Schaffer is the executive director of J-Lab at American University.

DL: Let’s talk about what journalism education should be and do.

Schaffer: I think journalism schools should not be manufacturing assembly lines for journalist wannabes.

DL: What does that mean?

Schaffer: I think we have a bigger role to play in higher education and in society at large. The opportunity is right here, but we can’t see it: Journalism schools, in my view, should be recasting themselves as a gateway to just about any career a student wants to have. If it happens to be in journalism, that’s fine. But, we need digital and reporting skills in the nonprofit sector; we need them in the diplomatic sector; we need them in the for-profit sector; we need them, at large, in government. Journalism skills are a great baseline for medical, law or business degrees. Journalism schools have a moment in time when they could create the new liberal arts degree, but with a more pronounced value proposition. They should be trumpeting how the overlay of digital, writing, and research skills makes the right journalism degree much more valuable than a classic liberal arts degree. It’s a degree that really will prepare students for a menu of jobs. Some of them will be journalism jobs, but even now journalism school graduates are migrating far beyond the field of journalism. We just don’t always want to crow about that reality.

DL: What you are talking about is what communications schools have always said they do.

Schaffer: Sort of, but they don’t nakedly market themselves that way. Already, journalism degrees have a big liberal arts component but in the competitive educational landscape moving forward, I think journalism/communication schools should be totally rebranding themselves as giving students incredibly useful gateways to the world. It’s a much more meaningful and marketable construct. Liberal arts programs can’t really say that students will come out with a set of skills that can be used in almost any job they encounter. A genuine Gateway Degree will allay parent concerns. It will give students jobs. It will bring you better, more grounded alumni who can actually feed back into your programs. I think it’s a missed opportunity.

DL: What’s the curriculum look like?

JS: All journalism schools right now have to deal with remedial writing. Kids aren’t being taught that in high schools now. But as different journalism programs have adopted different curricula and emphases, the result is that journalism degrees aren’t like medical degrees anymore, where you get a baseline set of skills. Some schools will teach you how to write a news story and where to put the commas really well. You’ll come out of that school knowing how to write a news story, but you might not be able to produce the website or edit a video. Other schools will teach you how to edit a video, produce a website and do social media, but you will come out light on how to gather news, conduct an interview or write a news story. You might be able to produce a fabulous documentary, however. And you might be able to produce a persuasive game, but you will not be able to write a news story. So you have the writing and reporting part and the digital part.

DL: Is it possible for everyone to do everything?

Schaffer: I think students will tend to skew to their interests. And some of it may be reporting and writing a news story; some of it may be media production of some sort, and some of it may be doing research, interviews or data analysis for another entity. I think that’s OK, and I also think those would be much more useful specialties than the print, Web, broadcast paradigms we now offer. I don’t think we should expect a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter person coming out of a journalism school. However, if we amp up the media aspect of their liberal arts courses—emphasizing research, solutions, visualizations of information, sharing of information, and some aspects of social entrepreneurship, you are on the road to an ideal Gateway Degree.

DL: In the context of what you are saying, should every journalism student know how to code? Know how to make an app?

Schaffer: No. I don’t think so. I think that’s too much. But that is the latest fad. WordPress was the new thing. Data is the big thing. I believe in data. And now it’s coding. I just think there are some people who are never going to be comfortable with coding because they don’t do languages and that’s OK, but a baseline of knowledge is useful. I do think that there are other baseline skills that can be taught. One is actually picking up the telephone to make a call. Students have to figure out how to get beyond search engines and ask questions and get answers—without waiting endlessly for a response to an email that may never come. That’s a skill that plays out no matter what the job.

DL: Let me ask you this. If you say this could be the new liberal arts degree, does that dilute the impact or the mission of the degree? And does it dilute the core mission of journalism schools, which has been historically to train journalists?

Schaffer: I think the mission should be recast. I think if our mission were to make the media we need for the world we want, we will appeal to a very mission-driven group of younger people who want to make a difference; that’s important to their lives. We need a mission that’s a little bit more overarching than the mission we have right now, a mission that also embraces some key developments happening right under our noses. When you look at what’s happening in media entrepreneurship, there are important trends that defy our classic journalism pedagogy. I call them my “A’s.” We are seeing more than ever before the rise of activist journalism: Look at what First Look is trying to do, which is to undertake a mission of actively enabling government transparency. If you look at what Bill McKibben is doing around climate change, it’s an example of a rise in authoritative and knowledge-based journalism that defies the “he said, she said’ paradigm of false equivalencies. And then there’s the rise of what I call “soft-advocacy” journalism.

What I see happening on the ground in smaller news startups is the rise of websites that have a voice, a point of view, on their master narrative.

Take UrbanMilwaukee.com. It was created by a couple of Web designers to cover the “built” environment in the city; legacy media is not doing much of that. So we are starting to see new websites pop up that say, “We want you to know what is getting built when they tear this building down. We wants bike lanes and trees and sustainable cities. We are covering the zoning and planning board in our community because no one else is, and because we care about the community and we believe in sustainable cities.” Same thing with public health. There are sites like ClearHealthCosts.com that are advocating for transparency in health costs. These things have amazing journalism DNA and are very data-driven, but they don’t fit the mold of what we classically teach in journalism school.

