Kevin Sites just made my day. Not just because he has such strong, well-defined arms, but because his biography reaffirmed the mantra I sing to myself every morning: Ain't nuthin like a good journalism education. Sites, our latest online-journalism celebrity, has one, too. To be exact, he earned a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Sure, $30,000 could buy you a lot of instant gratification, but investing in an academic journalist education can't be such a bad idea, even -€“ or especially? -€“ in our rapidly changing media world.
Reporters will always need interviewing skills and the ability to step outside their comfort zone when calling a source 20 times a day to ask uncomfortable questions. They, as well as their editors, still need to be excellent writers with a good sense of style and grammar. The same goes for public relations, marketing and advertising students. Yes, you can learn writing or the basics of media law on the job, but those few hundred dollars you spent on an ethics, writing or marketing class will likely prove well spent.
Even the most thoroughly planned college education, however, needs input from professors and on-campus speakers from the professional world. They have to make sure that students quickly become savvy with the Web as this new medium is no longer all that new and has become an essential news, entertainment and research medium.
I think in that respect the University still has to catch up. We need more than one online-journalism class. We need more than one Internet-savvy professor and two genius HTML assistants. And we need more knowledge on the legal and ethical framework of online reporting and research. Talking about Kevin Sites seems a step in the right direction. Reading the paper and learning about the recent trends in online marketing research another.
Regardless of how much our media system will have changed by 2025, journalists need essential skills such as objectivity, accuracy and creativity, and a journalism school remains among the best places to acquire those skills. Faculty, however, shares the responsibility to develop a curriculum that helps students figure out their goals and eventually achieve them. Online media literacy will definitely be an essential part of a multi-facetted, valuable academic education. Students, however, have to make sure that they get the skills they need in today's converged media world.
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