Anyone who’s been to j-school remembers the initial jitters — and the bundle of nerves — that came with heading out on assignments and to beats unknown in those dizzying first months.

Journalism schools have generally been good at steadying those nerves, giving students the confidence to explore new neighborhoods and challenging issues, and to ask tough questions. Throw in some sharpened writing skills and storytelling techniques, and we walked out with that traditional toolkit ready to go in the old media world.

But in a wired age, where knowledge on all topics is accumulating and proliferating, a new kind of fear should be persistent for journalists: Not knowing what you’re talking about. Or put more practically, not doing your research. There is little excuse these days for being uninformed and caught unaware. Expectations are being raised all around us.

“Looming in the background is this issue of rising knowledge, even as schools struggle to figure out how to embed deeper research content into their classrooms.”

Scholar-bloggers (and a legion of wonky twittizens) are now out in force. Statistics and data can be quickly located and brought to bear on most topics. Government agencies are creating research-oriented apps and APIs and uploading data sets fairly regularly. Unlike a decade ago — when much of the world’s deepest knowledge sat on dusty library shelves — targeted search engines and databases such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, PubMed, and the Social Science Research Network now make access to scholarship easy. One-fifth of all scholarship is “open access” (translation: no paywalls) and that trend is accelerating, according to the Peter Suber, director of Harvard’s Open Access Project.

There’s peril in not capitalizing on this flood of knowledge.

Any smart group of readers will call you out on ignorance in the comment thread (or just deploy the #clueless hashtag) and then float away forever to other sites. At stake for journalists is this: having enough credibility with one’s audience and being competent enough to convene readers/viewers who now have an overabundance of choices and alternatives. Otherwise, journalism loses its hard-won capacity to focus attention and define the contours of the public interest. In an overcrowded marketplace, it’s ultimately about turning out the highest-value work on a given news topic.

With the democratization of knowledge accelerating online, the bar is higher for young journalists. Outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others, with their suites of specialized blogs, are already reflecting as much.

At the same time, the great anxiety for many journalism schools — and their central debate — is about how to merge traditional reporting skills with new tech tools and modes of delivery. Looming in the background is this issue of rising knowledge, even as schools struggle to figure out how to embed deeper research content into their classrooms.

In our networked, crowdsourced media environment, the value of basic “reporting” on events and issues is diminished. Deep context and added-value knowledge around news, however, will remain scarce commodities.
At the AEJMC annual meeting in Chicago last month, many educators were indeed talking about a new imperative to use more scholarship within curricula.

But how?

The good news is that innovation, both in terms of tech tools and research capacity, can flourish in j-schools.
The intellectual component — though complex at one level, involving fluency with numbers and with some academic concepts (think correlation) — can be broken down into a single mantra: make a “research review” a core habit for students.

Even at the 200- or 300-level of undergraduate courses, students can get accustomed to using academic sites such as Google Scholar, survey-oriented sites such as the Pew Research Center, and paid repositories like Academic Search Premier. JSTOR is another example.

Reporting on vacant lots and redevelopment? You might want to know about this study. Exploring dynamics of overbearing parents in schools? This one might be useful. Backgrounding a piece on tax breaks for businesses? Take a look here. A new baseball stadium? Catch this. A smart search through key databases can yield a wealth of such information on deadline, which can then be leveraged for coverage of news events.

Journalism educators should press students to mine such knowledge and be as aggressive in its pursuit online as they are of leads in the real world.

This is not to suggest there is always some perfect study or dataset to inform every one-off local story. Establishing the habit is the thing.

The same analytical skills embedded in the research review habit will make for better questions, more rigorous scrutiny of assumptions, higher-level journalism. Scholars perform a literature review as they approach questions; most topics have been studied for decades. Why neglect all of that accumulated knowledge? Even within difficult disciplines, journalists can obtain a reasonable fluency — enough to be well informed, know the deeper debates within issues, and ask more penetrating questions when engaging with experts (and avoid all of those blind phone calls for quotes).

For journalism schools, this means not segregating “research skills” in a single seminar. It means every j-school instructor emphasizing sophisticated web search skills, some knowledge of statistical concepts, a familiarity with research databases, and fostering the strong desire for a non-anecdotal, contextual understanding of things.

For the many brilliant career journalists who are now working in academia, this is not that heavy a lift. But it requires rebalancing. It’s all a matter of reorienting j-school time and energy. And it means turning back toward the wealth of resources within universities — the experts in economics, sociology, political science, and many other departments — while teaching students to engage with those disciplines in a distinctively journalistic way.

How many journalism classes have ever, for instance, read an original academic paper from a scholar on campus and then had a vigorous conversation with that scholar? (The News21 initiatives have pioneered some of this cross-disciplinary work.)

Journalism education should move a little closer to the academic research world, using its resources to elevate and distinguish the reporting profession again in our new, more competitive information marketplace. Journalist’s Resource — from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, where I work — is but one player in an emerging movement along these lines that comes out of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. We hope it grows. Across the nation’s journalism schools, we’re seeing huge steps in this direction already.

All this comes at a crucial moment, when the profession’s momentum can be recaptured. Imagine journalism that is as smart as the giant pool of available knowledge now online. Then imagine it brought to bear through new, more-personalized social streams and rendered through more engaging platforms and applications.

If educators rise to the challenge of forging that future, journalism schools will have little to fear in the coming decades.

Photo by David Michael Morris used under a Creative Commons license.