What to teach future journalists?

Students of the Institute of Journalism and Communication (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU Hanoi) during a practical lesson in television - Photo: HL

Because schools are training "citizen journalists" to become "professional journalists."

Never forget the exam

I will never forget the final exam for my master’s degree in international journalism in 2007. The test maker and journalism instructor, Peter Eng, was working for the Associated Press at the time. The final exam was about 10 pages long, with multiple choice and open-ended questions. It was really hard to pass!

Peter warned us at the beginning of the course that it would be a demanding one. The test was about how to write a newspaper article, but we had to memorize a lot of principles about what constitutes news, how to think about the topic, and many facts about behavior, even considering the impact on the public. Many of the lessons from the test stayed with us in our teaching, research, and later speeches and talks.

Many journalists and journalism educators consider the past decades to be the height of professional journalism because it was an era of abundant resources supporting powerful news organizations and newsrooms. Journalists and newsrooms had a near monopoly on the daily news cycle.

When everyone can call themselves a "citizen journalist" or "editor-in-chief" of their own page, and the logos of Facebook and Google become familiar to more than half of the global population, the need to read news from mass media has cooled down.

Alan Rusbridger, who has been editor-in-chief of the prestigious newspaper The Guardian for 20 years, recently warned: "For the first time in modern history, we are facing the prospect of what society would be like without reliable news."

Adapt to change

Public attention and debate has shifted to digital media. Young people born after 1995, often labelled as “Digital Natives”, “Instantly Online Age Group”, “Dotcom Children”, have spent a long childhood on social media and with access to electronic devices.

Grasping technology no longer takes as much time as entering university as it used to.

A lecturer at Boston University (USA) was talking to a colleague about how to teach journalism. He emphasized that it is not new technologies but traditional values ​​in reporting that make a person a good journalist, helping to elevate their work above mediocrity.

Teaching a set of skills that will be obsolete in five years is no longer the priority in journalism schools, but rather building a way of thinking and teaching yourself over the long term.

Today, Donald Trump’s Twitter account has nearly 75 million followers and the New York Times has about 4 million paying readers. These two worlds still exist side by side.

It just goes to show that as long as there is a public, the medium will always exist and journalists will always have a responsibility to their public. Carl Bernstein once said: "Good journalism should challenge people, not just entertain them." Social media is and will do the latter better.

Technology may grow up with us, but perhaps professional journalism thinking still needs to "start" in school and be honed in press agencies.

My exam 13 years ago touched on the ethics and responsibilities of journalists, regardless of the medium or platform; the ability to verify information, regardless of the era; and sensitivity to information, regardless of the historical timeline.

According to Tuoi Tre online