Jay Rosen says J-Schools need to retire their newsroom models and embrace the future of reportage.

Topic: What Journalism Schools Do Wrong

Jay Rosen: Well, Jay Schools, first of all, have to stop simply reproducing the environment of the newsroom and try to be an R & D wing of the newsroom. That’s one thing. Secondly, they have to realize that simply educating new recruits by platform magazine journalist, newspaper journalist, you know, broadcast journalist, is not really a valid concept for organizing your school anymore, and find a better concept, they have to do that. They also have to find a way that an older faculty that’s grew up on one platform can engage with the new without all this storm and [IB] and ideological conflict, right, that can happen when you have platform overhaul like that. They have to do that. And they have to take advantage of the flood of talent that’s being expelled from the news business, right, as we enter this period of contraction so that Jay Schools themselves can play a role in catalyzing a new system for news, and I would love to see journalism schools do exactly that and I think a lot of people are kind of thinking in that direction and figuring it out how to do that. So it’s a major challenge. There’s no question about it. I kind of compare it in some ways to Agricultural Schools. If you know anything about how agricultural education works is this whole extension part of it where we’re not teaching people to be experts in agriculture, we’re teaching farmers how to grow better crops, right, because that’s our mission as an agricultural school. So there has to be almost that part of Jay School to the extension part of the enterprise which is not something journalism schools have specialized in before but certainly is… something there’s a demand for now, right? So that’s the landscape. It’s pretty challenging one for people in my biz.

Recorded on: 08/19/2008