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This week in CollegeJourn chat, we talked about reinventing the journalism school.  If we could create a j-school from scratch, what would it look like? The two main arguments were: #

Experience-based education: Daniel Bachhuber led the argument that the ideal undergraduate journalism program would have one year of learning the basics — ethics, writing, media law — and three years of internships and jobs. Credits for jobs and internships would be merit-based. #

Liberal arts-based education: Samuel Rubenfeld argued the best way to prepare for the journalism industry is to have a strong base in economics, law, humanities, social science, ethics, math, economics, business, law and politics before pursuing a job or internship. #

To take a hint from Prof. Rosen, we need to become better explainers. How can we explain something if we don’t understand it ourselves? -srubenfeld #

Other points specifics of the “ideal” j-school: #

• Get rid of tracks/concentrations, merge them all together
• More long-term projects and experimentation
•  An environment that fosters creativity (although Sam noted that word is a little too intangible)

If you were to design a journalism program (graduate or undergraduate), what would it look like?  #

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The second hour of CollegeJourn was led by Kristen Taylor, a guest from Knight Pulse– a new community site for the future of news. Taylor led the discussion to get feedback on how an online community for journalists should function. #

Rubenfeld said the project was “navel gazing” and Bachhubber noted the web  is already an online community. #

Taylor said the goal for Knight Pulse is to provide a place for discussion on how to better report and gather information. Rather than having a community based on innovation,  it’d be based on sharing what works. #

A few ideas from the chat for how to use Knight Pulse as a news source: #

• Knight Pulse as a news aggregator
• Provide alternative news that traditional news sites doesn’t
• Integrated user-submitted news
• Strong use of multimedia
• Keep it hyper-local

If you have any ideas for improving Knight Pulse, follow @kthread on Twitter. CollegeJourn is a weekly, student-led chat that takes place at www.collegejourn.com. You can read the log of this week’s chat, which was moderated by Sarah Wood, here. #

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