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Nov 11 / King Kaufman

NYU professor Jay Rosen’s roadmap for understanding the media landscape

Want a roadmap to understanding the rapidly changing world of journalism and media? You might want to read Jay Rosen’s post at his PressThink site: How to be literate in what’s changing in journalism.

Rosen is an NYU journalism professor and one of the sharpest media critics in the U.S. The list consists of “the main currents and trends” that he expects students in his “digital thinking” class to master by the end of the term.

He clarifies in the comments that the list is not about the skills one needs to have to land good jobs in the ever-changing media:

That’s worth doing. But that’s not what I am doing here.

The focus is not on “skills” but on “forces.”

I am starting in a different place: what’s changing in journalism, and what is forcing change by looming ever larger in the calculations of those trying to build a 21st century news operation?

I want my students to understand those things, first.

The concepts range from social media and the rapid shift to mobile devices to thinking of news as a product or service to “robot journalism” to … well, that ranging from X to Y to Z phrasing never works out for me because I never know if, in this case, “creating an agile culture in newsrooms” is within the range of “the personal franchise model in news” and “analytics in news production” or outside of it.

But the point is, it’s a wide-ranging list, and Rosen helpfully provides links for more reading on each concept. Worth your time.