Teaching Journalism

You can't cultivate strong specialty journalism by using a general j-school curriculum. Rather, you must teach the specialists the art of journalism. The University of Toronto's new certificate program looks to do just that. J-Source has been following the story from its planning stages, to the announcement and now, Robert Steiner, director of the journalism lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, explains why this program needed to be different and what students can expect to get out of it. 

Six Ryerson journalism students contributed to the research and reporting of a three-part  series published recently in the Toronto Star which detailed troubling practices in some Ontario high schools. The first story, by Robert Cribb, documented how some Ontario high school students are getting into university with inflated grades purchased from some privately run, for profit schools.  The second story, was a first-hand account by a reporter, Jennifer Yang,  who posed as a summer student at a school alleged to be handing out credits and grades for a fee. The third story provided comments from students who admitted benefitting from what was essentially a black market for high school grades.

Marta Iwanek. one of the Ryerson students who helped with the series, and her teammates reflect on how the story developed, what they learned from pursuing it, and offer advice to other students interested in investigative reporting. 

It's time for media companies to stop offering unpaid internships, says a journalism student, Bethany Horne. The only students who can afford to work for free the summer, she says, are those lucky enough to come from families with money. That's no way to bring diverse voices or fresh perspectives into a newsroom.