It’s time we got serious about building media curriculum around digital product concepts. But in order to make meaningful, comprehensive and holistic change, we’ll apparently need new faculty.
A research project by academic professional Amanda Bright of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia says it’s faculty who are preventing journalism curriculum from becoming more digital. Her case study of three U.S. journalism/communication programs found that “the predominant obstacle to digital curriculum decisions at these institutions was individual members’ inability or unwillingness to learn new concepts and technologies.” She found that journalism curriculum was more likely to be developed around faculty interests than student needs. (Full disclosure: Dr. Bright was a fellow in the inaugural PhDigital Bootcamp held at my university this past summer, a program I directed, designed to prepare faculty to lead innovative curriculum.)
This situation is untenable. Students need exposure to current media platforms in a modern curriculum and faculty interests and competencies must align with those needs. Digital product jobs are becoming more commonplace both within and outside of media industries. You’ll see positions now at Washington Post, New York Times, McClatchy, BuzzFeed, Vox Media and across community media organizations for web, mobile, data, visuals, video, engagement and social media producers. It’s no longer unusual to see the roles of product manager, director of product and chief product officer in media organizations.
Plus, opportunities abound for product-focused people at companies like HomeAway, HEB and Home Depot. What do these companies want? Leadership, strategy, problem-solving, excellent communication skills, all buoyed by an undercurrent of tech savvy — just what journalism graduates should be able to deliver.
But if we want graduates to have a chance at contributing to product teams across a range of industries, profound changes to curriculum will be necessary. That change can’t occur with faculty who are unable or unwilling to adapt.
It will ultimately require more than just a tweak here and there. It means teaching new courses in coding, data analysis, social media analytics, social storytelling, data visualization, multimedia package development and emerging topics to include 360 video and virtual reality, bots, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and whatever comes next.
But it’s more than just introducing these shiny, new technologies. It’s about focusing on the needs of users, identifying and solving problems and having the insight and exposure to know what’s possible. Beyond having scholars and instructors who can research and teach in these areas, programs need faculty who make decisions on personnel and curriculum committees to understand and embrace these concepts.
How can a program move its faculty toward digital product concepts? Here are a few suggestions:
Yes, tenure is an issue when it comes to motivating faculty. But if we accept that, in general, faculty have students’ best interests at heart, programs must start exploring curriculum solutions that better meet everyone’s needs.
In 2019, begin to innovate your curriculum. But first, disrupt your faculty.
Cindy Royal is a professor and director of the Media Innovation Lab at Texas State University.
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media