Credentialing for journalists

The liberal blogger Atrios is at a new-economy conference and reports this:

A couple of speakers here talking about education have emphasized the need to expand and extend training credentialing, so that skills earned in a variety of contexts - work, college, various training programs - can be universally recognized and provide more job portability for those skills. I'm not sure what I think about this. Discuss!

One constant point of contention in my field has been whether university journalism school is worth the time and money. Some say anyone with decent smarts and motivation can learn all they need on the job; others say formal instruction is essential.

(In recent decades, few newspapers have been willing to train new hires from square one. I don't know much about TV, radio or other media.)

As it is, though, the news media hate the idea of "credentialing", probably because it seems similar to "licensing", which is anathema to the U.S. journalistic culture. The journalism degree has become a de facto journalism credential, but except for some certificate programs in copy editing and technical writing, nothing comparable exists.

Is that for the best? Or should we journalists (and j-teachers) start considering the value of non-degree training and credentialing programs? Especially with the diverse multimedia skills in demand these days, it may help both journalists and their employers or clients to have some recognized standards. This needs some thought.

Book review

(With apologies to H.L. Mencken)

Black & White and Dead All Over by John Darnton, a murder mystery involving journalists.

"Ellen Butterby had never before seen a dead body. So she was not at all prepared for what she found on that mid-September morning." So the story begins. God knows how it ends.

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)