One problem that I still think pervades the news industry in the UK and (some of) its educators is the false divide between digital and non-digital reporting disciplines – the conflict of “print” and “online”. But students literally will have no choice – if they want to be employed in journalism in the next few decades, they will need online skills.

Plus the ones that get the right skills now will have a better chance of succeeding compared to Luddite naysayers.

@alexwood is exactly right: courses should aim to make web skills not just part of teaching modules module but of students’ entire careers.

As a recent graduate of City’s postgraduate school of journalism, I can tell you the emphasis on online journalism and Web 2.0 skills has vastly improved.

But many students are stuck in the mindset of “I want to be a TV presenter” or “Online is too techy for me”.

I start as a lecturer in online journalism as London Southbank this month and plan to as Josh points out, make web 2.0 tools part of not just my online module but of their whole journalism careers.

@alexwoodcreates

Speaking from experience*, the danger is that online journalism is ghettoised in degree programmes. Online newsgathering and publishing should should be inherent in all modules – all should have an online element as, sure enough, all have a print element.

At my place*, I’m the only one doing an online final project (http://SR2Blog.com), the rest are doing magazines; as far as I know the same was true last year. That, I believe, is the product of ghettoisation and a lack of clarity in communicating ‘what actually is online journalism?’, ‘how do I practice online journalism?’, ‘what’s different about online journalism?’, ‘how could I be a great online journalist?’ etc etc.

University institutions are relatively inflexible beasts, but I think in general they’re getting better. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to stick on an after-hours class on RSS, for example. I think all journalism faculties should put together an OPML file of essential reading RSS feeds (Paul Bradshaw did). I think they could also be doing some work with hyperlocal, embed it into the programme – for me, cutting my teeth on the bread-and-butter local journalism, going to Resident’s Assoc meetings etc has been invaluable.

*I’m a third-year journalism undergrad at University of Sunderland.

@JoshHalliday

But we were also being taught to shoot in three person crews – with a soundman (which went out of date in 1992!) so there you go. I still value the core journalistic, storytelling and writing skills I learned though.

And now, as a journalism lecturer myself, I think it’s important to inspire students too. They’re going into a very difficult career environment, and I think they need to be injected with some go-out-and-get-it energy to create their own future rather than waiting for work to come to them.

I think many journalists are STILL not aware of the Wisdom of the Language ( http://past.blog.com/gaggle-info-wiki/miscellaneous/articles/wisdom-of-the-language ) — yet this is a big part of why, whereas a site like jaiku (meaningless) fails, a site like like twitter (meaningful) succeeds.

Smart journalists would also succeed if they utilized the wisdom of the language more — i.e. also paid more attention to what the practitioners in my field have known for decades.

One such tidbit, for example, is that citation indexing (which is about 50 years old, and is also the basis for Google’s search algorithm) is VERY unreliable (it was by and large abandoned by information scientists decades ago.

I call people who ignore such observations and blindly follow the masses without paying attention to the advice of experts “GooTards” (in the case of Google’s algorithm), “TwitTards” (in the case of undifferentiated “social media” mesmerization), etc.

And BTW: The English Language ought to be the brand that journalists pay the MOST attention to (as CBS did when they acquired the CNet portfolio, and as NBCU did when the acquired weather.com).

nmw

I won’t go into detail, but it was very clear from these CVs that certain UK journalism courses have evolved a great deal in recent years and have finally started to turn out the sort of multimedia native journalist every editor is desperate hire.

But it also confirmed my suspicion that a lot of young journalists are still not getting these skills on their courses or don’t appreciate their importance enough to highlight them on their CVs. Very few listed URLs of their blogs or portfolio sites, for example. Even fewer mentioned having learned skills such as video editing or SEO awareness.