Formal journalism education emerged as part of the effort to codify and institutionalize the best practices of that day, and to serve a news industry oriented to an assembly-line based manufacturing culture. A new journalism is emerging, grounded in computational thinking, that mimics the values and processes of knowledge production in the information age -- what some experts call remix culture. (See Lawrence Lessig, Eduardo Navas, and Henry Jenkins for more on that concept.)
That's Kim Pearson on computational thinking in journalism. The whole post is worth reading, but the point about the form of journalism education is key to how we teach the next generation of newspeople.
A lot of j-schools are still teaching the way they did 20 or 30 years ago. Students at my institution don't get any meaningful multimedia or computer-assisted reporting instruction in the first year or more. What follows seems grafted on to me. A few institutions, e.g. Syracuse, have rebuilt their curriculum from the ground up. Everyone should be doing the same.
We should be teaching best practices as of now, not 1982. And (per Pearson's post) best ways of thinking for 5 years from now.
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