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Paul Bradshaw has been analysing the way in which journalism education has been and needs to be transformed to meet the needs of a dramatically changing industry. In the first part of his three-part post, he looks at the skills gap between journalism education (and staff) and what the industry needs.

Bradshaw cites a number of problems. In brief:

• Courses are only redesigned as a whole every several years, and changes can take years to come into effect
• Journalism and media departments face the same skills shortage as the news industry
• Most courses have historically been platform-focused. Tutors designed the modules based on their own largely single-platform experience.

The Journalism department at UCA in Farnham has redesigned its Journalism BA largely to tackle some of these issues.

In conjunction with a shake-up in the way the university itself approaches it course structures, we’ve rewritten our courses to be very broad. This means our basic course framework doesn’t talk about platforms, tasks, editorial types – whatever.

Instead, we’ve broken down our journalism education into “Content” and “Production”. i.e.: the stuff you produce, and the way you produce it. Research, newsgathering and storytelling in all its forms comes under “Content”; video editing, magazine production, web site building comes under “Production”. Each year group will tackle more advanced and sophisticated techniques and topics under this framework.

It’s a split that makes sense to some in the industry we’ve talked to, and seems a sensible  way to define the tasks young journalism graduates will do.

This also allows us to keep the detail of what we will try to teach open until we decide to teach it. Should we bring in something on Pinterest? Or mobile apps? Or some technology or medium as yet unborn? We can, without worrying that we will be breaking out of our course documents. Our courses are designed to be able to change in real time, without going through any academic red tape.

The course is now fully multimedia – ie no platform distinction. There will be no “print” versus “online” modules that students have to choose from. Instead, there will be emphasis on understanding how to tell stories using different media and why those media work (or don’t). Students will obviously still focus on the platforms they enjoy most and are best at. But the teaching will aim to be as integrated and flexible as possible.

Yes – our staff are old enough to remember strict platform demarcation and to have started work before the internet existed. Some of us even worked on magazines that used waxing machines to paste up galley text. But, you know, we are also happy to learn new stuff too.

Also, we plan to bring in visiting expertise to help teach some of the cutting edge stuff. Expect an email soon.

Bradshaw’s second point in his post is the problem of teaching journalism when the industry is shrinking and there don’t seem to be any jobs left.

We’re also keenly aware of this. In fact, a telling indicator is that our graduates tend to move straight into communications jobs that aren’t, strictly, journalism – such as social media marketing or PR.

As Bradshaw points out, “journalism” describes activities now that would have been unheard of before – producing mobile apps, online community management, multimedia production, blogging and social media content. With luck, our approach will acknowledge this more fully and prevent us having too blinkered a view of the opportunities open to our graduates in the future.

Watch this space for more painfully transparent progress reports as we get going…

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