What are the biggest challenges facing journalism schools?
The biggest challenges facing journalism schools is preparing students to enter a vastly different world than the one many of the professors are familiar with. Newspapers and broadcast news are facing market loss, and the younger demographic is simply not that interested in news as we traditionally define it. Not only are they not reading newspapers or watching the nightly news, but only 29% of them regularly get their news from traditional news dot coms. That 29% has held steady for the last 6 years. If NYTimes.com, washingtonpost.com and the rest are to grow their audience they need new ways of reaching that audience; and the new journalists really need to be adept at getting information to this largely disinterested demographic. That means knowing how to create compelling content online — so j-schools have to teach them both the fundamentals of reporting but also the fundamentals of web page design, flash, video production, etc. But it goes beyond that to teaching these students to
