J-school cirriculum

The question Amy Gahran posed: Should j-schools be partnering more closely with other academic departments in order to impart to students a more current and relevant skill set and mindset? If so, what are the obstacles to that cooperation, and how can they be overcome?

I would LOVE for our journalism department to work with other academic departments. It would very cool if we could have a class in which we wrote specifically for a topic that different departments focus on. If I had my way, I would write about animals and anything associated with the topic of animals for each story I had to write throughout my entire four years here. So if the Journalism department worked with the Animal Science department, I would have been able to take a class in which I learned more in depth information about animal sciences so I could be a better writer in that field. Same goes for sports lovers (kinesiology) or political mavericks (political science).

To have a class like that would be fantastic for people who wanted to be copy editors. We only have two copy editing classes in the whole journalism curriculum: this one and Magazine editing. And this teaches us very basic editing, so it would be very beneficial if we were able to take a class to learn about the topic we are interested in copy editing for. For example, by learning the veterinary lingo or more information about animals in general, I'd be able to edit stories about it and understand the topic and the "fancy" words.

One of the people whom left a comment said:

"With all due respect, the younger folk aren't really as tech savvy as some assume. Yes, they know email, Facebook, Youtube, IM and Limewire. But... With all due respect, the younger folk aren't really as tech savvy as some assume. Yes, they know email, Facebook, Youtube, IM and Limewire. But most of them don't know, or seem to care, about blogging, twitter, alternative online media, audio and video storytelling, why links matter, etc."

I do agree with him that many of us really don't know a whole lot about the Internet past the normal college websites. But he gives this as a reason that we don't need the classes, where I think this is THE reason we need classes about computer science and business. I know NOTHING about that kind of stuff and if the department required that I took a class like that, I would only be the better for it.

The biggest obstacle is going to be money, like everyone else said. Also, willingness from professors to spend a lot of extra time trying to start the program. If universities could gain the money needed and the passion from their professors for this type of project, I think the improvements they would see in their graduating students would be immense. I know it will never happen in my time here, but we already see it slowly with the online class and the News-Gazette class. Even this class has introduced me to a new medium I've never used: blogging!