Abstract
Look anywhere at media, and there is nothing but disruption.
Even the venerable New York Times is offering voluntary buyout packages to newsroom and business department staff in its effort to build a more digitally oriented newsroom and double its digital revenue by 2020. Executive Editor Dean Baquet has said the Times needs to shift toward people with skills in visual journalism and greater diversity while continuing to concentrate on depth reporting.
Given the trends in growing news consumption on mobile, it is hardly surprising that a more digital focus is at the heart of the Times’ proposed transformation. A research study conducted by Nielsen and commissioned by the Knight Foundation to explore how people use mobile platforms for news has shown that 89% of the 144 million U.S. mobile users access news on mobile, and most of that time is spent on social networks rather than on news sites and apps. The study also found that younger and more diverse audiences are paving new ways to get news, that they take action after accessing news (e.g., liking a story, retweeting, etc.), and that they talk about news offline with other people. They even depend on people in their social circle as news sources as much as or more than they depend on media outlets.
To say that we are in an age of disruption is an understatement.
In “Superpowers: The digital skills media leaders say newsrooms need going forward,” news organizations prioritized skills in three areas: coding, audience development and data, and photo/video production. The non-scientific study conducted by Mark Stencel, co-director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab, and Kim Perry, a senior editor on the Digital Transition team at the New York Times, showed that almost 60% of organizations ranked visual storytelling/editing among the top five priorities.
News organizations did not report the need to hire people with the Foundational Skills essential to newsroom operations—reporting, copyediting—but rather the Transformational Skills. There may be an oversupply of and less demand for people with the Foundational Skills, the report suggested. Transformational Skills include coding, audience development/user data and metrics, visual storytelling/editing, digital design (for web, mobile, apps), social media distribution, and product ownership/development (multimedia content/stories). Other Transformation Skills include social/engagement reporting, cross-platform storytelling/editing, editorial graphics/animation, user experience, audio production/editing, management (process, people and decision making, budgets), and project management (timelines, coordination, process). The study, published by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, noted that organizations with both Foundational and Transformational Skills are Superpowers. But there is not a one-size-fits-all matrix of hiring needs. The study found that markets drive hiring priorities with news organizations in small- to medium-sized media markets concentrating on the visual storytelling imperative rather than coding, audience development, and product ownership.
Clearly, our academic and professional programs need to concentrate on the Transformational Skills every bit as much as the Foundational Skills if we are to equip graduates with the skills they need to be employed—not only in news organizations but also in media tech companies, non-profits, and other environments.
And taking a lead from the project that Georgetown University calls Designing the Future of the University, our programs may need to consider how we teach and what we teach. Indeed, we may need to consider whether we teach at all in the traditional sense. In “rebundling” or “unbundling” the academic enterprise, Georgetown’s Randy Bass, former director of the center on teaching and learning, has said, “I think if we look across the next 5, 10, or 15 years, one of the consequences of the explosion of options to learn things online is that our value proposition will increasingly be on the high-quality interaction of faculty.” That model will change how faculty workload is credited, whether coaching and mentoring, sustained project work, advising of student organizations, and other outside-the-classroom activities will be assigned credit-hour status and counted toward teaching load. It may mean that the one-size-fits-all semester model will not work. Meaningful learning may occur instead in units less than one-semester time spans and less than three credits. One-credit modules may be sufficient for some learners while three credits may be needed for students wanting a more in-depth exploration of some topic.
For example, we at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln are about to introduce an Emporium-style teaching model in an immersive digital/social media lab this fall. Students who ordinarily would take two three-credit hour visual communication classes in their freshman or sophomore year will instead take one one-credit-hour introductory lecture; two one-credit hour modules from a range of seven core skills, that is, audio, video, photo, layout, typography, mobile/social, and web design/development; one additional credit-hour module in a skill of their choosing (e.g., an in-depth exploration of an area they have already studied or of a new area); and a two-credit-hour final project for a total of six credit hours. Faculty will serve as coaches/mentors to the students, available to answer questions and critique the students’ project work in the lab.
Like all innovations and innovative approaches, this new teaching method will manifest issues not even yet considered, and we will have to work them out. However, the benefits of this new approach are that students will be empowered to learn what they want to learn and are most interested in, and faculty will be freed up to interact as coaches/mentors/guides to the students in a more meaningful way than if they were teaching and demonstrating in a traditional style to a possibly passive and disengaged student group.
Although we have no evidence yet as to how this new approach may work out, we are excited about getting it off the ground this fall. And we hope it may become the delivery method for many of our Foundational Skills—and indeed our Transformational Skills—courses.
We will let you know how it goes.
Have a great summer. Fall will be here soon!