In an advanced reporting class this spring at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Tom Warhover’s students chose to create in-depth reports on local growth and environmental issues that could be conveyed to readers at a glance. Think online interactive, searchable maps of sewers and water pipes.

The project was a “real success and a real failure,” admits Warhover, chairman of the print and digital faculty at the journalism school, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this month.

The students easily gathered the information. But by late summer, content was still sitting on computers. “We couldn’t implement it because we didn’t have the technical know-how” to create interactive maps and charts, says Warhover, who also is executive editor for the Columbia Missourian, the six-day-a-week newspaper that students produce independent of the university for class credit.

As j-schools seek to keep up with the pace of change in the newspaper  industry, Warhover’s example illustrates the challenges they face. J-schools still need to instill the basics of reporting and writing and an understanding of ethics and legal issues—but at the same time teach multimedia and other skills that will help students land their first jobs. They need to coach students on new methods of reporting even as faculties and curricula are slow to change, and professors may not have used these skills in their careers as working journalists. And they need to do this at a time when the industry is confused about its own future and not necessarily able to offer much guidance.

Newsrooms and classrooms “are not in sync,” says Dana S. Eagles, staff development editor at the Orlando Sentinel. But given how quickly the industry is changing, how slowly curriculum traditionally changes and the fact that universities are facing financial pressures, “I’m very, very sympathetic to their situation,” he notes.

Adds Kathy Pellegrino, recruitment editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, “Schools are very aware there needs to [be] an evolutionary process under way. It’s just a struggle with how to do that.”

Reporting, Writing and Multimedia
As j-schools feel their way through the changes, they’re experiencing the ups and downs of an industry in transition. For instance, while The City University of New York, which opened its graduate j-school program two years ago, has 70 students in the incoming class, up from 50 students in each of its first two classes, the board of trustees at Florida International University in Miami considered closing its j-school this year to save money but determined it wouldn’t result in significant enough savings.

Overall, the number of journalism and mass communications programs increased to 472 in 2006 from 458 in 2005, but enrollment barely budged, according to an annual survey by the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia in Athens. Undergraduate enrollment in journalism and mass communications programs inched up by 0.3 percent, while graduate enrollment declined by 1.3 percent, the survey showed.

Leaving aside the age-old question of whether j-schools are necessary, just what students are learning in these programs depends on where they are enrolled. Although some schools are coming up with creative ideas about how to address the industry’s challenges, others “are as proud as they can be that they are traditional journalism schools, devoted and dedicated to doing the journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. That’s not where the world is going,” says Alberto Ibargüen, president and chief executive officer of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, which has pledged more than $100 million to media innovation initiatives in the last three years, including several at universities. 

Beyond the basics of helping students to report, organize and analyze information for accuracy and context, j-schools don’t know exactly what skills will best serve their students in the long run. “The industry is asking for a lot of things,” says Lee B. Becker, a professor at the Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia in Athens, who tracks statistics for the annual Cox Center survey. 

“It’s hard to know which things are likely to be enduring, which are most important, which we can do the best job helping our students with,” he adds. “Do you cut back on an ethics class in order to offer another course on design?”

J-schools are taking different approaches to answering that question. Many are incorporating multimedia elements into other courses—for instance, students in the basic news reporting and writing class, which is required of all students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in Tempe, write breaking stories for the Web. An online journalism course shows students how to produce news in a multimedia environment, and students continue to use multimedia concepts in future coursework, says Christopher Callahan, the school’s founding dean.

Two years ago, the school set up a Multimedia Reporting Program, in partnership with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, for sophomores and some upper-class students, Callahan says. Students receive course credit, are paid for covering breaking news for the paper’s Web site, www.azcentral.com, and are edited by a Republic editor assigned full-time to the school to supervise the program.

Multimedia courses offered at the Medill School at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., led Amy Lee, who earned her undergraduate degree in journalism from Michigan State University in East Lansing in 1999, to enroll in Medill’s graduate program after working at The Detroit News for more than seven years, most recently as a city politics reporter. With the paper starting to require reporters to have multimedia skills, she decided it was a good time to go back to school to quickly immerse herself in digital media skills.

At Medill, Lee was one of six students who practiced “locative journalism” this spring by collecting data about Chicago, which is a potential host city for the 2016 Olympics. They gathered information-—such as interviews with local residents concerned about how the Olympics could affect green space surrounding Chicago’s Washington Park, for example—then used software to allow users with mobile devices that have GPS to access that information when they reach a particular spot. For example, users standing in Washington Park could follow directions as if they were on a museum tour, such as “walk north along the path” to hear about roadway construction plans for the Olympics.

