Undergraduate Students Prefer Learning Text and Broadcast Skills Sequentially Versus Concurrently,But Assessments of Their Final Projects Are Mixed

Introduction

Journalism educators face a dilemma. They need to adapt curricula to reflect a changing industry buffeted by rapid technological changes. As the number of platforms and formats journalists use to convey information continues to grow—from Facebook to augmented reality—adjusting curricula can feel like a zero-sum game. In many cases, instruction in some subjects must be reduced or eliminated to make room for skills needed in the new media environment, such as coding, web analytics, and social media reporting, to name a few. Although programs across the country vary, most journalism educators and professionals agree that the basics remain important, including the ability to “tell compelling and accurate stories, to ask insightful questions, to understand the values and principles of the craft and its place in the history of democracy, and to use the tool kit of the profession, however one defines or describes that” (Lynch, 2015).

This “tool kit” grows larger every day. Journalism programs that traditionally taught students to become newspaper, television, or radio reporters must now grapple with equipping the next generation of professionals to produce content for websites, podcasts, social media platforms, and mobile devices as well as traditional formats—all while many outlets struggle to find a clear path toward sustainability or profitability. “Mastering newsgathering and storytelling techniques in all media formats [multi-skilling] as well as integrating digital network technologies, and a new producer-consumer relationship have become the biggest challenges in journalism in recent years” (Rottwilm, 2014). Those challenges are unlikely to subside. A 2017 report by the New York Times laying out its strategy for the future emphasized the need for the august paper of record to use more visuals, as well as “more digitally native mix of journalistic forms,” concluding “to keep our current readers and attract new ones we must more often apply Times values to the new forms of journalism now available to us” (The New York Times, 2017). In addition to basics of reporting and writing, journalists must also understand the impact of race and ethnicity, technology, entrepreneurship, data, and new storytelling techniques to be effective in the current media ecosystem (Chan, 2017). Furthermore, journalists must be able to adapt to emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, which will change the ways information is gathered and disseminated (O’Sullivan, Fortunati, Taipale, & Barnhurst, 2017).

Journalism educators understand that they need to update and modernize curriculum to adapt to the many changes in the field, and most programs across the country have incorporated “converged” media skills into their departments (Kraeplin & Criado, 2005). However, among the many challenges to innovation in journalism education is that “the current system prevents curriculum development from keeping pace with the changing realities of modern journalism” (Webb, 2015). The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) currently accredits 113 schools. Four additional schools have provisional accreditation. Webb argues that this system of accreditation can “unintentionally encourage the status quo” due to the prep time needed for accreditation (3-7 years) and the lengthy time it can take for schools to approve and launch new courses and programs. In addition, accreditation rules require that students take at least 72 semester credit hours (or 104 quarter credit hours) for a bachelor’s degree outside of journalism and mass communication, even though students must learn more journalism skills than ever before. (Hundreds of journalism programs across the United States are not accredited.) Indeed, even as more journalism schools adopted the idea of “convergence,” the industry began to move away from the first iterations of that model. As Filak et al. noted, where partnerships such as the one between the Tampa Tribune and a local television station once seemed inevitable, the clear industry trend moved away from those types of simple partnerships (Dailey, Demo, & Spillman, 2009, Radio and Television Digital News Association [RTDNA] surveys). In 2009, both Thornton and Keith (2009) and Dailey et al. (2009) found that many editors were reporting a decline in the number of partnerships with outside news outlets. Instead, they were relying on their own staff to produce copy and video for their own websites. Although this does not obviate the need for journalists to learn cross-platform skills, it does suggest educators would do well to approach convergence with a more sophisticated understanding. Students are unlikely to be asked to write and report a local news package for a legacy news organization; rather, they would more likely need to know how to write and add photos and video for the website of the news organization in which they are employed. Yet while there seems to be a general consensus that journalism education should offer more cross-platform skills, there is little agreement—and even less evidence—for how to go about teaching these skills.

