Abstract

This study examines the perceptions that veteran digital journalists working at news organizations, the people who traditionally have hiring power, hold concerning how new entrants into the news industry are being prepared by journalism programs. Using in-depth interviews with 29 full-time digital journalists (journalists who only publish online), this study finds that while veterans said educators are doing a good job teaching technology, there is too much focus on it to the detriment of traditional journalism skills. These findings are then discussed through the lens of the theory of disruptive innovation.

In 1998, after a call to action from the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank and school that often partners with college journalism programs, created something it christened the Pyramid of Competence. The idea behind the project revolved around identifying the skills journalists needed and journalism students should be taught. And, in the pyramid, “the cornerstones were news judgment and reporting” (Clark, 2014). The journalism industry of the 2010s looks nothing like the one Poynter examined then. And in 2014, the institute responded by updating the pyramid with terms such as “curation,’ ‘aggregation,’ and ‘data visualization,’ language that was not part of journalism study when the pyramid was first created” (Clark, 2014). While the new pyramid also contains many of the journalism cornerstones that comprised the original, the focus on current industry buzzwords is unmistakable. And in the early part of this decade, industry insiders such as the Knight Foundation pressured the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, the main accreditor of journalism programs nationwide, to better incorporate technology into curricula (Newton, 2012).