Here’s my response to the conversation started by #collegejourn on journalism education and Suzanne Yada’s follow-up question, “What can journalism schools do to help students prepare for the real world?”

While it’s important that journalism students learn the tenets of good storytelling and the tools that make it possible, I think one thing that’s been left out of the discussion so far is the lack of guidance when it comes to developing skills for reporting in real-life communities.

I think that’s something college professors can teach us right now, whether they “catch up” or not on all the new media widgets and gizmos. Friend and colleague S.P. Sullivan gave me a nice reality check when, in response to my musings about an e-mail writing workshop for j-students, he wrote back on Twitter:

@jackiehai Tip One: A phone call is always better. My experience @ The Collegian shows too many students journalists are afraid of the phone

This is just one of countless examples where students of our generation often find themselves totally lost. We were raised on the Internet. No one had to teach us how to use Facebook; show us how to use Twitter once and we get it instantly. In my opinion, educational time would be best spent learning how to get started on a beat, how to connect with and build relationships with sources, how to mine public records, how to find the pulse of a community and engage with it. These are where all the best story ideas come from, and this is what we should be training the next generation of reporters to do.

Are technical skills inherent in social skills? Absolutely. Gina Chen wrote a great post recently that demonstrates the merging of the two. But if students and professors are starting on the same playing field, then shouldn’t we all be learning this together?

Introduce students to the basics of the new tools and technologies they’ll be using, and let them learn how to master them on their own. That’s what Google and a support network of our peers are for. Spend class time focusing on what the tools are being used for, developing good news sense and producing quality journalism.

I’ll leave you with one more anecdotal example:

Since its opening, The Amherst Wire’s multimedia newsroom has become a common space where both students and faculty drop by. So far, students have learned how to install blogs to a server from scratch, dabbled in MySQL databases, and started working on a variety of online journalism projects. This Friday we’re holding a CSS workshop that everybody, faculty included, is welcome to attend for free.

Last week, one of our editors met with our faculty adviser to talk about a new political blog he’ll be heading up this semester. The editor had some ideas about where he wanted to take the blog, but lacked a clear focus. Twenty years of experience as a reporter and editor made it possible for this j-prof to give the student the advice he needed to choose a focus that’s relevant, timely and useful to his audience.

This is the kind of exchange I’d like to see more of. Over to you, #collegejourn.