Revamped Journalism Courses Attract Hordes of Students

At a time when the newspaper industry is in free fall and thousands of jobs are being cut each year, one would think that the halls of the nation’s journalism schools would be awfully quiet. Think again.
Many universities report that journalism enrollments are up this year. Over the past few weeks, a lot of these budding journalists have been blogging, broadcasting, and tweeting their way through introductory courses that have been revamped to embrace the digital age.

I just wish my journalism school was teaching this kind of stuff. Colorado has offered one class on social media which was a Summer course called Twitter Democracy. In it people learned how to use Twitter, some of the ways the media uses Twitter and how to game the system to drive your follower number up in short amounts of time. What people are starting to realize (hopefully) is that the number of followers is useless if the audience isn’t the audience you want. I’d rather have 10 followers that all interact with me than 2,000 followers who are nothing but companies, spammers and people who generally don’t care.

At Colorado, other than Twitter Democracy, not many courses are offered that teach new media, changing media practices or courses that teach us how to adapt to the changing world of journalism. We’ve got to figure that one out for ourselves.

According to Christopher Harper, an associate professor of journalism at Temple University, ”The future is for smart, hard-working students to band together, create their own media, and make a business out of it.” And that’s what I plan to do. Because the future of journalism is up in the air that taking risks and taking shots in the dark are worth it. You might just find something that will work for you.

The direction that journalism is going right now is a subscription-based route. People want to subscribe to certain feeds to pull news from the sources that they want. Where our parents read one newspaper every morning for years, we sit down at our computers and check Twitter and RSS feeds to see where the latest links are coming from from the sources that we trust. So maybe the future of journalism isn’t in organizations per se but with the individual, and with the shared sources that they trust.

  1. zackshapiro posted this