A thought about J-education

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.

Suckers

"Since journalists don't (and shouldn't) pay the subjects of stories, they should be careful about using the word 'parasite.'" -- Steve Yelvington

Where we're at

"Journalism cannot be relied on when breakdowns in public trust and intelligence are severe, as long as the political system benefits from institutional myopia, and great fortunes thrive on public ignorance." -- Todd Gitlin

The insurgency is in its last throws

Sock and awe:

Louis C.K. — Everything’s Amazing, No One’s Happy

(h/t Kathy Sierra)

I'll get right on that

'The corruption of the profession'

What Josh Said:

Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign's policy of deliberate lies. And you won't find a better example than Cathleen Decker's piece in yesterday's LA Times.

Read into the article and you'll see numerous instances of McCain's repeated use of false claims and lies and one instance Decker is able to dig up of an Obama campaign claim that arguably leaves out some information.

But the conclusion and packaging of the article is that both candidates deceive equally and that they do so because it works. (There was another example, though not quite as egregious, by Jonathan Weismann last week in the Post.)

We hear a lot about the steep and perhaps terminal decline of the business model underlying daily print newspapers. But this corruption in the basic conception of the craft -- which is actually related to the economic decline -- gets discussed much less.

This is what gives liars a clear strategic advantage over non-liars. And it's an open question whether McCain's level of dishonesty turns out to be so great that it overwhelms reporters' unwillingness to report accurately on it.