Response to Nieman Article

I found the article "Do journalism schools really need to be teaching hospitals?" by Justin Ellis to be very interesting and I definitely agree with the view of David Ryfe and Donica Mensing. I think making journalism schools similar to teaching hospitals is a bad idea and I think that it would actually make journalists less prepared to enter the newsroom. This is why I found it interesting that the article said that some people say that the model is a "way of offering real-world reporting experience to students." Like Ryfe and Mensing, I find that to be completely ridiculous because the industry is always changing. Training someone in such a specific way would be a complete waste of time.

For me personally, I believe that the best way to learn about journalism, news writing, and reporting is to just jump right into it. You have to learn by doing and by gaining actual experience. This way you'll be constantly learning new things and adapting to different situations. You learn how things work best for you or how they work best for your paper/editor. I think teaching somebody in a certain way will just get them stuck in a mindset that they can't get out of. This slows down the learning process.


I'm not sure how much I agree with the idea that being taught by older journalists will make younger ones more cynical. While I do think that learning through experience is the best way to go, I also believe that you should take advice where you can get it. If someone who's been in the field for a long time offers you advice, you should listen and learn from there. This being said though, I think this should be done when the writer/reporter is actually working so that they can apply it to their job. It shouldn't be used as a method of teaching.


Overall I agree with the arguments made by Ryfe and Mensing because it is very true that you can't teach someone about something that is always changing. I also would like to say that Justin Ellis, the author of this article, did a great job with those Scrubs references. I was thoroughly entertained.