Rethinking J-School
When I went to journalism school, journalism education was a fairly straightforward thing that emphasized the tools, techniques and historical and legal aspects of the craft of journalism. Most j-schools are still that way. Boston University Chancellor John Silber thinks that is not enough, and that journalism students should also get a grounding in an academic discipline such as science, economics, politics or literature, reports the Boston Globe. I think Silber is right.

In a spiraling crisis within Boston University's popular College of Communication, the dean and a department head have been pushed out, and the college's associate dean has resigned, according to numerous sources in the college.

The turmoil stems from a rift between the college's faculty and BU administrators over whether the school should be revamped to give more emphasis to liberal arts and less to professional studies. [Chancellor John Silber] Silber, who has been acting as president since July, said he feels strongly that communications students need to be better grounded in academic disciplines such as science, economics, politics, and literature. ''I don't know any journalist who's competent simply by doing a layout on the front page,'' Silber said. ''The good journalists are the journalists that know something and are competent in the subject.''

The tension about the communication school's mission is reflected at journalism schools across the country, which are struggling over whether they should give more weight to broader intellectual study or practical training. Most notably, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger has called for reshaping Columbia's journalism school to cover a broader array of academic subjects...

''There is a serious intellectual question about whether journalism schools can actually do the job they are supposed to do,'' said [BU journalism professor Keith] Botsford. The BU College of Communication ''has been in trouble for quite some time,'' he added. ''It is top-heavy with people who may not be in touch with the real world.''

I got a good journalism education, which prepared me to do basic journalism covering simple stories like fires and wrecks, or the local school board meetings. But in 1990 I took a job with Nashville Business Journal, a specialized niche publication all about business and written for business-savvy readers. I had taken zero business courses in college, so I had to learn about business on the fly. Lucky for me I enjoyed business and had a quick learning curve, and over the years I've covered business stories in healthcare, real estate, technology, economic development, corporate finance, small business, manufacturing, transportation, and other niches and managed to do so accurately and in depth.

But it would have been better - for me, my readers and my employer - if along with learning the craft of journalism I'd also been schooled in the basics of business. Rather than learning about business from my sources and story subjects and picking it knowledge as I could from various national business publications, I could have asked questions, researched, and written from an independent base of knowledge, bringing greater depth and understanding to the final product.

As journalism increasingly moves away from the one-size-fits-all approach of a typical daily newspaper to a myriad of niche publications for specific interests, and as the world that journalists cover becomes increasingly complex, j-schools ought to reflect that reality by combining journalism courses with some sort of specialization. We don't need more general-assignment journalists - most of that basic news "content" will soon be generated by independent web publishers, bloggers and citizens with digital cameras anyway. We DO need journalists who understand a particular topic in-depth - whether it be political science, the environment, economics, sociology, corporate finance, law or etc.

A university with a law school and a journalism school, for example, ought to turn out some journalism graduates with a foundation of expertise in law, all the better to cover legal issues and the courts. A university with a medical school and a j-school ought to produce some j-school graduates ready to cover medical matters with authority. A univesity with a journalism program and a high-quality College of Business ought to produce journalists who could go to work for Forbes or Fortune or the Wall Street Journal on day one. And so on. Yet today few schools offer such an integrated approach to journalism education.

More should.