This is an Editor’s Note from Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, written by Maria B. Marron, who was announcing her move to become dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Most of the piece is about teams — how departments, schools and journals all depend on people working together rather than on a single star player. Then it turns to optimism, and that is where my work shows up.
Marron cited two sources for her optimism about the future of journalism and journalism education. The first was Marty Baron, then editor of The Washington Post, from his keynote at the fifteenth International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas–Austin:
There is no acceptable alternative to optimism.
The second was my writing about The Core Skills for the Future of Journalism report, which Poynter released on April 9, 2014. The report was research I did with my co-author, Lauren Klinger. Marron quoted my summary of what we found:
shows a wide divergence between professionals and educators in their thinking on the importance of core journalism skills, especially those skills that are essential for mastering new methods of gathering and delivering news and information.
The survey behind the report identified thirty-seven skills, attributes and knowledge areas judged important “for a beginning journalist as he/she looks toward his/her career in the digital/mobile age.” The widest gaps were in multimedia. Marron laid out the numbers: 76 percent of educators versus 46 percent of professionals rated “shoot and edit video” as important; 80 percent versus 52 percent on the “ability to tell stories with design and visuals”; 79 percent versus 53 percent on shooting and editing photographs; and 72 percent versus 38 percent on recording and editing audio. Coding was the outlier in a different direction — students rated the ability to work with HTML or another computer language highly, while only 41 percent of educators and 28 percent of professionals and managers did.
What interests me is how she read those gaps. Lauren and I had framed the divergence as a problem for the industry. Marron read the same data as evidence that educators were ahead of the professionals:
educators are serving as leaders for the industry, not as followers.
That is a more generous interpretation than the one we offered, and it is a fair one. The Core Skills research grew out of years of thinking about training at Poynter’s News University, where the question was always the same: what does a journalist actually need to know, and who is responsible for teaching it? The 2014 answer was that educators, students and freelancers largely agreed with each other, and newsroom professionals were somewhere else entirely.
Reading this in 2026, the specific skills have shifted — the argument now is about AI tools rather than shooting video — but the underlying gap between what the academy teaches and what newsrooms say they value has not gone away. Neither, I hope, has the optimism.