Rethinking Journalism Education 2.0

Journalism educators from around California will gather for an all-day working summit, Rethinking Journalism Education 2.0: Preparing Journalists for the 21st Century, sponsored by California Journalism Education Coalition and the California Newspaper Publishers Association and hosted by the San Francisco State University Journalism Department.

As we all know, the field of journalism is changing dramatically. Newspaper readership is declining, while the Internet is exploding. New technologies and new narrative techniques, such as blogging, podcasting and multimedia storytelling, are changing the way journalists do their jobs – and changing the expectations employers have for journalism graduates.

As journalism educators, we need to rethink what and how we teach our students to prepare them for this rapidly evolving media environment.

This gathering will build on work done at two previous events. In February 2006, nearly 70 journalism educators from the California State University system and the Journalism Association of Community Colleges met in Morro Bay for a two-day summit on Rethinking Journalism Education. In May 2007, half a dozen journalism educators met with 15 leading industry professionals at the Orange County Register for a daylong conversation on how to prepare students for media jobs. The group came up with a list of skills and competencies employers want to see from journalism graduates today.

The goal of the coming meeting is to advance the work done at these previous events to help journalism educators come up with practical ideas you can take back to your classrooms.

Specific details:
When: November 9, 2007, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: San Francisco State University

Registration: Registration is free but spaces are limited. Please reserve by filling out this form.

We are planning a session at the meeting where educators will present curricular innovations. If you are doing something new – a classroom exercise, a class assignment or a departmentwide change that goes along with the Preparing Journalists for the 21st Century theme and you’d like to share it in a 15-minute presentation, please email a brief description to us at rethinkingjed@gmail.com.