Robert Steiner: In Toronto, we’re dumping the j-school model to produce a new kind of reporter
October 16/2012
Students are back at journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Here Robert Steiner, director of the Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, talks about the different model that he’s trying — turning experts into journalists rather than journalists into experts.
In its series of pieces on journalism education, the Nieman Journalism Lab raised two of three ideas that could really change the field. The first, from Len Downie: Journalism schools should work more like teaching hospitals. The second, from CNN Digital’s Meredith Artley, is that specialists in certain beats are getting hard to find.
But the breakthrough comes in melding those two ideas to a third: The world now belongs to freelancers.
With that, you have a new kind of journalism education now in its first month at the University of Toronto.