Water found to be wet

If blog­ging is to replace jour­nal­ism, it has to do a bet­ter job than cur­rent jour­nal­ists. Even jour­nal­ists are now decry­ing the low qual­ity of report­ing. Of note: “CEOs describe busi­ness jour­nal­ists as lack­ing a basic under­stand­ing of how busi­nesses oper­ate.” Now that’s pretty scary. If you cover some­thing, shouldn’t you at least under­stand its basics?

The main prob­lem here is the way jour­nal­ists are trained (and, as a jour­nal­ism grad­u­ate, I went through it): we learn to gather facts and write quickly and effi­ciently (I know, I know, some peo­ple are going to com­plain about how wordy I’ve been get­ting lately) but most J-school stu­dents do not learn any­thing else. What should hap­pen is that jour­nal­ism schools should require that its stu­dent also have another major so they would develop field exper­tise in some­thing else than just gath­er­ing facts and writ­ing on deadline.