Are journalism schools teaching their students the right skills?

The problem was that massive disruption of print media really came to a head due to the great recession, when low media buys plus a real uptick of traction from ad networks put a final nail in a lot of print journalists careers.

Looking back its easy to think if they were more tech savvy they could have somehow survived -- but thats just not the case. Tech and journalism are more closely related than ever, and specifically scripted languages and knowledge of markup (CSS and JS Libraries) can improve the final product's production quality, but journalists are not programmers no should they be. Its similar to saying journalists should know how to roll their own print presses in the 50s -- its not their job.

The problem lies more in the fact that we simply can't fund journalists to do their job anymore. We charge them with both doing investigative reporting, staying neutral and coming up with a sustainable business model for it -- and you know what? Its just too much to ask. Local news stations are slowly dying out, local newspapers are already mostly thinned out and upstarts like Patch (flawed as it was) were not able to fund real journalistic work.

After a few years going back and forth on this I have come to believe that a BBC like model in the US would do the nation great deal of good. Funding journalists to do their job and keep up the good work without pressuring them to make compromises is essentially to keeping voters informed.

I hope we can get over our mindset that all things need to be privatized at some point in the near future and begin funding PBS, NPR, and local news to keep doing what they are doing.

The very idea of journalism schools is that the most important aspect of journalism is journalism specific knowledge. Knowing how to write in just the right way. Knowing how to keep your word count down. Knowing how to write on a schedule. Knowing how to mold the material into a familiar shape.

But most of that is bullshit. It produces a grey ooze of pablum, and it reinforces the conceit that journalists are more knowledgeable than they truly are and, more importantly, that by following the "news" we can become educated in the important topics relevant to our time.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that most of the time it takes someone who is truly an expert (or at least a very enthusiastic amateur) in a given field to be able to understand it at a holistic level and to be able to educate the public about it. The most important factor is knowledge, not style. Typically the skills necessary to pass on that knowledge to the public are comparatively easier to pick up than the expertise itself, and not requiring of a degree in journalism.

If you look at the vast bulk of material that comes out of j-school graduates you notice the same things. Bland, boring copy designed to spoon feed the tiniest amount of new knowledge, often poorly understood by the writer themselves, to the public. This I would not count as a great service to humanity.

Edit: the crisis with j-school educated journalists today is not that journalists are insufficiently tech savvy, it's a mistake to think that way. The issue is that journalists are becoming disintermediated. That's what the internet does, and what it will continue to do. At the end of the day journalists are middle men. Back in the early 20th century we needed an army of middle men to collate news from around the world and format it correctly and in the appropriate terms so that it could fit and be understandable in the medium of printed newspapers. Today none of that is necessary because now transmission and storage of data is nearly trivial. We don't need an army of formatters, we need a much smaller force of knowledgeable experts who are good at communicating. We don't need folks rewriting the same story for hundreds of news outlets and ending up with a hundred different largely similar versions.

1-Ignorance of statistics, and of how they are frequently misused.

2-Lack of awareness of how good arguments are conducted, and what logical fallacies commonly appear.

3-Insufficient awareness of how the media can create or contribute to cultural or individual biases.

4-A lack of an attitude of open-mindedness or fairness.

5-General scientific illiteracy

Also, If you do recruiting, you are not in tech. You are in recruiting. And so on. Else tell me something technical about graph (a data structure) search vs linked list search.

Outcome: when a recruiter and a marketing person argue at a python tech conference, the tech conference is just a location of their argument. They are not tech.