Parker is executive director of content and user engagement at Penton Media, Penton Technology Group. She previously was West Coast editorial director for Patch.com, launch manager for California Watch at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and assistant dean at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

DL: What’s happening in journalism today?

Parker: I feel like now there’s all these different kinds of media, including the traditional ones who are trying to get to digital, and all these startups that have at the base the core of journalism, but they’re also trying to be a whole bunch of things, too, adding some other level of value to information.

So now I feel like as a journalist, at the base, you have to be an information provider, an information-services player. And you have to have to have a successful business model. That means you have to have partners, because nobody stands on their own anymore.

At the same time, the whole industry is shifting to mobile first, so that requires a set of skills that we have had to add over the last couple of years.

Even with all of that, it still starts with core journalism, because there’s no way you can do a good job without having the core commitments to what journalism is and does. But then on top of that, there’s everything else, there’s user engagement, communicating with your audience, using social media to expand and extend your audience, knowing how to seed innovations, how to do something with all of that. And being able to be an exceptional social media person is really important.

It’s really about seeding conversation, engaging in conversation, keeping a conversation going—not just because you have to improve time on your site, but because users are now in the habit of really engaging with stories.

The process by which people are engaging with stories is also changing.

People are using the commentary platforms, but they’re also engaged in conversation on Twitter about stories, and there will be all kinds of new things through which that will be happening. No journalist has been trained to do that.

I had to teach hundreds of people [at Patch], and that takes a while to get people both comfortable with it and to teach them how to do it. Not everyone got it but over time, that really required an enormous amount of ongoing training.

Every day, those platforms change … Facebook changes all the time: “Oh, by the way, you’re engaging in the conversation and you’re going to get ads, and you have to know how to work with that, how to work around that, there are a million things you need to know how to do. … “

And on top of that comes this partnership piece, because every single journalism organ, traditional and nontraditional, certainly nonprofits as well, have all different kinds of distribution deals now. Those partnerships are really part of your world, and you’ve never really had to think about that before.

Lots of journalists have to do partnership management in some way. We have to teach people how to do that. And that might mean, hey, we’re distributing your story on Al Jazeera and through 10 other distribution patterns. So now you’re going to see comments rolling in from all of them. And you have multiple engagement platforms you have to worry about. And if one of them is not happy, that’s going to impact you.

You have to understand what partnerships are, what are the success factors, and what could go wrong with them. Nobody talks about any of that, but nowhere I’ve worked in the past three years have people not had to deal with that.

And you know even at the local level, not just the Huff Post, even small sites are cutting different kinds of partnership deals, some are in the gray space, that church-and-state division that freaks people out, educating students about that, and how to handle everything that goes around the grayness is important.

In many ways now, journalists are being judged by the performance of their content—and none of them know how to be judged by that. They don’t always like that or understand it, and it freaks them out, always. We need to teach people how to be comfortable with it, and what do you do if you’re in the kind of news organization that says, “Hey, your stories aren’t performing well … “ or “Our three distribution partners aren’t seeing enough page views from your stories, and that’s a problem.” Or, “Hey, we don’t have enough time on the page, people are reading the first three paragraphs of your stories and nothing else.”

What’s the answer to that? News organizations are saying you have to do x, y and z, and they don’t really know. You want the journalist to be smart enough to know what strategies are available to them, and how to be judged by the new standards.

There are only a few news organizations that are getting smart about analytics. That’s a whole skill set that all journalists really need to be taught. You can’t just walk in a newsroom, traditional or not, if you don’t understand how you’re going to be judged and what that means. Most reporters come in with the attitude that “that’s just crap, I don’t have to worry about that.” …

But you do, but actually you’re going to lose your job at the other end if your stories aren’t performing well … and now you’re being judged on metrics like community engagement, time on site, time on section, time on story, how much are you seeding and engaged in conversation. If you’re crappy at it, that’s a problem; if your social media—after you’ve had two internal classes—if your social media doesn’t sing and doesn’t get response, you’re going to be marked down for that.

Journalists aren’t prepared for that. I don’t know of a single school that’s actually teaching that. And yet every single organization is struggling with analytics and applying it to their news content.

I have a lot of feelings about the business side. In the traditional organizations, journalists are still not exposed enough to that side on every level. And then in the newer startup world, often they are, but they didn’t come in prepared, so they not only don’t know what a business plan is, they don’t understand road maps, they don’t understand product requirements, they don’t understand what partnership and strategy is all about, and how revenue is actually generated.

