Fostering Collaboration

Journalism schools should build collaborative partnerships with other disciplines. Many professional schools, journalism included, have tended to operate as silos within universities because they draw their culture and concerns from a field of practice rather than a tradition of academic discourse. That stance must shift because journalism itself is shifting. As a result, we should recognize that journalism is not a narrow set of traditional newsroom skills, but instead encompasses whatever tools and methods have, in one way or another, been made journalistic. Practitioners of data-driven and computational journalism have thrived by embracing interdisciplinarity in their work. Several journalism schools have begun to build bridges with computer science departments by opening research centers, co-teaching and cross-listing classes, and even developing joint degree programs. This is a promising start. Not only will journalism schools benefit from acting as leaders in interdisciplinary collaboration, but they also should be naturally suited to this role as a field situated at the intersection of many other disciplines.