Jeff Jarvis steals the show again with some provocative suggestions during a symposium at Columbia University:
Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor…
They need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator…
News is a conversation. Life is a conversation.
The question for us is, how do we teach our students to be great conversationalists?
Well, more than 12 years ago, Carlos Soria and I wrote a manifesto about the Journalism Schools of the Future. With a few updates, I think that we had some answers for Jeff Jarvis:
First: Improve the Liberal Arts curricula of your School.
Second: Teach the student how to think, how to read, how to write, and how to speak in more than one language.
Third: Thinking is more important than doing.
Fourth: Avoid mono-media majors and don’t spend too much time with technology: students know more than many teachers!
Fifth: Travel and train your students with some semesters abroad. The Erasmus program in Europe is a must. Joseph Pulitzer was right.
And if your life is spent on a computer (see the same picture from my last post), remember what the British say: “garbage in, garbage out.”