And a lot of times revenue is going to generated around sponsored content and all these new things that they are unbelievably uncomfortable with, but it’s going to be this generation that is going to try to start to find out a way to do it well, with the right kind of walls around it.

At ONA [Online News Association], we’re going to have a few really intense couple of seminars around sponsored content, how to get comfortable with sponsored content. We don’t really train anybody in these things, but this is the language of our industry now.

If you’re a business reporter, an entry-level business reporter, you can bet there are 500 ways they are monetizing their content … they hope not, they don’t really want to know that in the traditional places, and if they do, they’re scared of it. …

In terms of helping people understand monetization of content, you have to say to them, “Hey, this is a new world, and you’d better be in it, and actually, you’re going to be asked to contribute ideas about how your site is going to pay for itself.”

If you don’t have any understanding of it, you might as well forget it. You’re going to be the one in your newsroom the editors are saying is resistant, resistant to change. … At Patch, it took so long to get them to this place, we said to new hires, “Don’t come to this company if you don’t understand that you are going to be a part of building a new business model. That means you are going to have to go on sales calls with your salespeople and you’re going to be the editor, you’re not the salesperson but you’re going to be there and talk about editorial. You have to be there, and you can’t flip out about it.”

There were definitely people who still flipped out, and there were people who made the leap. It took comfort and training. We said, “Hey, we have [rules]. We don’t let people look at the stories and then change them.” But we were creating new models, and you want your people to understand what that means.

DL: Many of the faculty who responded to the survey said we have to teach ethics, but this is new.

Parker: Nobody talks about this. At the Stanford Knight Fellows, the people who run it have come a long way to a new place … now it’s really about building something that is credible and you’re going to do it … for example, they’re all interviewing now that the program is coming to an end for the year, and it’s fascinating to see what they do; they have all these new skill sets. One of the fellows I’ve been mentoring came from local news, that’s where her heart is, and she took a job as the director of content for Salesforce. This is so fascinating to me, these are the people who are making the big changes. I asked her why. She said it’s really interesting to figure out how to create interesting, useful content—not Salesforce content—but great content. They’re developing content strategies.

That’s another area that’s important to teach, it’s a skill set. It’s like me going to State [state.com] it’s not an editorial company, but they’re smart enough to know that news drives 75 percent of the opinion sharing on the network, so they need an editorial content strategy, but you don’t know what a content strategy is. … She’s going to go and do that, and she doesn’t know and they don’t know, but they know they need one because they want to provide useful content to their entire community.

Look at LinkedIn: John Abell is developing their whole content strategy. That’s really fascinating. The point is, “Duh, we need a content strategy that gives us a product we can add to our products, and that means we need editorial people.” Journalism is really just about editorial content.

DL: So what does all of that mean for journalism education?

Parker: The biggest, the only, question for journalism students is: “What are you going to go and do?” At Berkeley … they’re going to train amazing young people and they’re going to Salesforce or LinkedIn or Facebook. They’re going to nonprofits and startups and all these other places to develop content strategy. This is the next big program. If I were running a journalism program, we would have a whole thing around content strategy.

I feel like we should just reverse the whole thing [about journalism education] and start over. We should figure out all the skill sets required to produce, manage and publish editorial content. It would be much broader than what programs are doing now. I’d hire content-strategies people, and then you could start breaking down the skill sets you need to be able to do that. You’d have to help students figure out what is the business strategy of the organization you’re going to work for—and that includes the LinkedIns of the world and the Salesforces and CIR [Center for Investigative Reporting] and all of those different things.

Just as schools are trying to figure out what’s going on and how to do this, there are all these players coming into the media space. They are doing it because they think they can take the skills that they have, and apply them and reimagine them, and they know that there is value in content. I think that’s where that skill set needs to start: What’s the revenue model for the startup? And you need to know there are a whole bunch of those out there, and you need to be thinking about it from day one. This is our industry, this is how it’s changing, and it’s really like learning a different one.

We don’t teach that in journalism schools … we barely even mention it.

DL: Should journalism schools be teaching students how to create apps?

Parker: Creating apps is a really important skill set because now every Web or mobile platform that they’ll be working for is trying to provide a whole suite of services for the user. … I’m torn about that. I don’t think every kid needs to know how to do that, but I think you do need an orientation in that way, you need to know that’s part of your world of strategy of the Web, and the mobile product you’re working on. But we don’t need every person to create apps.

