Amy Gahran has a very interesting piece at Poynter Online about the importance of teaching journalism students to use content management systems (h/t joshb). Her basic point is that Dreamweaver, which many schools teach their students, is utterly pointless in the modern journalistic office, since no one uses Dreamweaver to run a modern newspaper website anymore. Moreover, she asserts, Dreamweaver teaches prospective journalists to think of their newspaper as an isolated island, while content management systems teach them to think of their newspaper as a hub of information, connected to a much broader web of interconnected information.
Those are both fair points, although I'm not sure I'm convinced that the latter is so crucial. I imagine most journalism students understand the web by now, and have some idea that newspaper websites are frequently the hubs of interaction and discussion. Then again, I could be wrong.
What I find most interesting, though, is Gahran's assertion that most journalism schools simply don't teach basic CMS skills. That strikes me as odd, but entirely believable. Moreover, it seems like a great opportunity for a liberal entrepreneur to make some money while reaching, and hopefully helping to shape, the minds of prospective or up-and-coming journalists.
Teaching users how to use a CMS is not very difficult. It's a core practice of my company, in fact. While we've only been doing it for about a year, we find that even our most technophobic clients generally "get it" pretty early on in the process. I'd venture a guess that there are a lot of self-taught CMS users out there, judging from the size of the blogosphere.
So here's what I think a clever liberal entrepreneur could do to exploit this situation, and help push journalistic enterprises to the left. Start up a one-day or two-day training course on popular content management systems, like Drupal or Wordpress, and target it at journalism students. Then, use that opportunity to give journalism students a taste of the importance of democratic conversation in the world of journalism, and the ways that web-based technologies can help media outlets attract a good-sized audience without resorting to gossip-mongering.
Certainly, a one- or two-day course is not going to move mountains, and it won't change journalistic practice overnight. On the other hand, providing a key set of professionals with valuable skills, and pointing out the ways that progressive journalistic practices can be supported by those skills, can be a money-making and, in some small way, profession-changing enterprise.
