ASU professor: The key journalism skill of the future is deep knowledge

Bleacher Report NFL writer Michael Schottey passes along a Chronicle of Higher Education piece headlined To Prepare 21st-Century Journalists, Help Students Become Experts.

The piece, by G. Pascal Zachary, a professor at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is aimed at other journalism educators, but any “21st-century journalists” can benefit from its ideas. Zachary argues that journalism educators who are responding to changes in the media business are putting too much emphasis on teaching students how to use new digital tools. This has “become a new orthodoxy, a meek response to the radical changes in who journalists are and what they do.”

The truth is that good journalism depends on expertise that arises from subject-area mastery, deep engagement with rigorous disciplines, and interdisciplinary skills. As journalism schools embrace digital tools as a solution to threatened extinction, journalism consumed by the wider public is increasingly created by experts who reach mass audiences directly through TED talks, blogs, articles, and tweets, for example. Think of Paul Krugman, an economist now best known for his journalism on economics, public policy, and world affairs. Or Nate Silver, who also holds economics degrees and is among a handful of the hottest journalists on the planet.

Zachary writes that when he began his career in the 1970s, he “thrived on a kind of arbitrage. I went to City Hall and observed a meeting. I went to the police station and got a report. I acted as intermediary between a star athlete and his fans. The days of arbitrage journalism are long gone. Journalists instead need deep knowledge.” He concludes:

The creative destruction of journalism as an occupation remains in full swing. Much is uncertain, but this much is clear: In an era of pervasive digital networks that instantly deliver news with scant human help, the successful journalist will be, above all, a knowledge maker.

Food for thought, and it leads to an important question: What do you know?

Note: “Scant human help” refers to algorithm-generated journalism.