Several journalists I know made the transition from online newsrooms into classrooms this year. With decades of journalism experience under their belts, these new media trailblazers have decided that molding the next generation of journalists is how they want to spend the next leg of their careers.
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Over the next week or so, I’ll share their responses to questions about their current roles and the challenges facing journalism and journalism schools.
Let’s start with Retha Hill, director of the new media lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Retha is the former vice president of content at BET Interactive, where she launched BET.com seven years ago. I know Retha from her days at washingtonpost.com, where she was an executive producer for special projects and an editor for local news and arts and entertainment.
What are the biggest challenges facing journalism schools?
The biggest challenges facing journalism schools is preparing students to enter a vastly different world than the one many of the professors are familiar with. Newspapers and broadcast news are facing market loss, and the younger demographic is simply not that interested in news as we traditionally define it. Not only are they not reading newspapers or watching the nightly news, but only 29% of them regularly get their news from traditional news dot coms. That 29% has held steady for the last 6 years. If NYTimes.com, washingtonpost.com and the rest are to grow their audience they need new ways of reaching that audience; and the new journalists really need to be adept at getting information to this largely disinterested demographic. That means knowing how to create compelling content online — so j-schools have to teach them both the fundamentals of reporting but also the fundamentals of web page design, flash, video production, etc. But it goes beyond that to teaching these students to be innovators. To constantly think outside of the box – not to build a better news site but to reinvent news sites and think about how to reach younger people where they are.
What advice do you have for new graduates trying to get their first new media job?
Get as much experience as possible in the real world — whether that is building your own web site, volunteering at a local web site and definitely having your own Facebook or Myspace page. And you have to learn the craft. There is nothing that makes a hiring decision maker salivate more than a young person with good news and online experience.
What are the biggest challenges facing online newsrooms?
75 million gen-yers aren’t interested in their current product. That begs for change. Newspapers have done this before — going from party-affiliated rags to independent newspapers, going from yellow journalism to investigative, muckraking papers, replacing prejudiced reporting with reporting that better covers the entire community. This one is harder because of the technology and fickleness of the under-26 crowd — Myspace is hot today and cold the next; Facebook is the bomb now and will probably go the way of Friendster in a few years.
Do you see any potential for online newsrooms to partner with journalism schools? If so, what are the possibilities?
I think there is much potential. AT ASU, journalism students work at azcentral.com (the online site for the Arizona Republic and News Channel 12), doing the news updates, for example. They get the experience and the news site gets a supply of reporters who can rapidly update breaking news. I could see this being replicated in TV and newspaper online sites. Online news sites could also use the university journalism programs as sounding boards for new content applications.
How is teaching different from or similar to what you were doing in the newsroom?
Before coming to ASU this semester, I spent most of the last 13 years working with younger new media people or training traditional journalists to be online journalists, so I’m still doing that here. At the New Media Innovation Lab, I have students who have worked online and some who haven’t, but they are all open to news ways of doing journalism and that’s great and refreshing from some of the newsroom types who resisted change or are reluctant to truly embrace, say, user-generated content.
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