If you want change, show the corporate puppetmasters that there is a profit to be increased, or a loss to be stemmed, and you’ll find staunch support… but not for the reasons you hold dear, in fact, your goal can only be accomplished by selling out your underlying principles. Ironic, life is.

Your points are true of nearly every non-specialized (medicine) profession,
and one might make the same argument for
medicine… the age old argument about the importance of a notebook versus a textbook.

The problem is that those in charge come from the old system… life everywhere in life, as you grow up you will find. It’s called life. Get used to it. You will, anyway.

It’s great to take your youthful lack of experience and call it insight, but the reality is that life was moving along just fine without you, and will when you’re gone. Work on that, and change yourself… the world will follow if you are right. Perhaps.

Good luck! Just don’t get frustrated, keep your mind open to the next gen that is going to call your thinking antiquated and obstructionist, as surely as you live that long. Cheers!

In the move to become accredited and officially stamped by “X” prestigious university, schools forgot that journalism isn’t something you just learn in the classroom or in the library–I would argue that 70 percent of the craft is learned on the job (or internship). And very few schools have their curriculum based around that experience.
It’s a never ending cycle of unnecessary education. Just as j-school profs can’t get a job with out at least a masters, most journalists can’t get a job without a j-school degree (and as much as some editors say otherwise, they tend to hire j-school grads and wait for others with biz or science degrees to prove themselves).

The j-school degree is the safe bet.

The j-school prof with a PhD and elbow patches is the safe bet.

The journalism industry has coasted on safe bets and now they’re finding that system isn’t working.

It’s an exciting time to be in the media. Everything’s getting flipped upside down. Upstart bloggers with no j-ed. are scooping the big dogs (TechCrunch.com), programmers with no j-school experience are pooling diverse photo resources that the big media is drooling over (Flickr.com), automated and public-driven news sites blossoming out of no where (Digg, Google News) and let’s not even get into the business side of how newspapers are getting owned.

I agree 100 percent with the second part of that. And I agree with you that many of the people teaching in j-schools today are very out of touch with how newsrooms work now — even if they spent 20 years in a newsroom in their past life.

But the first part of what Joe wrote (and some of what you wrote, Will) ignores the reality in today’s universities. It used to be that guys with just a bachelor’s degree — heck, even some guys with no college degree at all — could get a gig teaching journalism in an actual university (not a mere community college). But those days are gone.

A huge number of factors boil down to one thing: You must have a master’s degree to teach journalism in a university today, and increasingly, you must have a Ph.D. to be considered for the job. This is a university-wide requirement, and there’s a multitude of reasons for it — not all good, but not all bad either.

Another piece of this puzzle is in the newsrooms. People from newsrooms like to complain and tell the professors what they ought to do and how they ought to teach. But I would respectfully submit that this is akin to a bunch of rich people waltzing into a rural village and saying, “You people really ought to get a source of clean drinking water. You have diseases because you are drinking this foul stuff.”

There are constraints and practices in universities with which the working journalists are not familiar. What it looks like from outside (we choose to drink this dirty water) is not the reality (we have no tools or materials to make pumps to bring clean water up out of the ground). Those outsiders could make a difference if they chose to work with the villagers.

So, Will, I know you didn’t mean to trash all journalism professors — many of whom have crushing workloads and little or no administrative support and lower pay than you might imagine — but it did sound that way. And that’s not fair.

Yea, that assessment may have been a bit extreme, but the way many j-schools are set up right now just isn’t working and continues to perpetuate the ‘old school’ mentality.

I don’t have a perfect solution but many schools have relationships with news organizations and I haven’t found one that really works that relationship perfectly. Scripps / OU does a good job from what I can see.

At Medill, there was a handful of the old school, kind of ‘lifetime’ people but that base was augmented by a rotating,working professionals who assisted with courses as their schedules allowed. It was kind of a 40/60 split old school to working professionals.

It made the experience exponentially richer for learning the real world expectations and situations students face. (Also, Medill has a very heavy practical practicum. Most things you do there are for publication or research working with a real company facing a real world problem … like the “Your Mom” teen publication I worked on for Lee Enterprises.)

It also opens the students up to much more opportunities for networking, jobs and freelancing.

The bottom line is there’s a great, great chasm between the way newspapers operate and do journalism and the way schools teach journalism. It’s time for media organizations and schools to collaborate and save the evolving craft of journalism.