Brendan R. Watson

The most valuable journalistic experience I had is leading Student Life, the student newspaper at Washington University. Having complete responsibility for the entire production process taught me more skills and strategies that have come in handy in my career as a multimedia journalist than studying online journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism, or even working in a multimedia newsroom. I also learned a lot about communication, leadership and management.

That said, the structure of many student newspapers hurts the quality of journalism education on those campuses. The fact that most student newspapers are independent from the university means they are not integrated into the curriculum. Its very difficult to have a innovative curriculum. It simply takes too long to propose new courses and have them approved. Thus, innovation must occur through extracurricular activities, including student newspapers, which can be a significant lab for experimenting with new forms of reporting and news delivery.

But there is very little or no coordination between the journalism curriculum and student newspapers — usually the most significant media outlet on a campus — because of their independence from the university. Journalism schools (and their students) are missing out on significant teaching opportunities. These teaching opportunities need to include the type of skills and management experience I mentioned above, preserving the bulk of student leadership. But innovation should also not be completely dependent on the uneven leadership students to provide during their brief tenures. Student media boards provide some leadership, but when busy professionals parachute in for only one, maybe two, meetings a year they provide often less consistent leadership than student editors.

Many student newspapers are starting to grapple with similar problems as those that inflict the profession as a whole. More involvement of journalism programs in college newspapers would help provide longer-term strategies to remain viable as the advertising landscape and reader habits change, as well as to create an innovative lab for experimentation that is absent in most curriculums (and in the students, who surprisingly cling to very conservative approaches). Students need to be prodded to experiment. Journalism programs need an outlet to teach experimentation. Separated, both the quality of the journalism curriculum and the student newspaper suffer.