Innovation is now on the to-do list for many media organisations. Some have set up news labs to experiment with new formats and emerging technologies, while others have appointed innovation editors to supervise future newsroom transformations.
As media outlets strive to equip their teams with the right mindset, skills and workflows to be able to adapt to constantly changing audience behaviours or to the adoption of new technologies, journalism schools are also setting up journalism innovation courses.
Journalism.co.uk set out to find out how professors of journalism innovation approach the daunting task of teaching innovation, a term many in the industry even avoid defining.
We spoke to Jane Singer, professor of journalism innovation at City, University of London, and Dan Pacheco, Peter A. Horvitz chair of journalism innovation at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, about entrepreneurial journalism and an innovative mindset in a recent podcast.
Entrepreneurial journalism is out
At City, University of London, the journalism innovation module is in its fourth year. Called entrepreneurial journalism at its inception, it was restructured shortly after its launch to better match the expectations of students as well as the reality in the industry.
"The problem with entrepreneurial journalism we found is that it had this connotation of starting up your own business," Singer explained.
"And while some students are interested in doing that, and they do think about whatever it is that they want to take forward as an enterprise in the traditional sense, a lot of them are more interested in doing something that would sit in with the remit of an existing company, but be creative and take that in a new direction.
"Existing companies and media organisations are very keen to do that sort of thing so there's a real interest in that all around."
While the focus has shifted to encourage students to come up with ideas that could work in existing newsrooms as well as start-ups on their own, an element of entrepreneurship has remained in the class. Students need to pitch their projects in front of a panel of experts in an exercise with a similar format to that of business show Dragon's Den, where entrepreneurs pitch their business in front of potential investors.
While on Dragon's Den some participants leave with money to fund their business, students at City don't receive any funding for their products, and are under no obligation to build a tool or new publication to showcase as part of the class. It's the idea and the plan behind it that counts – and some graduates are even taking their ideas to market after finishing the class.
A change in mindset
At Syracuse, Dan Pacheco is tasked with designing new courses every year, and his classes both give students a hands-on experience of new technologies and attempt to change their mindset and push them towards more agile workflows.
"It's about rewiring their brains to be looking out for new technologies, coming up with ideas, not being afraid to go and try them out, and even if they fail, then sharing what they've learned from that," he said.
Pacheco has been teaching virtual reality, 360-degree video, and digital media among other modules, and his classes usually include both a lab-style practical element and a task to publish blog posts outlining the challenges they encountered along the way and the solutions they have found on their own.
"This is actually the most important part. What discoveries did they make about other things that are possible that had nothing to do with these assignments based on what they tried and failed? The only way you discover new ways of doing things is by trying and failing.
"Just because you tried and failed at very specific ideas or hypothesis that you had, it doesn't mean that there's really a failure there because in the data of all that experimentation you're going to discover other uses of these technologies you never even thought about.
"In that process you can be like the digital equivalent of the chef who invented the French fry because supposedly the potato fell into the oil [by accident]... and now we eat French fries.
"You have to be constantly doing things and I think that's also important in industry so I'm hopeful that the students who come out of this method really help their organisations also act that way and try things, and not punish people when they don't work."
Listen to the full podcast about teaching journalism innovation here.
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