All of these issues deserve exploring. For this study, researchers focused on the question of how to best teach a core journalism skills class, specifically introductory writing and reporting for text/online and broadcast (video and audio). Before launching a revised undergraduate curriculum, students at a large private West Coast journalism school were required to take two separate text and broadcast courses that were supposed to work together to keep the workload manageable. For example, in the Fall, students enrolled in 15-week “Newswriting: Print” and “Newswriting: Broadcast” courses at the same time. Ideally, they would report the same stories for both classes, but one version would be for a text/online platform, and the other version would be for a broadcast platform. The course focused on broadcast writing for traditional platforms; students also took a different class in web and online video. Each course was taught by one instructor. The collaboration rarely worked, however, because many instructors teaching foundational skills courses are adjuncts with full-time jobs who found it difficult to meet or talk with each other. However, students did at least receive one full semester of training in writing for text/online and one full semester of training in writing for broadcast. The following semester, students enrolled in “Reporting: Print” and “Reporting: Broadcast” at the same time.

The new 15-week course “Reporting and Writing I” is typically taken by sophomores or junior undergraduates transferring from another college or major. The class is capped at 20 and focuses on introducing students to basic hard news and feature reporting and writing skills for both text/online and broadcast all in one course. The course also introduced basics of social media as a tool for both reporting and publishing. Essentially, what was previously taught in two separate one-semester courses was combined into a single one-semester course even as the subject matter expanded. The class time increased slightly, and it is co-taught by a text specialist and a broadcast specialist. Students produce a variety of stories in and out of class from campus or the campus neighborhood. For their finals, students are required to pitch and produce a text story and a broadcast version of that story, although students sometimes complete two different stories. This course is followed by “Reporting and Writing II,” where students spend the semester pitching and producing four text and broadcast stories from a local city or neighborhood they have been assigned to cover.

The result from restructuring and combining introductory text and broadcast reporting and writing into two courses over two semesters instead of four courses in two semesters is that students now spend about half as much time on either text or broadcast than before. In addition, broadcast instructors must spend a significant amount of time explaining not only the skill set required for writing for broadcast—the emphasis on writing for the ear rather than the eye—but also the differences between text and broadcast writing (e.g., putting attribution first in broadcast, using “today” rather than a date, etc.). As time with students is finite, many instructors felt these lengthy explanations were to the detriment of core journalism skills. Many instructors offered anecdotal evidence that after the implementation of the new curriculum, more students in “Reporting and Writing II” or other upper division courses had yet to master basic skills, such as writing a hard news lead, news judgment, broadcast conventions, Associated Press style, news judgment, and more. Students also complained verbally and on course evaluations about how learning text and broadcast writing at the same time was confusing, or that they spent too much or not enough time on one or the other. Some students also complained about the lack of instruction in social media skills, which were also part of each required assignment.

Research Questions

As a result of the anecdotal concerns expressed by instructors and student comments on course evaluations, this project was launched to try and determine whether there was any benefit to learning to write for text and broadcast sequentially as opposed to concurrently, as practiced in the new curriculum. The following two research questions were developed:

Literature Review

Journalism educators have been arguing about what students should learn for decades. As far back as the mid-19th century, “news professionals and university educators pondered whether journalists needed to be college-educated, whether they needed a liberal arts degree, or whether they needed professional education that combined liberal arts and practical training” (Folkerts, 2014). Folkerts writes that in the 1860s, some of the earlier journalism courses were taught at Cornell University and what is now Washington and Lee University; in 1908, the University of Missouri launched the first journalism degree; and by 1966, hundreds of programs were in operation, half of which had added broadcast specializations. Arguments about the purpose and curriculum in postsecondary institutions continued, including the debate between “theory and practice” (Castaneda, Murphy, & Hether, 2005). In 1987, the first full-scale assessment on journalism education conducted by the University of Oregon with funding from the Gannett Foundation found the general state of journalism education to be “dismal, ” that programs lacked academic heft, and that journalism schools “were not exactly centers of innovation” (Dennis, 1987). Furthermore, Mensing and Ryfe (2013) argue that the prevailing method of teaching journalism is ill-suited to an industry sorely in need of disruption, not a continuation of the status quo.

