One of the things the first information students on the two year information study and I managed to get through the department board back in the stoneage when I started working in Volda was that the public information students would have half a semester of journalism as part of the (then) two-year study. This was a victory over a set of not-so-pleasant prejudices which were quite strong among journalists. These were the days when journalists working for internal newspapers or in information offices had to leave the journalist union, and the faculty of Volda College was daring and radical to establish public information on a parallel track to the famous and established journalism study.
Now it seems like the tides have turned, and quite surprisingly so. I heard the first hints of this from some of the faculty, in offhand quotes from study board meetings (mostly students, some staff on those meetings). It seems like the journalist students want more contact with the information students. I know that despite working here for a very long time I don't really have much to do with the journalists, but that made my lack of journalism-student-contact blatantly obvious: I never saw it coming!
And then I find this delicious little discussion in the comments of the blog of a journalist student. It's all in Norwegian, but part of what they say is how unfair it is that the information students get to sit in on the journalism lectures, while the journalists don't get to go to the public information lectures.
WOW.
However, one of the changes we have recently made is to open up a course for everybody with the right combination of subjects. This means that if journalism students would like a course in information, they can enroll to inf211.
Clever, hmm?
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6 comments:
Hehe, interesting! Both the the situation - and that I don't really know whether you're being ironic or not. :)
... Wait a minute! Did you mean to imply that I dream of world dominance?
Complicated, isn't it? Do I dream of world dominance? Do you? Do I think you think I dream of world dominance? Am I referring to a general paranoia among certain groups? Or am I referring to the true, but unspoken goal of all public information workers of the world?
And me, ironic? Me? I am a teacher. By definition we have no sense of humour, would never tease students and never display or understand irony. I think that's part of the regulations in the quality reform.
I suspect this might interest you: In STiV (the student "assembly") there's an ongoing discussion on who's most competent to author our flyers - the infamous journalists or the (slightly more) infamous informators.
If what they want is somebody to write, they should go with a journalist. If they want somebody who knows if writing the right thing to do, and what to write, they should choose a public information student.
It's not a competition. It's two related, complementing, but different skills.
Sounds like you're doing some fancy juggling. Our journalism and communications programs are not integrated at all -- until a few years ago, communications was part of the business school, but now it's in the humanities division.
I've had a handful of journalism students change their majors to communications. They didn't seem as interested in accuracy and grammatical correctness as I would have liked. I haven't seen any students coming the other way -- though we do sometimes pick up people from creative writing.
Our journalism program has the benefit of the student paper as its flagship, and that publication is very healthy. We don't have a TV station or a corporation for our communicaions students to work with -- though there are some plans for looking into internet radio.
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