The program has “compelling” applications for breaking news, Lee says. A GPS- triggered device could alert users to a car accident clogging traffic on the route they normally take home and suggest an alternative.

The course is just one example of how the school is helping its students learn how to reach audiences through digital tools, especially as mobile becomes a bigger platform for newspapers.

“If my newspaper’s going to come alive, here’s a way to have value-added you never could have had otherwise,” says John Lavine, the school’s dean, who has pushed for students to understand and engage audiences in new ways. Using the tree-falls-in-a-forest analogy, he asks, “If you write a great story and no one reads it,” did it happen?

Beyond Multimedia
Journalism schools need to go beyond teaching baseline multimedia skills, says Wendell Cochran, associate professor and director of the journalism division at American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C. They also must incorporate mobile and social networking applications into the classroom, he says.  Next spring American University plans to offer a course in which students can build interactive Web applications.

The need to make room for new technical skills has led some j-schools to change their curricula. For instance, when the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas in Lawrence “upended” its curriculum in 1999 to emphasize multimedia skills, it stopped requiring students to take a course in media history, although it remains a popular elective, says Ann Brill, the school’s dean. Starting this fall, the school will offer a class to help students develop a presence on camera and radio because, she says, many journalists appear on multiple platforms today.

Kansas also is one of several schools differentiating its curriculum by offering interdisciplinary courses to give students more expertise in certain subjects. This spring it offered a class on “Military and the Media,” in which 16 soldiers from the Army’s base at Fort Leavenworth and 10 students from the j-school read books by journalists who have covered the military, such as legendary World War II journalist Ernie Pyle and former ABC News co-anchor Bob Woodruff who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2006. During the class, the students and soldiers discussed each other’s roles and the basics of each profession. In one exercise, student journalists had to report on a military news conference given by the student soldiers.

CUNY opted for a three-semester program rather than the more traditional yearlong academic program. “Otherwise, it’s a zero-sum game” of offering some classes and not others, says Stephen B. Shepard, the school’s dean.

Rather than following a cookie-cutter formula, schools should focus on what they do well, suggests the Knight Foundation’s Ibargüen. Allowing students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City to take advantage of classes in other departments at the university is a “brilliant use of resources,” he says. “Figure out what your specific assets are, what your passion is and focus on that.”

Class Dismissed
In March, a record 114 companies recruited potential candidates at a job fair held at Columbia University’s j-school, and by May, 62 percent of the graduating class had lined up employment, says Ernest R. Sotomayor, the school’s assistant dean of career services. The school was pleased with that number, especially given layoffs in the industry, he says.

In the most recent Cox Center survey, released last month, 63.3 percent of graduates with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and mass communication had job offers by Oct. 31, 2007, down slightly from 63.7 percent the year before (see chart below). For graduates with master’s degrees, 67.9 percent had job offers by that time, up from 64.8 percent the year before. Still, neither set of numbers is statistically significant based on the margin of error, Georgia’s Becker says.

As they search for new talent, recruiters are looking beyond the classroom. Richard Leonard, director of executive and professional recruiting at Gannett Co. in McLean, Va., says his staff recruits “pretty heavily” at about 35 to 40 j-schools each year. Student publications that operate separately from j-schools, such as The Daily Collegian at The Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa., also are a source of talent.

Some students at campus dailies “are pushing the envelope on their own when it comes to their Web sites,” such as adding social networking features or reader feedback elements, podcasting, and uploading video and audio, Leonard says. Campus papers also are a place to look for sales reps who have sold online advertising, since many j-school programs are not yet addressing this increasingly critical area, he says.

As schools further develop their curricula, industry recruiters and editors are looking not only for basic journalism skills but also a working knowledge of multimedia and, increasingly, content or database management.

“J-schools are pumping out a lot of mojo reporters, which is good,” says Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor for interactive at The Dallas Morning News. But, he adds, “We already have a lot of reporters. What we don’t have are Internet-savvy news editors who understand the culture and distribution networks of the Internet.”

Having basic, technical skills is increasingly important, says Joe Grimm, former recruiting and development editor at the Detroit Free Press who also teaches an editing class at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. “Excel,” he quips, “is the new Word.”

Closing the Gap
A few reasons lie behind the gap that exists between what schools teach and what newsrooms need. One is the natural lag between when a new course is developed and when it is taught. “Universities tend to be very democratic in the way they do things,” says Warren Watson, director of the Journalism Institute for Digital Education, Activities and Scholarship at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.

Another is that the faculty-—many professors left newsroom jobs when print was still the dominant medium—is often slow to turn over. This year’s Cox Center survey showed that more than 25 percent of full-time faculty teaching journalism and mass communications would reach age 66 in the next decade.