Since about the mid-1990s, the discussion took on new urgency as it became clear the Internet would transform traditional methods of disseminating information. The so-called “Digital Revolution,” coupled with the decline of the newspaper industry, made journalism “a target for both traditional journalists, who saw their world slipping away, and for entrepreneurs who believed they could succeed without formal training in journalism” (Folkerts, 2014). For almost two decades, journalism programs have been undergoing a wide range of curricular revisions to catch up to the technological revolution that has upended the media industry. Schools have changed their names and added terms such as “integrated communications,” as well as a range of digital competencies that in some cases have replaced long-standing required courses such as copy editing.

Kraeplin and Criado (2005) found in a survey from the mid-2000s that most journalism schools had adopted a “converged” curriculum that reflected the need for students to understand the difference between, and be able to practice, writing and reporting for traditional formats (newspapers and TV and radio stations) and new ones, based on the web. At that time, most programs focused on the eventuality that websites would combine broadcast and print elements, and that journalists would need to produce content for both and post them on the website, an idea bolstered by changes in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership regulations (Castaneda et al., 2005) as well as corporate mergers and cooperation among legacy newspaper and television news outlets (Huang et al., 2003). Yet even among those programs that reported incorporating “convergence” into their curriculum, fewer than one quarter described those changes as “major.”

Furthermore, the research evaluating learning outcomes and best practices among “converged” schools remains relatively scarce (Filak, 2006). Bor (2014), in a qualitative study of three broadcast journalism classes incorporating social media reporting, found that students struggled to understand and master the use of social media as a reporting tool as opposed to one for personal use. That study recommended instructors explicitly teach ethics, technical instruction, and the professional use of social media platforms. It also noted that while there is a need to include social media and digital reporting skills into journalism classes, there is “a noticeable absence of literature that evaluates instructional approaches and related learning outcomes” in these fields (Bor, 2014).

Even as the demands to teach writing skills increase, research shows many students enter colleges with inadequate preparation in one of the basic—writing. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress reports show only about 27% of 12th and eighth graders scored “proficient” or higher on writing tests (The Nation’s Report Card, 2011). Lingwell (2010) conducted a survey of a thousand educators in journalism and mass communication programs to assess several questions on how faculty teach writing and how effective they find their instruction. The survey found that most educators report they must teach many students whose writing skills are only moderately proficient, but that there is no clear standard or approach adopted across most institutions. Educators themselves disagree as to the best approach to teaching writing skills.

In addition, there is little research on the challenges of teaching traditional broadcast writing in an increasingly digitally based world. Writing for broadcast requires students to focus on writing for the “ear” as opposed to writing for a reader or “the eye.” Students learning broadcast writing must learn a new set of rules and “grammar” and master specific skills including short sentences and using the active voice (Hewitt, 2011) Traditional broadcast pedagogy in the United States follows a model in which students first learn to write for radio/audio followed by writing short scripts for broadcast (voiceover/sound-on-tape [VO/SOTS] and the like), building up to a longer reporter package incorporating sound from interviews and reporter’s spoken explanation. In this conceptualization, images follow the written word (Davie and Auter, 2003). As Silcock (2007) points out, this progression is not true worldwide. European newsroom follows a tradition in which stories are built primarily using images first, followed by a written script that conforms to the story told by the pictures, as opposed to vice versa. Students enter the classroom with more experience manipulating images and text due to the rapid proliferation of mobile phones with camera and editing capabilities as well as social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram that allow novices to acquire and annotate images far more rapidly and easily than even a decade ago. Yet the research on pedagogy should relate to these changes is virtually nonexistent. Filak (2006) examined the impact of two different teaching styles for an introductory converged class. Some students took a class with one instructor, whereas others experienced “mini-classes” with different specialists. The primary focus of this study was on students’ attitudes toward the various medium—that is, whether they viewed the topic of convergence more positively as a result of different teaching styles—but it also incorporated a test of basic knowledge in the field. That test did not find statistical differences in performance between the different groups.

