Is a journalism school necessary? There is a big change going on around the world of journalism. Regrettably, the students who aspire to be journalists are not receiving the training from their journalism schools to deal with such change. Journalism no longer only revolves around writing; it also includes delving into electronic blogging and becoming an expert in the social media. Patrick Thornton writes an article titled, "Let's be honest about J-school" and explores the realism and point of attending a journalism school.
It has been said that the journalism schools (also known as the J-schools) that have been very prestigious in the past are of no longer relevance to the way journalism is explored today. So the times are changing but the J-school curriculum basically stays the same; this resulting in outdated information.
One way of getting ahead in the journalism world is to have connections. One would think that getting together with people who went to a J-school would be an ideal connection, however, many more relationships are built and form via the internet and blogging; it has a wider network of people to reach out to. There are many other ways of attaining and nurturing your talent than that of going to a J-school; BeatBlogging.Org is one of the sites that Patrick mentions that could help.
Finally, journalists don't just write long articles of nothing, they add passion to the great reporting they produce.
Meggan, you are doing well - nice to see your full portfolio.
ReplyDeleteFor the other side of the story on journalism training - see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/22/media-studies
Also, go again to http://ow.ly/ky3A - and then you click on the image of King Kaufman to get his most recent post: The man in charge of online news, 1981. This article is important because it gives an overview of how circulation of news electronically has developed since the advent of internet, i.e. in the past 30 years. There is currently a debate on whether newspapers are losing readers because of the internet, and so should see electronic news circulation as competition, where the i-net gives an unfair advantage. The alternative view is that the big news companies have a monopoly, they control too much of what we see and hear, or what not ... and then the i-net gives others a chance to get their views circulated as well. For this - see http://dominicself.co.uk/blog/?query=&amount=0&blogid=1