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Pop-Up Newsroom: Liquid Journalism for the Next Generation

Melissa Wall

Instability in the journalism industries of Western democracies has become an increasing concern as observers and journalists themselves call it a “crisis,” implying that the field is withering toward an eventual demise. Or, as a popular book on the state of the American news industry asked, “Will the last reporter please turn out the lights?” (McChesney & Pickard, 2011). Yet others suggest that we are actually seeing not the death but a vital transformation of journalism that will enable innovation and creativity to flourish (Gillmor, 2013).

These concerns and conflicting points of view have played out in journalism education programs around the world. Voices from the professional journalism world have often viewed journalism education as overly theoretical and impractical, if not an outright waste of time. The current crisis merely confirms to them that the educational realm does not understand the needs of industry. Eric Newton, a leading critic of journalism education and former head of the Knight Foundation, has repeatedly chastised journalism programs for failing future journalists (2013).

A survey of professional journalists in the United States came to a similar conclusion with almost one half of respondents believing American journalism education was keeping up with the dramatic changes in the field only “a little” or “not at all” (Sivek, 2013). Studies of journalism education from within the academy suggest changes are being made. Indeed, in their national survey of journalism programs, Becker, Vlad, and Simpson (2013) found that while an overwhelming majority of administrators reported that their programs had updated their curricula, more than one half reported obstacles to change, including faculty resistance and bureaucratic holdups.

Many still believe that journalism education continues to be not only valuable, but even more necessary than ever due to rapid changes in the media industry as a whole (Scruggs, 2012). In fact, many journalism educators have taken up the call to envision new educational models and practices for their programs (Baines & Kennedy, 2010; Berger, 2011; Deuze, 2006; Robinson, 2013). These forward-thinking journalism educators suggest that their peers need to be more willing to “experiment with new types of information creation, distribution and organization” (Mensing, 2011, p. 25), and some argue that journalism educators must make wholesale changes to “revolutionize curricula to prepare students for the digital age” (Robinson, 2013, p. 2).

As Jarvis (2012) argues, industry disruptions should be seen as opportunities to rethink journalism education, including reconsidering the importance of classroom spaces for learning and the actual forms of news itself. He notes that journalism educators ought to consider not “what the industry is [demanding] but what it should be demanding” (Bennett, 2014, para. 5).

Thus, the pessimists and the optimists appear to agree that journalism education must continue to dramatically evolve to remain relevant. This chapter examines an effort to rethink how journalism is taught through an exploration of a university-based initiative, the Pop-Up Newsroom.

 Many of the most highly touted projects said to re-imagine journalism education urge educators to have their students take on professional journalism responsibilities, filling the gaps of the shrinking professional world in what has been called the “hospital model”(Newton, 2012).

Yet tying journalism education to the news industry’s needs and values is precisely what critics such as Mensing (2011) believe holds journalism education back from developing truly different visions of what the discipline could be. The Pop-Up Newsroom offers a different possible direction.