We don’t have a journalism degree at Armstrong State University (I know, it’s officially Armstrong Atlantic until 7/1, but I’ve decided to jump the gun here on the blog), but we do have a journalism concentration within the professional communications track for the English major. Tony Morris and I each teach about half those journalism offerings.
So of course I’ve been following news about journalism education, and it becomes increasingly clear with each passing year that larger journalism schools are facing a particularly difficult time. By their very nature, large bureaucratic institutions — i.e., colleges and the departments within them — do not adjust consistently well to rapid change. And few things are changing faster than the field of journalism.
Click here for a cogent lecture by Robert G. Picard, director of research at the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. It was delivered yesterday (5/31/14) as the keynote at the Toward 2020: New Directions in Journalism Education Conference at Ryerson University in Toronto.
The opening:
The whole piece is well worth reading.
I became aware of Picard’s talk via the highly recommended Twitter stream of Jay Rosen at NYU. I tweeted one response:
.@jayrosen_nyu Interesting that Picard criticizes "hiring middle-aged and senior journalists" but leaves out the word "tenure".
— Bill Dawers (@billdawers) June 1, 2014