Is a journalism education still useful?

Yes. Very useful.

Carrie Hoover asked a group of grads “is a journalism-centric education is still useful in today’s job market?” for a piece she’s doing for the Society for News Design Denver Conference. Here’s what I wrote back, the bottom bit is the most interesting.

I am grateful for every second of my journalism experience and opportunity. I tell people that SND raised me as a professional. There is no professional community that cares for students like this one does.

Journalism school has been an essential part of my growth and career development. I studied at Indiana University, in Bloomington. I had an opportunity to learn about working on deadlines, in teams, dealing with plagiarism, accuracy, content, design and other critical thinking skills. Because I studied journalism, I had an opportunity to start a magazine that won many awards while a student. Many people don’t get to be entrepreneurs any time in their life!

My journalism experience took me to London for an internship and then onto a job at the Indianapolis Star. But, those things are all the traditional path. Now for the good stuff.

I’m studying Human-Computer Interaction design at IU. With this degree I blend the what I’ve learned about people, technology and design. This summer I worked at RockMelt, a startup in Silicon Valley which is backed by one of industry’s most recognized investors.

I have no doubt that my journalism experience helped me get this opportunity. J-school and Poynter taught me to talk to people, but more importantly how to listen. When I am doing usability studies or interviewing people in our demographic, I have a better sense of what kinds of questions to ask and simply, I now know, just to shut up and let people talk.

After I do an interview or a study I go over the session with my team and do a writeup. I need to tell a story and I need to do it quickly. Why? Because we are a small, committed team with a never ending list of things to do, just like in news. I can handle deadlines, pressure and have learned to balance many projects at once that require real deliverables.

When I’m designing product wireframes, building the behaviors and describing the experience, I cannot write a long winded essay for our developers. I need to write concise but descriptive lines of text that are clear and succinct. We take these skills we have for granted.

On a higher level, journalism school prepared me to be a critical thinker and a hard worker. There is a lot left to be desired in J-Schools when it comes to designing classes for the future. It’s essential to teach the foundations of journalism but students need to be taught about the future, not the past.

Newspapers, radio and cable television should be taught in media history classes. Students should be taught to produce for and think about Mobile apps, Google and Apple TV, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Environments, Chat clients, Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers, GPS devices, etc. The list goes on and on. If the medium is the message, it’s time to open our eyes to all the new mediums.

We should have invented Twitter*. We should have invented RSS feeds. We should have invented Craigslist and Groupon and Youtube and the iPad and Google Search and Yelp. It’s okay to hire developers. It’s okay to take a risk. If people inside the news industry don’t change the model, people outside will.