You have to know how to work with mobile. … We want to end up with a group of people that has all the skills that a news organization needs, and usually that’s going to include journalism, community management, and partnership management/business development because those are more and more important, people are doing that, and then [they need to know] something in that app space because it’s really about creating new functionalities. So you don’t have to be the person who creates the app, but you have to have some cognizance of the functionality to be able to communicate with the people who are creating the apps.

And then I think journalism schools should be the place where we’re getting user designers. I’ve worked with extraordinary ones, so it doesn’t have to be a journalism person, but I think that’s a piece of the profession that we could own. It would produce stronger mobile products and Web products if they were informed by people who had an orientation to how users actually use a website or app. There are lots of journalism kids who are drawn to that, they may come in as graphics people, they did design websites, those people having all those other skill sets could be that next generation of UX [user experience] designers. I think that should be something journalism schools should consider.

DL: And what about data?

Parker: Just having a data skillset, not just as a journalist using data but data as a product on your website or mobile product, is increasingly important. Everybody’s trying to mine data on a million levels. Understanding how to make a database, how to communicate with the engineers who are going to help you make those things, you need to be able to say. “I want this to do these five things.” That’s increasingly an important skill set that we need.

DL: But you’re talking about analytics, rather than coding. Correct?

Parker: Yes, and to know that the data that’s out there, in whatever form, that is relevant to your audience is an important part of what you have to know and what you have to offer to your users. So if you’re local news, you’re going to know that your local government makes data available in a million different ways, and you’re going to know what it is, new ways to use it, you’re going to know how to analyze it, to talk to engineers. And maybe you and the engineer go together to talk to data sources. It’s happening everywhere. Maybe there’s a nonprofit in your market that is gathering education data from all over the place and nobody sees it, so the news site goes to it and says, “We will help you distribute it, we’ll help analyze it, so you have both presentation and analytics.”

DL: So you’re talking about a journalist who can produce content, track its impact in its community, and do all the rest of this?

Parker: Yes, it’s all of that. Sometimes, I just want to just tell journalism schools to sit down on LinkedIn and read 15 job descriptions for journalism jobs and see what they say they’re looking for. You’re not teaching any of those things. Most of them do say “basic journalism,” but all the rest of it is all about teamwork and collaboration. No person in a journalism school I know of has ever been taught how to do that, how to work with the analytics team, the UI [user interface] guy, the business guys—which pretty much everybody has to do now. So it’s not just about the content. It’s about what you do with it and how you do that.

So many journalism schools are so out of touch now. Just teaching students to deal with change could be the starting place for journalism schools now. In addition to all of those skill sets, it’s also about change, learning to change.

You still have to meet the demand for the industries, but J-schools don’t even get the basics right. They need to be identifying literally year by year what the needs are, not five years out. They need to be asking “What is transformational now? … What do they need now?”

DL: Are there models for journalism schools you would recommend?

Parker: Look at Singularity[University]. It’s really hard to get in, but it’s such an interesting model. There could be something to borrow from that: It’s very short, it’s very different, they don’t have tenure, each class is different.

Every single job I’ve been in there have been these training issues that I would never have expected. Like “mobile first.” I have to say “mobile first” 100 times a day now, and I’m constantly thinking, “What am I trying to relate with a ‘mobile first’ strategy? What’s that? Can anybody teach me that?” Not really. But everybody has to be mobile first, because that’s what you’re supposed to do—everything is supposed to be mobile first, but we don’t really even know what that means.

We also should be talking about curation. Every day it’s more important. What qualifications does a curation team need to have? They need to be knowledgeable in their vertical, and they need to be good with social media, which means being able to write in an engaging way. The other aspect is just curiosity: You can’t be just looking at The Washington Post about a story; you have to look on the MIT site, and yes, YouTube, but where else? You’re the discoverer, go discover. You have to have someone who wants to do that.

That’s why I think about the journalism schools. We’re losing students, we’re not making our numbers, but there’s this group of people out there if they had a program that taught them what they need to know, they would come. The programs don’t meet their needs.

I hear the faculty say, “We just want to do the journalism part, we don’t want to do the other stuff.” I don’t want them to stop teaching students to be amazing journalists, but what about all of these other things? Every single job description asks for curation skills now. …

Another whole piece of the journalism school reimagined is about diversity—not just race or age or sex, but as background, and geography, and class. Most of the top schools have a few hot-shot students of color, but the number is very small. We should find a way to address the issue of diversity.