I think we have a cohort of incoming students who see a world that needs to be changed and want to make a difference and build responsible on-ramps for doing that. But we don’t validate their aspirations as bona fide media challenges. Look at The Marshall Project with Bill Keller; it’s all about social injustice. They will end up building on-ramps for social change through their reporting and other activities.

New taxonomies in journalism are happening all around us, and I think journalism schools just can’t see it. I think, in part, traditional journalists bristle at the idea of soft advocacy, or activist journalism or even solutions journalism. Our challenge is how do we step up and embrace how you might reinvent journalism so that it still adheres to core values but also opens doors for activating citizen involvement that can make things better.

When I run workshops, I have a picture from UrbanMilwaukee.com that I put on the screen. It shows a ragged streetscape in kind of a rundown part of the city. Urban Milwaukee hired a graphic artist to create an image of what this street could look like with bikeways and curbs and trees and streetlights. They published a photo of the current streetscape alongside the artist’s visualization. Their “story” had an enormous impact on the community; the local alderman and residents wanted their community to look like the artist’s image. Momentum was generated and two years later, they cut the ribbon on the new street. I can put that picture up on a screen and some journalists in the room are horrified. “We can’t do that,” they say. “We would be advocating for that.”

DL: That’s an interesting response.

Schaffer: Meanwhile, younger people look at the two images and can’t see a problem. We can’t even begin to imagine, or seriously invent, how we could engage a community in solutions or other possibilities for addressing their problems.

DL: What is the difference between that and a small town newspaper editorial saying the street needs to be fixed?

Schaffer: I think it’s the power of the visualization.

DL: It’s the tools and presentation.

Schaffer: In my own civic journalism days, we did tons of solutions reporting and we didn’t apologize for it. We’d put together a menu of solution possibilities with task forces to work on them. Nowadays, we’ve gotten ourselves so turned into pretzels that we think we can’t advocate for a particular solution unless we analyze the data and find the positive deviance, and that is the only solution we can get behind.

You don’t have to call for one solution but you can report on many if you know how to do the reporting to track them down (and that is a skill to be taught). I think the pedagogy is broken. I think the possibilities are huge for reimagining what journalism schools could do and how they could create value propositions, not only for their students, but also for society at large.

DL: Where are the barriers?

Schaffer: In some instances, I believe the accrediting committees are a barrier because they are operating using constrained templates that get in the way of reimagining journalism education.

DL: What would such a reimagining require?

Schaffer: So, teach students not just how to write up the 5,000-foot-view story but also take the 50,000-foot view. What’s the larger issue? How is it framed? Not who are the competing personalities, but what are the competing tensions and values? How can they elicit community involvement? Amp up the value proposition in a way to make a journalism school mission that not only appeals to prospective students but also responsibly impacts society. You want to recruit students? You need tell your story in a different way. You don’t tell your story that so and so got a job at The Washington Post or at The New York Times. You tell your story that so and so was on the front end of a series of stories that did this, or provided wheelchairs, or made telephone calls at prisons cheaper, or whatever. Your narrative changes, and when the narrative becomes more compelling, you’re not just an assembly line producing little journalistees. You have a larger purpose in life. A bigger playing field.

DL: How do you deliver on the promise?

Schaffer: That is the mindset of entrepreneurship and could become a nice linchpin for schools of journalism. The classic mindset of entrepreneurship is to identify what is the job that needs to be done and what is your market niche. Maybe your market niche starts small and then you can scale up, like Toyota, or Vox Media, or whatever. Teaching students to observe, notice and analyze what jobs need to be done is taught in business schools but not usually employed in journalism curricula. It sort of plays to students’ imaginations. You’d be surprised what they come up with. I’m all about making entrepreneurship part of journalism schools.

DL: So every student should learn to pitch?

Schaffer: Not pitch. I think there is more merit in defining opportunities or gaps in the market. Whether you are an intrepreneur or entrepreneur, there’s merit in defining what job needs to be done and what the solution is to that market opportunity. Whether it is commoditizing white papers or building an app, identifying those opportunities involves analytical and critical thinking skills that will be very useful in any job. I also think that there is no better teacher than failure, and we need to validate serial entrepreneurship instead of focusing so much on sustainable business models. Silicon Valley does it all the time. …

I think you’ve heard me say this before, but I believe a vast majority of small liberal arts colleges are going to be out of business in the next decade. You can create all of these Ph.D.s, but they have fewer skills than journalism grads to contribute to the marketplace. So, analyze your value proposition. Journalism schools are going to be disrupted, but I also think universities are going to be disrupted. So figure out what your sweet spot is in there. I think a journalism/communication/whatever degree that teaches the skills of researching, writing, and some baseline digital production and entrepreneurial thinking plays across any industry.