How should universities which teach journalism respond to the online revolution? With caution and scepticism, if yesterday's Association for Journalism Education meeting is anything to go by.
The weather played havoc with arrangements and I was the only one of four speakers would actually made it to the University of Huddersfield. I was expecting to do a short slot on what I have learnt from my Sunderland blogging module but ended up trying the patience of delegates by covering for the others, including Paul Bradshaw, from the University of Central England, who has a couple of interesting posts on how academics should respond to changes driven by social media.
I think, like me, Paul would have been surprised by the number of delegates who who were unfamiliar with tools like FlickR, YouTube and RSS, or, more importantly, had spent time exploring The Sun's impressive and extensive online presence.
There was pretty much total agreement that the online offerings of many regional newspapers range from the weak to the embarrassing, and some spirited defences of "proper" journalism. There was also a consensus that it was simply too soon to tell where the influence of social media would take journalism. Whereas I broadly agreed with many of these points, it does concern me when academics are happy to stand aside and take a long view of important developments. Through initiatives such as Sunderland's Delivering the New PR conferences and Euprera's EuroBlog project, academics are working hard to develop and explain new concepts to PR practitioners. For my money, that's one of the most important parts of the job, to do research that directly feeds into practice.
Working journalists famously construct a first draft of history, which is almost by definition incomplete and sometimes wrong, but vitally important nontheless; for the academics who teach journalists and journalism to wonder if blogging is 'a fad' and to want to reserve judgment on the social media until its impacts are more clearly observable is, to my mind at least, a little worrying.
Anyway, it was a good day with some lively debate and some very interesting perspectives. And it would have been much, much better if Paul, Jonathan Hewett, of City University, and Kathy Hilton (London College of Communication) had been able to make it north.
It would have been interesting to know what Mindy McAdams would have contributed... Her evangelical take on what journalism education should embrace goes beyond what I would advocate for the UK in 2007, but it is certainly worth thinking about.
In the event, thank goodness for Epic 2015....
Recent Comments