In a review of team-teaching in a converged journalism school curriculum, Auman and Lillie (2008) looked at a case study of different models of team-teaching in four undergraduate core classes in a university with a newly adopted converged curriculum. In the first year of a new converged curriculum, students learned web, print, and broadcast at once from multiple instructors teaching together. The students reported feeling frustrated and anxious about having to file multiple assignments in different formats, and instructors complained about the workload. The school then moved to a “master instructor” model with one teacher focused on print skills, with some “modules” for other media. Students reported greater satisfaction and outcomes improved. In upper-level courses, students tackled more complex skills using a modular approach. In a second iteration of the course, they also selected a medium for a more advanced project, allowing them to focus on skills they wanted to acquire. Upper-level students also took courses that created cross-disciplinary projects. The authors conclude their research suggests journalism schools follow a “middle way,” as beginning students do better with highly structured, more focused courses before they tackle more complex courses where they can choose specialties.

The convergence movement spawned a bit of a backlash as well. Some schools—such as Brigham Young University—adopted a model of “convergence” that tried to teach students to excel in print and broadcast skills only to drop it after concluding students’ learning outcomes had suffered (Wenger, 2005). Meanwhile, since the convergence discussion first began, more and more skills have become necessary for graduates. In a study of job skills required by broadcast news companies, Wenger and Owens (2010) noted that employers were looking for skills beyond just combining print and broadcast into the same stories. Instead, they were also looking for journalists adept at using new forms of communication, including social media and mobile. The authors concluded that although the percentage of these jobs was small, it was growing rapidly and likely to continue to increase. Even when journalism educators make a good faith effort to predict the skills needed to succeed in emerging industries, they can misjudge those needs of industry. Du and Thornburg (2011), in a review of surveys from online media professionals and journalism educators, found some areas of agreement. Both agreed basic journalism skills such as news judgment, grammar, and style remain foundational to training journalists. However, they also found “today’s online journalists have duties that are more likely to be conceptual—such as project management and staff organization/administration—than their academic counterparts might believe” (Du & Thornburg, 2011). A recent case study of thousands of job listings, employment postings, and company profiles for news media companies in the New York City metropolitan area found a significant growth in jobs for workers in digital, analytic, and platforms such as social media in newsrooms (Weber & Kosterich, 2018).

As Kolodzy, Grant, DeMars, and Wilkinson (2014) wrote in 2014, the challenges facing journalism educators are both familiar and profound. The industry has already faced a century in which it moved from a print product to one that included radio, television, and film. The current changes, however, went beyond simply adding new formats and involved a different kind of delivery, in which consumers expected a constant stream of news and journalism organizations needed to provide it across platforms and in a largely on-demand manner. In many ways, the educational community has been slow to respond. The ACEJMC accrediting council, for example, did not add digital competencies to its requirements until 2013 (Folkerts, 2014).

Method

Two sections of the same course, titled “Reporting and Writing I,” were selected for an evaluation. One section was named “Blue” and the other “Red.” The Blue section had 17 students, and the Red section had 19 students. Each section was co-taught by two instructors, a text specialist and a video specialist, who also are the two researchers for this article. In addition, the same video instructor/researcher taught both the Blue and Red sections. The same syllabus, learning objectives, and assessments also were used for both courses.

Institutional review board (IRB) approval was granted for this study, which provided students with the same learning objectives and assessments, but in a different order. For example, the Blue class was taught text and video writing concurrently. The class met twice a week. The first class of the week focused on text writing, whereas the second class focused on video writing. This continued throughout the 15-week semester. The Red class taught text and video writing sequentially. This class also met twice a week. The first half of the semester focused on text only, whereas the second half of the semester focused on video only.

Students choose which sections to enroll in, so instructors had no control over the type of students they taught. However, the mean grade point averages (GPAs) for each section were virtually identical—3.585 for Blue and 3.592 for Red. The median GPA for the Blue section was 3.72, and the mode was 3.57, 3.8, 3.76, 3.86, and 3.72. The median GPA for the Red section was lower at 3.525, and the mode was 3.74.

