This is probably my favorite week of the year, because it’s the week I start teaching the Vox magazine staff class, and also overseeing the Vox reporting section in the Missourian reporting class. This is the second summer in a row I’ve done this, and it’s been my favorite J-school experience thus far.
One of the things that I struggle with, though, is how to teach my students what they need to know in the new digital economy. The magazine sequence has thankfully been a few years behind the print death spiral that’s affecting the newspaper industry. And many magazine companies, while struggling with drops in advertising revenue, also aren’t as over-leveraged as big newspaper companies are. Also, magazines tend to have more niche focuses that (theoretically) might insulate them from some of the trouble that comes from attempting to be a mass medium in an era of personalization. Regardless, though, my students are graduating with very traditional skills for jobs that may or may not be around for much longer.
One of the ways I’m trying to ameliorate that is by having a heavy emphasis on social media in this particular class. My reading list is pretty full of items I’ve found from around the Web, including a lot of stuff that’s been written by Mizzou friends or alums. In addition, as before, my students will have to generate a lot of online content — once every other week, each department needs to have an online exclusive of some sort that’s not just another story. The fact that the print edition is only 16 pages each week for the summer means that the online content helps a lot.
On a related note, I’m fascinated with Jane Singer’s model for what journalism education and journalism will look like in the future. What she describes — a model where journalists move from fledglings to experienced writers – is a slightly longer version of what already happens here at Mizzou. The caveat, of course, is that we only get our students for two years, and she’s talking about a model that seems as though it would take at least 5-10 years to finish. But the newsroom apprenticeship is exactly what we do at Vox and the Missourian — and KOMU and KBIA, of course.
Something else that’s interesting about Jane’s model is that it sounds an awful lot like what magazine editors do. One of the drawbacks of our newspaper curriculum, IMO, is that it still divides people into copy editors, designers, reporters, etc. Our top students — and top people in those jobs — generally realize that a designer, for example, has as much responsibility for creating content as a reporter or editor does. But too often, we send out people who think their title defines their entire set of responsibilities. My mag editors, on the other hand, are by definition responsible for everything on their page or in their department, and fit Singer’s model much better.
One minor criticism of her assumptions, though, is the idea that the Web site becomes the repository for all content. I don’t have a problem with the idea that media organizations need to be web-first, or even that the Web CMS can serve as the default story creation spot. But saying the Web curates all content leaves out things like HTML newsletters, digital newsbooks, mobile-device-specific apps, etc.
Like I said, that’s a very minor criticism. What do you think of her post? Any tips for what magazine students need to learn now?
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