Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School
“Nowadays it's essential for journalists to blog,” says Professor Mary Quigley to a class of 16 NYU journalism students. The class is titled “Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers),” and it's one of the few NYU undergrad journalism classes that focuses on new media.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2008 snapshot of NYU's journalism curriculum — one professor telling sixteen students that blogging is now essential, in one of the few undergrad classes touching new media — lands mid-arc in a running debate over whether journalism education and institutions can adapt. Earlier coverage had already argued that journalism is reviving rather than dying and that the field needs conceptual bridges to a new media world, while later pieces pushed further: whether technologists rather than traditional reporters might save journalism, and what a news organization built natively for new media would look like. The NYU classroom tension is a concrete instance of that institutional lag.
First-order effects
- NYU journalism students face a skills gap at graduation: if only a handful of classes cover blogging and new-media reporting, most graduates enter a job market where those skills are treated as baseline requirements.
- Professor Mary Quigley's 'Reporting Gen Y' class becomes a small test case for whether legacy curricula can absorb new-media practice without a wholesale redesign.
Second-order effects
- Rival journalism programs that move faster on digital training gain a recruiting edge, pressuring schools like NYU to add new-media courses or risk losing applicants who compare curricula.
- Newsrooms hiring from these programs absorb the cost of the gap, either retraining print-trained graduates or shifting entry-level demand toward candidates with self-taught digital skills.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, journalism schools split into adapters and laggards, and the industry's talent pipeline re-routes around formal education toward portfolios and non-traditional backgrounds — a shift later debates about technologists saving journalism made explicit.
- Persistent institutional slowness in training strengthens the argument that new kinds of media companies, not legacy ones, will define the next era of news.
The trend: Journalism education is being forced through a generational transition in which digital-native skills shift from elective novelty to core curriculum, exposing how slowly legacy institutions adapt.