All quiet on campus?

There are all manner of kerfuffles across the entire media landscape as the year draws to an end. In Britain the ITV network is floundering, Channel Four is re-inventing itself in wondrous ways and the BBC is alarming the publishers of regional newspapers. The national broadsheets, whether re-sized or not, are blogging and podcasting as hard as they can in the hope of positioning themselves to carry in their digital incarnations the messages of advertisers who are booking less and less space in the print editions read by a diminishing and rapidly aging readership.

Across the pond mammoth newspaper chains are falling apart and reporters are being tossed out with the bathwater as a revolution bites. Television news is facing the changes as videojournalist soloists replace the traditional trios and quartets. TomKat is deemed a ‘breaking news’ story. Al Jazeera in English is to be, for as long as possible, totally ignored.

Citizen journalism, user generated content, is as scary for the fourth estate as Napster was for the music industry.

Comparatively few see the way ahead as a challenge to be welcomed with open arms. Jeff Jarvis and others point out the potential up-side awaiting those who embrace the new, who are bold enough to re-think their roles as media professionals. They are still outnumbered by the legions who would prefer very much to continue as if nothing had changed, who deny that re-writing wire stories to include a tenuous local angle is an ignoble task, who decry the inaccuracy and blatant advocacy which marks much of the blogosphere, who regard Wikipedia with suspicion.

In the meantime, of course, socially networked cyberspace is doing just fine, thank you very much, whether in its textual, audiovisual or virtual metaversal manifestations.

But there exists a space between these two worlds – the one populated by the established but increasingly perplexed media professionals, the other consisting of their formerly passive but increasingly interactive audience – which needs to be considered. There are thousands of young people for whom it is not enough merely to post clips to YouTube or update their MySpace pages; their ambition is to be the next generation of media professionals.

Journalism, Communications Arts, Film and Television Production and Media Studies programs are offered by countless schools and colleges in countries across the globe. The appropriate orientation, education and practical training of students is a subject at least as important as persuading incumbent professionals to see the winds of change as a balmy breeze rather than an devastating hurricane. Possibly more important.

How many institutions have decided that Media Studies, Journalism and the various audiovisual craft specializations cannot be, must not be, in this day and age segregated into separate faculties?

But how many instructors are psychologically prepared to take a holistic approach to the media, since most will have been hired to teach based on their specifically compartmentalized expertises?

Have journalism instructors, presumably earlier in their careers themselves working reporters or editors, brought to academe the complacency of the pre-millennial newsroom? One must hope that they are out-jarvissing Jarvis.

Are the mentors training future television producers still sending out four-man student crews and protesting that only Digital Beta delivers true broadcast quality? Are they still preaching hardware rather than software? One prays that they insist that each in their class has his or her own image capture device and an editing application on a laptop.

How many of the teachers of media have jettisoned their own baggage of out-dated professional assumptions, questioned their past professional experience, evaluated anew the skill-sets tomorrow’s media demand and are able to lead and inspire their students to boldly go… Where?

An added complication; training fully rounded specialists for professions which are in the process of re-defining their very nature and mission in a context of radical discontinuous change is inevitably going to be tricky.

There is the possibility that, when it comes to the new ways of making and distributing media, in many ways the students are more likely to ‘get it’ than their teachers. It is the students who will find the availability of unlimited multiple video layers on a time-line totally obvious and self-evident; it is to be feared that often their tutor will have settled for the basic non-linear editing functionality.

It may even be the students themselves who could best exploit the potential that broadband offers. Sigma Delta Chi has almost a century of history as a professional fraternity open to student journalists in the United States. Is there SDC-TV on the horizon?

There is National Student Television Association in the United Kingdom. Could there be a NASTA Network, (with student-created content pooled on a single site available for viewing on demand) in the making?

On the one hand, the old media, CNN and Senator Stevens and his series of tubes. On the other, the trailblazers like Jarvis, Michael Rosenblum and Al Gore’s Current TV.

Between the two are the media educators and their students. From the latter, perhaps, great things can be expected. Cue Pink Floyd. Audio up… and out.

“Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone!”