At the end of the semester, students in each section were asked to complete a brief survey via Qualtrics to gauge their satisfaction with how the course was organized (Appendix 1). In addition, two outside evaluators, both professional journalists who did not know the students, were hired to review final text and broadcast projects from both classes. One outside evaluator, a text specialist, reviewed all the text stories from both classes without knowing how students were taught—concurrently or sequentially. Similarly, the other outside evaluator, a broadcast specialist, reviewed all the broadcast stories from both classes without knowing how students were taught—concurrently or sequentially. Student names and section numbers were redacted from the finals seen by evaluators. The evaluators also used a rubric (Appendix 2) created by instructors to score the finals.

Analysis

Again, the Blue class was taught two subjects concurrently, whereas the Red section was taught sequentially. The Blue section’s response rate to the survey was low, at almost 39%. The response rate from the Red section was more than 94%. The overall response rate for both classes, however, was almost 67%. Taken as a whole, the five-question Qualtrics survey that included two open-ended questions showed a clear and strong preference for learning two subjects—writing for text and for video—sequentially rather than concurrently.

The survey showed that students in the Blue section were most interested in video (57.14%) compared with text (28.5), with 14.29% undecided. It also found that 57.15% of students in the Blue section disagreed or strongly disagreed with the question, “Learning about text and broadcast at the same time was an effective way to learn.” More than 71% disagreed or strongly disagreed with the question, “Focusing on two subjects at a time—text and broadcast—was an effective way to learn.”

The survey showed that students in the Red section were mostly interested in video (69.71%) compared with text (11.76%), with 17.65% interested in digital and 5.88% indicating he or she was no longer interested in journalism. It also found that 94.12% of students in the Red section agreed or strongly agreed with the question, “Learning about text in the first half of the semester, then learning about broadcast in the second half of the semester, was an effective way to learn about both subjects.” More than 88% of students agreed or strongly agreed with the question, “Focusing on one subject at a time—text and then broadcast—was an effective way to learn about both subjects.” Student comments in the open-ended section of the survey support the data:

I think there should be one class for print, and another for broadcast. It really feels like everything is squashed together and the content seems to go by way too quickly. I think students need more time to learn the material effectively.

I think print and broadcast should be separated.

Keep the class structure as it was for mine—where text is taught before broadcast, and and both are separated halfway through the semester. Students in other classes clearly articulated that they envied our structure and I, for one, found myself learning easily under this structure.

I would personally make [Reporting and Writing I] a journalism writing class, then make [Reporting and Writing II] or whatever comes next a reporting class that focuses more on broadcast.

Separate the text from broadcast.

It was really difficult to mix text and broadcast in one class because it becomes confusing and work heavy. It was like taking two separate classes, and there were no connections made between the text portion and the broadcast portion. We ended up with many assignments because both teachers would give their own assignments (i.e., text story and vox pop due the same week).

The outside text evaluator, a working professional, using a rubric for text provided by the instructor, rated the text stories produced by the Red class higher than those produced by the Blue class. Again, students in the Red class were taught sequentially. The text evaluator reviewed all text stories from both the red and the blue group. Out of a possible score of 100, the 19 Red text finals had a mean score of 87.47, a median score of 88, and a mode of 87.88. To compare, the 18 Blue text finals had a mean score of 84.94, a median score of 87, and a mode of 89.82.

A broadcast evaluator, a working professional, reviewed broadcast assignments for both sections using a rubric provided by the instructor. Results for the broadcast stories were flipped, with the outside broadcast evaluator rating broadcast stories produced by the Blue class higher than those produced by the Red class. Out of a possible score of 100, the 17 Blue finals had a mean score of 86.5, a median score of 86.5, and mode scores of 97, 83, and 84. To compare, the Red class broadcast finals had a mean score of 84.7, a mean score of 85, and mode scores of 96, 94, 87, and 79.

