The fine folks at CoPress hosted a session at Saturday’s BCNI Philly on reinventing j-schools, sparking off some interesting conversations (see a live blog of the event by Greg Linch).

I’d like to expand here on a thought that bubbled up during the session, in the middle of a discussion about the inclusion of entrepreneurial journalism in j-school curricula. I had suggested that j-schools should apply the basic theory behind link journalism — do what you know best, and link to the rest — to structuring their own programs. In other words, focus on teaching the craft of journalism and its fundamental theories, techniques and tools within the major, and “link out” to peripheral knowledge bases (business/advertising, information technology, programming and design) by sending students to other schools within the university system.

So what does that look like in action? Let’s take the UMass Amherst Journalism program as an example: currently, students enrolled in the major must complete an official minor, concentration or second major in order to fulfill the requirements for graduation. Now suppose the journalism department established interdisciplinary programs with the other schools and, in collaboration with faculty in those schools, created specialized tracks for j-students. This opens up a wealth of possibilities:

• A student who wants to get into the business side of news would take a planned series of courses in the school of management concurrent to classes in journalism, then apply that knowledge to a hands-on master class in entrepreneurial journalism.
• A student interested in environmental beat reporting after college would take a class on environmental policy in the department of natural resources during the same semester as a newswriting class, and practice writing stories for that beat.
• A team of students could take a programming class in the comp sci department together and develop apps for journalism as part of an independent study.

And so on. The advantage of an interdisciplinary approach is that students get exposed to a much wider range of knowledge, while journalism faculty can focus on teaching to their strengths.

UPDATE
Betty Medsger’s essay, Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way, was brought to my attention and contains a similar line of thought:

Journalism faculty should become gate openers to the entire university, rather than guardians of journalism studies. As such they would work far more closely with colleagues in other disciplines. They would develop the relationships needed to recruit excellent students from other disciplines, not to a major or minor in journalism but to an intensive senior year introduction to journalism. The curriculum would be truly interdisciplinary. Assignments in journalism courses would make use of what students have studied in their major areas of inquiry and also tap the expertise of faculty in other disciplines.

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.