columbia Tomorrow have been imagining and experimenting with for some time (in Jane’s case, since 2002). Both of these journalists, and many others, recognize that context is a key factor missing in most journalism today that the Web, happily, is ideally suited to provide. Matt Thompson wrote about context on his blog “Newsless”:

To me, journalism is the constant effort to deliver a truer picture of the world as it is. The “latest developments” provide one lens through which to capture that picture. And as long as journalism was primarily delivered by static media, that lens made perfect sense.

The Web, however, makes possible other ways of delivering that picture of our evolving world. It allows us to shirk the tyranny of recency and place more emphasis on context – the information that often gets buried beneath the news.

I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.

The Google prototype doesn’t look particularly impressive and it’s not a new idea. But I think it’s a good marker for thinking about how journalism is changing. How? Eventually, when systems like this are more commonplace, it will mean:

• Redundancy is squeezed from the system:We don’t need a lot of similar stories all quoting the same people. The value comes from people who can build knowledge, not replicate it.
• We don’t need constant rehashes of the same stories. The past will be perfectly accessible.
• We don’t need stories that provide artificial balance by people who don’t really understand the trade-offs. We need people who are equipped to make defensible judgments about balance and credibility and make the entire process transparent.
• We need to understand much better how how people process information and what they need in order to follow an issue quickly or deeply, daily or monthly or annually.
• We need people in graphics, video, audio and text to work together more seamlessly to build an ongoing contextual, dynamic node in the network that is easily updatable, searchable, taggable, findable, linkable, widgitized.

What’s missing from the Google system, that I can tell, is the opportunity for conversation and engagement about the subject. For these living story pages to be truly living, they would need to also be a central node in the community conversation taking place about the issue. Information and context — by themselves — don’t move us forward in terms of addressing and acting on whatever the important issue requires. Once that capacity is enabled, the journalist would have both information and conversation to connect, arbitrate, build and update.

What might this mean for journalism education?

• Students would need to have subject areas of expertise to be able to organize and curate context about major issues. The ‘generalist’ as many have pointed out, has much less value in this environment.
• More emphasis would have to be placed on creating stories that differentiated themselves from each other. This requires elimination of ‘group think,’ use of the usual sources, copying, imitating, formulaic journalism.
• Students would need to educate themselves about the journalism being done on the subject, identifying holes and building on what came before, rather than replicating what is already known. A “living story” system eliminates redundancy and rewards knowledge that builds on what came before.
• Students would have to be skilled at finding and evaluating the credibility and accuracy of a wider variety of sources, in more transparent and efficient ways, than ever before.
• Students would need to be able to collaborate, generate, create and imagine as core competencies.
• Students would have to understand policy and action cycles so as to anticipate what kind of information would be needed next to move the subject forward
• Students would need to know how to connect, facilitate and moderate conversations about a controversial public issue that included the most important points of view and perspective about the topic

These are not the same skills we teach today. Yes, there’s overlap and yes some of this sound like the ‘old’ journalism. But in fundamental ways, it’s very different from the sometimes formula driven, idealized craft work of a lot of journalism education. As educators, we have to analyze, anticipate and build on what is happening as it happens. There are no ‘best practices’ during a time of disruption. We have to build them.