Words of Wisdom From Ithaca College's Dean Lynch

You may have already absorbed Dianne Lynch's article in last fall's Nieman Reports Teaching Journalism issue, titled "Incubating Innovation at Journalism Schools." Below is an excerpt from that piece that is a refreshing take on the challenges we face. ELW

"(W)e need to stop teaching software (except, perhaps, to each other). Our students come to us knowing it, or knowing they can learn it when they need to. We need to stop conflating the newspaper industry with journalism itself. When we see yet another study about how kids aren't reading daily newspapers, we should worry less about the democracy and more about the insularity of our research frame: Journalism is alive and well on digg.com, YouTube, Crooksandliars.com, and The Smoking Gun.com. And when our students challenge our authority and fact check our proclamations during class, we need to stop scrambling for classroom management techniques and start addressing the widening gap between their assumptions about knowledge production and our own."

Nieman's "Teaching Journalism" issue here.