If you’re going to attend a journalism program – especially a graduate program – you want to be in a program that will teach you how to start your own projects and be entrepreneurial.
I can identify with a lot of these thoughts. Today’s mainstream media are different than what we considered the mainstream yesterday, and tomorrow’s list may not even have newspapers and broadcast networks on it at all. Journos working this environment need a mix of skills and cross-format expertise not combined in the typical sequence-based j-school. Something like four parts journalism (across multiple sequences), three parts tech, two parts business and one part marketing/pr. Or some such.
At the risk of marking myself old school or some kind of Luddite, I demur on the suggestion that tomorrow’s journalism is all about social networks. They will be in the mix, but the (public) jury is still out on how much of the short-term hype we’re experiencing today will survive to become long-term trend. Remember Second Life?
And I do always get a kick out of pieces that knock journalistic fundamentals as being so yesterday’s priorities, while inflicting typos and grammatical errors no self-respecting journalist would let pass in a professional editorial workflow.