To help bridge this gap, Boston University’s College of Communication offers continuing education classes to help its professors learn multimedia skills to share with their students. “We have unanimity among the faculty that it’s important that we’re able to provide that,” says Lou Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department. Adjunct professors—who often are still working at media companies—also provide a way to infuse the school with new skills quickly, he says.

Students also can teach new skills to each other and to their teachers. “I try to learn from my students,” says University of Georgia’s Becker, noting that students “live” social networking every day with Facebook and MySpace.  “The old model is, as the teacher, I’m the fountain of knowledge,” says Arizona State’s Callahan. “The new model is to foster an environment where you collaborate with each other and with me.”

Technical skills can give students an advantage when they look for work. For instance, Eagles of the Orlando Sentinel says he has noticed the best students “are ensuring they are having the opportunity to learn skills” by teaching themselves if their schools don’t offer this training. Those skills include Excel, Web publishing programs, video editing and audio editing. While this know-how makes job candidates more valuable, he cautions it’s not a substitute for fundamental knowledge. “They still have to know how to report and write,” he says.

Even though professors and editors talk regularly—whether through recruiters who visit campuses for job fairs or to talk with promising candidates, or working journalists who serve on advisory boards or as adjunct faculty members at universities—there needs to be more of a “systematic dialogue” between the two, Eagles says.

He suggests that j-school deans invite local or regional media representatives to their campuses for an annual meeting to ask “what’s going on in their industries and specifically what sort of training needs to be offered to meet those needs, understanding there’s a built-in lag time with universities.”

In March, Ball State University invited 10 editors from Indiana newspapers to talk about what the journalism school could do better. “We kept hearing, ‘Web, Web, Web,’ ” Watson says. As a result, the school is restructuring its news curriculum so print, online and television divisions will work more closely together. Although these changes will not reach the course catalog until 2010, faculty will incorporate some concepts along the way. The school will continue to talk with editors throughout the process, Watson says, predicting that communication between newspapers and professors will be deeper and more frequent as the industry continues to change.

Idea Laboratories
Science departments and business schools often act like research and development arms in helping their respective industries develop new ideas. That has not been as true for journalism schools.

“Our industry doesn’t have much in the way of industry skunk works,” which may be partly responsible for the industry’s woes, says University of Missouri’s Warhover. Universities also should be a place to “create best practices for our industry, not just for our students,” he says. J-schools “should be the place to try and fail, and try again.”

Several foundations and universities are working to make that happen.

In July, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced that they are spending more than $11 million over three years to expand News21, an online news incubator that will be housed at Arizona State University, deepen curricula at 11 universities and one research center, and continue funding a journalism education policy task force (see related story, p. 31).

In June, the Tow Foundation (www.towfoundation.org) pledged $5 million to Columbia University and $3 million to CUNY to develop centers for new media innovation. “We need to find new ways to interest [readers] and new financial model designs that will support investigative journalism and accurate reporting,” says Leonard Tow, who chairs the foundation and is a graduate of Brooklyn College in New York, which is part of the CUNY system. 

The CUNY grant will fund an “incubator” to foster ideas for new products and services in journalism, says CUNY’s Shepard. “We’re trying to be one more voice, one more place for experimentation and development,” he adds. Next month, it plans to hold a conference aimed at journalists, media executives and academics on new business models.

Additionally, the grant will provide support for the school’s entrepreneurial journalism course, led by Jeff Jarvis, who blogs about the media at www.BuzzMachine.com. The course brings in a jury of venture capitalists to judge students’ ideas for new products. The purpose of the class is for students to consider whether their product is sustainable as a business, Shepard says. With a grant from the McCormick Foundation (www.mccormicktribune.org), CUNY has awarded about $25,000 to four students to pursue their ideas; none has resulted yet in the launch of a product.

Two years ago, Arizona State University set up a New Media Innovation Lab where students from across disciplines, including journalism, business, design and computer engineering, work on research and development for Gannett to explore digital solutions, Callahan says. And this fall, American University is launching an Investigative Reporting Workshop, led by Charles Lewis, who founded the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org); the center's reporting projects have appeared in newspapers and other media outlets (“Helping Hands,” November 2007, p. 22).  The workshop will bring professional journalists to campus to brainstorm about new models to support investigative journalism and conduct investigative projects.

Where the innovation efforts at universities will lead is anyone’s guess. After all, the industry doesn’t have its future mapped out, either. But the hope is that j-schools, which don’t face the same time or financial pressures as newspapers, will produce solutions to help both in the future.

“If not now, when?” American University’s Cochran asks. “If not us, who?”