Memo to Rob Curley: Kent JMC stacks up pretty good too

The maharishi of convergence, Rob Curley, was at Kent State University recently, preaching the gospel of online and multi-platform journalism.

The director of New Media and Convergence for the Naples Daily News talked about webifying news stories with hyper-local coverage and lots of interactivity, blogs and podcasts. (See earlier blog).

Someone made the mistake, however, of asking him about the state of journalism education relative to the emergence of Curley’s brand of cyberjournalism. His bottom line: although a couple schools were “doing it right,” most were wasting their students’ money.

Most of his tirade echoed comments he had made two years earlier in a blog on his website. “Most J-schools are still churning out the same sorts of graduates that they were 50 years ago,” he wrote then. “Whether it’s good convergence or shitty convergence, J-schools better be preparing students for a new kind of journalism….[J]ournalism programs should be ensuring that students don’t have blinders on – that they are aware of all aspects of media.”

He suggested students might want to think about suing their deans and directors if they hadn’t been introduced to iMovie or Photoshop before they graduate. While at Kent State, he said all journalism students should enter the job market with a solid background in reporting and newswriting (who’d argue against that?) and in Photoshop and its use of layers.

Photoshop and iMovie teach not just practical skills, but also a multimedia mindset, Curley said, correctly.

So, I’m thinking, while he’s ranting, where does my School of Journalism and Mass Communication rank in preparing students for Curley’s world of New Media? After a lot of deliberate thought and consideration, I concluded that Kent State students are gonna be pretty well geared up for the future. Yeah, we’ve got a lot more to do, but we know that, and we’re taking steps to keep our grads ready with practical skill sets, critical thinking abilities, and multi-platform media mindsets.

Evidence submitted:

• Courses offered in Online Journalism, Cybermedia Design, and Public Relations Online Tactics.
• A Collaborative Hour attached to several of our courses, where students from feature writing, photography, and design classes work together to produce a newspaper, magazine, or online package.
• A joint section of Reporting Public Affairs where students produce print, broadcast and online versions of their stories. Last year they covered a capital murder trial.
• A Collaborative Online Producing class where students from print, broadcast, visual journalism, and design team up to produce rich multimedia content for the School website.
• Digital still photography that soon will be wed with Flash animation.
• A forthcoming broadcast producing class that will be Web oriented.
• A requirement of all students to learn the basics of still and video photography, along with the fundamentals of Final Cut Pro and Photoshop.
• Super online versions of traditional student media: The CyBurr, The Online Stater, Black Squirrel Radio, and TV2.

Curley pointed to journalism programs at Northwestern, Berkeley, and Kansas as three he thought were on the right path.

Strikes me that he needs to add a fourth school to his list. Though I might be just a tad biased.

--Fred Endres, Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Kent State University