We’re used to our peers and mentors privileging...

“We’re used to our peers and mentors privileging legacy media — be it broadcast or newspapers. But this is not what we expect of today’s college students, a.k.a. tomorrow’s journalists. In their wired world, there are increasingly fuzzy distinctions between professional and citizen, fact and rumor, confirmed and unconfirmed. We see their iPhones and Androids, iPads and laptops, and we figure part of our job as journalism instructors is to call attention to those distinctions. Yet, as Josh’s answer suggests, students might be overcorrecting toward the old school, and in the process psyching themselves out of the journalism game.”

College Students Miss the Journalistic Potential of Social Media

Other potential headlines for this piece by Devin Harner:

“College Students Don’t Know How to Report”
“College Students Don’t Know How to Publish Online”
“College Students Not Good at Journalism”
“Journalism Professor Shocked at Having Teach Students About Journalism”

OK, I’m being hyperbolic, but no moreso than the original headline, which is currently at the top of the homepage of PBS’ Mediashift.

First of all, how Harner comes to this conclusion is a little laughable. He asks his students where they learned about Osama Bin Laden’s death. One student—one!—says CNN. Really? Harner asks. No, the student realizes, he learned about it on Facebook.

Aha! Harner sees it so clearly now: his students are just as blind to the “journalistic potential” of Facebook as the old fogeys gathering dust at newspapers all over the country. Oh, the irony! The young are just as ignorant as the old. Yet, don’t the students have a good excuse?

1) This is most likely the first time for these students that social media has been used in a classroom setting. No one taught them how to use these tools. They taught themselves. Why? Because it was fun, not because 5 years after they created their Facebook account they thought it was going to help their journalism careers. Takeaway: as students begin to discover social media, teachers should be right there with them instructing them to use it wisely and demonstrating its inherent power.

2) Does anyone fully understand the journalistic potential of social media? I think it’s fair to say that it’s still something even the most seasoned journalists are still trying to figure out. So how can Harner reasonably expect students who are just learning the basics of reporting to intuitively understand how to use these tools in its service?

3) Shouldn’t there be a healthy skepticism about where one reads something, especially on Facebook? Shouldn’t this student be congratulated for doing the right thing: verifying one source by consulting another? It’s funny. If the student had said he learned about OBL’s death on Facebook and just trusted that, he would have been slammed for not following up the first source with a more reputable one. Are we really looking to teach students not to privilege legacy media or are we trying to teach them to not dismiss social media? There’s a big difference there.

Harner sums up his fears thusly: “How can students properly examine and harness the journalistic potential of digital media if they don’t even see it as media, and how can they become content creators if they don’t believe their content counts?”

Isn’t that a little like saying, how can a reporter harness the power of the telephone, if they’ve only used it to make personal calls? It’s your job to teach them.