The text and broadcast final assessments by outside evaluators were mixed, meaning the answer to the second research question also was mixed:

Discussion

One way to explain the difference in the outside evaluator’s assessment of the broadcast final projects is to compare the number of students interested in broadcast (audio and video) as a profession. The average score for the broadcast finals in the Blue class, which was taught concurrently, was higher than that of the broadcast finals for the Red class, which was taught sequentially. But the Qualtrics survey also found that almost 65% of students in the Blue class said they were interested in broadcast, compared with 57% in the Red class. It could be that students who were more interested in broadcast put more effort into their broadcast finals than students who were not interested in broadcast.

This study had several limitations. Just two sections of the same course were examined because the two researchers realized that, by chance, they were partnered to teach one section as a team, and one was teaching an additional section as well. Although the two sections were taught using the same syllabus, rubrics, and general assignments, they were not exactly alike. Each section was team taught. Both sections had the same broadcast instructor, but they each had different text instructors. Students in both sections had similar overall GPAs, but differed in their interests, strengths, weaknesses, and number of hours they could devote to assignments. Each assignment was not exactly alike, either. For example, students were sent to cover a campus speech, but almost every student covered a different speaker. In addition, although the two text instructors had the same learning objectives and general assessments, each covered subjects using their own lectures, PowerPoint presentations, guest speakers, and in-class assignments.

Overall, the difference in learning outcomes—as assessed by outside evaluation of final assignments—between students who learned text and broadcast writing sequentially and those who did so concurrently was neither dramatic nor conclusive. In many ways, the data are reassuring. Students did not appear to show significant differences in their performance on a final assignment based on whether or not they learned text and broadcast writing together or in a sequence. However, they overwhelmingly disliked the simultaneous model and preferred the sequential one. This serves as reminder that student opinion should not be the sole basis for curricular decisions, as students often make mistakes when assessing their own academic progress. However, it does highlight the very real issue of capacity in journalism education courses. After all, it is far less expensive for schools to rely on a sole instructor for each course than to hire two for each course.

The class in this study focused on text and broadcast writing, with a brief discussion of social media. This made sense in the context of a “converged” curriculum when convergence primarily meant training students in web, print, and broadcast skills. But in the time since “convergence” became a buzzword in academic journalism circles, the industry changed yet again. Yes, students still need to learn how to report and write, but the platforms they use have expanded, which means the ways that information is presented have also grown. Employers now need newsroom expertise in social media, data and analytics, and employees who can create content for apps, text messages, and automated bots. The fields of augmented and virtual reality and artificial intelligence also seem poised to alter the field. The question of how to teach students an ever-expanding skill set, and how to assess their progress toward those goals, will continue to pose challenges to journalism educators. Squeezing more and more competencies into a finite number of core classes is unlikely to prove a viable strategy for journalism education.

Future Research

As journalism schools continue to update their curricula in response to changes in the field, more research is needed on how to best teach various skills, including reporting and writing. This must begin with identifying core competencies that form the heart of traditional journalism—the ability to find, verify, and disseminate accurate information—now that so much of that information is available across a multiplicity of platforms. Are the five Ws and H—who, what, when, where, why, and how—and the inverted pyramid still pertinent? Should mastering J-school staples such as hard news briefs and feature stories still form the core of a journalism education? Should we be teaching all students about writing to video or audio in legacy broadcast formats, or for alternate medium, or both? How should we train journalists to write for Twitter (longer tweets and tweet threads), create videos for social media and online outlets, and produce stories for Snapchat, Instagram, and messaging apps? Does the answer lie in teaching core reporting and writing skills that should translate across different media, that is, platform agnostic, or is it necessary to teach component skills specific to different outlets? Many journalism schools moved toward a model of media convergence that assumed broadcast and print outlets would continue to merge; however, this has not proven to be the case. Should schools now reevaluate their efforts and include social media and other digital platforms? And if the latter, which ones? A replication of this particular study, with more sections, instructors, and outside evaluators, could paint a clearer picture if barriers to class scheduling and adjunct time constraints could be resolved. In any skills course, the only way to find what works best is to research various pedagogies and programs, assess what works, and determine best practices.