A new study in Journalism indicates that undergraduate journalism training needs to better prepare students for digital newsroom cultures. Steen Steensen's study examines how journalism students learn through practice while on internships in newsrooms and highlights tensions between legacy and digital newsroom cultures in professional practice and formal education. The study draws on sixteen interviews and thirty internship reports from Norwegian journalism students.
Contemporary newsrooms are marked by "material messiness" in which "people move around, construction workers and tech people come and go and new professional groups, such as programmers and social media curators, become integrated in the work flow and hence the newsroom as a physical space." One major finding indicates that student journalists struggle to learn when asked to negotiate this fluid cross media environment.
Steensen characterises the newsroom experiences of the student journalists in terms of "nomads" and "settlers". The differences between these two groups proved vital to the students’ learning experience and the ways in which they engaged with newsroom culture and professional knowledge.
The settlers, that is, those who had their own workstation from the very beginning and, therefore, found their place in the newsroom with relative ease, quickly felt as if they were part of the newsroom and found it easy to get the help they needed in order to enhance their learning experience. ... To be able to ask people for help was important for all the students in order for them to master everything from software applications to the newsroom culture, for example, what kind of stories were considered good or bad, how to find the right story ideas to work with and how the local culture of communication was. The settlers had the opportunity to quickly get to know the people they sat next to and to reach out for their help, which made their process of assimilation fast and easy. They quickly got a sense of belonging. The nomads, however – that is, those who had to move around – found it much harder to reach the same level of both cultural and practical understanding of the newsroom practices.
However, the author concludes that "students are in the long run probably better equipped if they manage to adapt to a more nomadic way of work life, in which newsrooms could ‘pop up’ everywhere". Consequently, he suggests that journalism schools "should take into account the fluidity and material messiness of contemporary newsrooms when preparing students not only for periods of internships but also for their post-graduate efforts to enter the profession."
This implies that j-schools need to have knowledge about and sensibility for the various kinds of materialities that play a role in the newsroom, especially related to the magnitude and variability of software applications in use, how newsrooms are constantly reconstructed as physical spaces, how the professional culture changes due to the entry of new professional groups into the newsroom and how new media and new tools affect genre development.
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