Professor to fellow journalists: We work in tech

Cindy Royal is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, and she had something provocative to say last week at Nieman Journalism Lab: “If you are a journalism educator or media professional, I have news for you,” she wrote: “We work in tech.”

She went on:

I know: That’s not exactly what you signed up for when you entered the profession 20, 10, or even five years ago. But things have changed. While some of the tenets of the profession we formerly knew as journalism have remained, workflows, business practices, participants, and competitors are all very different. Because we work in tech.

Internet and web technologies don’t just represent a new medium where print and multimedia can live in harmony. The ways we communicate both personally and professionally have been profoundly altered. Communication is technology, and technology is communication. That’s the true convergence.

Royal argues that there should be a “very strong” emphasis on the tech perspective in journalism education—and since we’re all journalism students, I think that’s worth all of us thinking about. She lays out 10 questions for journalism educators to ask themselves about their curriculum, with links to reading about each subject.

Examples: “Do you understand the history of computers, the Internet, and the web and how they relate to the current state of platforms?” and “Do you understand new business models created by platforms?”

The links provided with each question form a basic reading list on the idea that “We work in tech.” And if that’s not enough for you, Royal also links to a four-page course syllabus for Summer School for Journalism Professors, created by Amy Webb of Webbmedia Group and presented at the Journalism Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, last month.

Even those of us who are students, not professors, can benefit. There are no grades, but Webb offers plenty of motivation all the same: “Buy yourself a beer at the end of each week if you’ve completed all tasks and readings,” she writes. “Make yourself listen to Miley Cyrus if you don’t.”