Rebecca MacKinnon says that journalism schools need to teach students to be more entrepreneurial. I agree that that’s why I added an entrepreneurial course that I will teach to the curriculum of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism (you won’t find it online; it’s new).
The idea is that students need to create a new journalistic product. These could be businesses the students start when they graduate (and because they may have the next Google in mind, this will be the one course I won’t webcast) or a product they could start in an existing media company (because they are all woefully short on R&D) or even a charitable endeavor (but even in this case, they need to show why people would give money to make it work).
Says Rebecca:
American journalism is in crisis. What a wonderful opportunity we now have to rethink the whole industry. The question is: Even if journalism schools do train the future’s journalists to innovate and think outside the box, will today’s news organizations be prepared or willing to take advantage of their fresh ideas?
I find it pleasantly ironic that while some in journalism wish it weren’t a business, others want to train journalists to be better at business. Count me in the second camp and see my other posts on the topic today.
