What should a Journalism MA for the 21st century look like?

Snag cloud: information is replacing reporting in online news, but there are opportunities for those who can shape and innovate journalism

WHEN I began teaching a new MA in Online Journalism in September last year, I was handed a rare opportunity to radically reconsider what a journalism education should be, and I grabbed it.

As I blogged at the time, there were some key ideas I wanted to underpin the course: in particular, experimentation, enterprise, and community. In an industry in flux, learning a craft that’s changing every day, flexibility would be key to students’ learning. Not just in the way they ran a news operation, but also in their approach to the business side of journalism.

The community focus was part of this too. It seems obvious to me that any online journalism operation must draw strength from a community, whether it is one that is geographical or from a community of interest. And not just for editorial reasons but commercial ones, too. Our former audience are now our distributors, and our co-workers.

Community was so important that I decided it would be the focus of the very first class. I asked students to look at what communities their news operation might serve, and which members of that community they might work with – and to let that inform their decision on what to do next.

Building from that community, in further weeks I covered the organisation of a virtual newsroom, and practices ranging from mobile journalism and liveblogging to audio, photos and mapping, and strategies surrounding what is insultingly called ‘user generated content’ – from how to attract it, to the ethics of exploring it.

But these sessions were not solely about me sharing my knowledge. I took what I felt was a significant decision to host sessions in a city centre coffee house, partly to take us out of the classroom environment and into something more conversational, where students felt more comfortable sharing their own experiences. We had people in the group with fantastic experience crossing radio and TV journalism, print and magazines, web design and content, and one student who had launched her own social networking platform. This ‘peer-to-peer learning’ would be much more productive than any emphasis on lectures alone – and I know that it continued outside of the scheduled class.

In addition, the coffee house was right next to Birmingham New Street, – meaning that visitors could come from other cities to take part in the conversations. Our guests included The Times‘ Joanna Geary, The Guardian‘s Sarah Hartley, Alison Gow from the Liverpool Post and Echo, The Telegraph‘s Kate Day, and Zach Beauvais from semantic web company Talis.

I also wanted to use the venue to reach out to Birmingham’s vibrant social media scene. In one marathon session we were joined by a range of bloggers and former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves as we talked for four hours about the legal situation surrounding content online. It’s perhaps slightly scary that the resulting online presentation now features on the BBC College of Journalism’s page on media law.

Aside from these online journalism sessions, students also studied a separate Enterprise module that focused on skills such as sources of funding, writing business plans, and pitching. This clearly had an effect, as most of the students took their ideas further after they completed the module. And in the second semester it was clear that most of the students were more interested in redefining what a journalist did than in joining a mainstream media organisation, as they moved into the Production Laboratory, they had to work with a professional client to put together an online project. Their clients ranged from newspapers and social media companies to community groups, arts organisations, bands and music promoters. Not, by any means, the usual suspects.

At the same time they studied multimedia journalism, seeking to become specialists in audio, video, Flash or data journalism. Encouragingly, data proved to have the widest appeal, with students using it to scrutinise the forthcoming legacy of the Olympics, for example, to investigate crowd problems at Glastonbury, or to map cycling collisions.

When I designed the MA, I was clear that at this level that students should not only be learning about their field, but seeking to anticipate what it would become – and to shape it. Yet I didn’t expect the class to be as innovative and entrepreneurial as it has been. Week after week, students astonish me with their ambition and achievements. And quite often, the most interesting things they do are the things that fail, but “fail forward”.

Some eight months after they started, over half of the students already have jobs in related areas. Many of them have established such a reputation that the jobs are finding them. In a decentralised, bottom-up world, that’s perhaps appropriate. Perhaps it’s how careers will increasingly develop. Either way, I’ll be proud to have known this group, and look forward to learning from them in turn as they take the craft of journalism into a new era.