Reportr.net

PBS Mediashift has launched a new initiative with “embeds”. The idea is to get first-hand reports from people who are in the midst of change brought on by technology and the internet.

I am one of them, reporting back from the front line of journalism education. My first missive has just been published, looking at our integrated journalism approach at the UBC j-school.

This extract sums up what we are doing:

This past academic year, we decided to combine these three disciplines (news-writing, multimedia and research) into an ambitious team-taught integrated journalism program. Over two days every week for the two semesters, students receive training in core journalism competences. They get to apply these skills through assignments that take them from covering social issues in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to tackling questions of diversity, with the work published in TheThunderbird.ca, an online magazine.
Questioning What Is News

The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.

But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred

There is no doubt that journalism education has to change, just as journalism itself is changing. It is time to start a conversation on what we should be teaching the next generation of reporters.