Prof. Jay Rosen
We wrote last week about Jay Rosen’s Studio 20, an NYU course that teaches journalism in a fascinating new way. Shorthand: students need to know how to report in a multimedia way, and have to rethink their own careers. For my AR&D Media 2.0 INTEL newsletter this week, I interviewed Prof. Rosen by email. I’d like to thank him for taking the time to chat.
Q. Was there one reason why Studio 20 came about, or was it an evolution?
ROSEN: I was chair of the journalism program at NYU from 1999 to 2005. During that time I began to sense that the old model of “magazine,” “newspaper” and “broadcast” journalism tracks was going to crash because of what was happening with the Web and the economy of the news business. So I began looking around for a different master image. That led me to graduate programs in the arts, which are often based on a studio model. In architecture school or an MFA in painting, you take studio courses and everyone has projects. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the studio concept was rich enough to replace the boot camp metaphor and division by platform. But only if the projects had media partners to anchor them in the actual conditions out there today for editorial producers. So… that’s our approach: an “innovation studio,” working on projects with partners
Q: What is the ideal student?
ROSEN: The ideal student knows before he or she enrolls that the old employment path in the news business has been disrupted; that specializing in a single platform isn’t an especially smart thing to do; that many different kinds of skills are going to be helpful and it isn’t realistic to expect J-school to simply “give” them all to you, or even to know what all of them are. At the same time, the ideal student brings to Studio 20 a level of mastery in one or two of the skills our “cool projects” approach will require, which could mean video, audio, design, production, database, programming, writing and editing, CMS systems, project management, just to name a few. The way we put this is: “bring skills, share skills, learn new stuff.” Finally, the ideal student is super comfortable with the Web and with the more open conditions the online world has brought to journalism.
Q.What will a student coming out of the class understand that a typical J-student may not?
ROSEN: How to “think with” the Web as an interactive and multi-media platform. How to reckon with the entire puzzle of sustainability. How to incorporate the users into the journalism from the beginning. How to run projects that test possibilities and bring a big learning dividend. How to iterate. How to start your own thing if you don’t see it in the world but it should exist. How to be a less dependent creature or more of a brand yourself.
Tags: journalism
This entry was posted on November 5, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Change, New Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
I took this class Spring of ‘09 and it was the best, truly “real-world” journalism class I’ve ever taken. Instead of preparing for a newsroom that is changing faster than a semester can teach… we actually got to see what was happening NOW and receive new assignments as current events and ways of thinking advanced.