Journalism education must teach more than shiny new things

PHOTO BY MARKUS WINKLER “College journalism programs are failing to prepare students for the workforce.”“Journalism programs are decades behind.”“If you’re a student considering journalism, I’d skip that degree.”Well, ouch.In a written commentary that spurred a lot of debate in journalism circles a few months ago, the top editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com leveled these slams because, he said, journalism schools are not teaching students how to use artificial intelligence to help produce journalism. In fact, Chris Quinn claimed that J-schools are warning against the use of AI.I wrote in August 2023 about the ways that most newsrooms use, and decline to use, AI in their work. Since then – roughly the AI industry’s time equivalent of since dinosaurs lived – its prevalence in newsrooms has widened with new kinds of uses, including using AI to write full stories from reporters’ notes or from publicly available records and videos.* Quinn’s newsroom uses AI to write…