Up until now—or at least a short while ago—the talk for small businesses focused on adding digital into your product mix. This has to be rephrased, and Cindy Royal, an associate professor at Texas State University, has done just that.
Her article, on the PBS site, is titled We Need a Digital-First Curriculum to Teach Modern Journalism. It reflects the idea that the traditional journalism school isn’t teaching the kinds of skills that modern journalists need, like HTML coding, building an audience on social media and mobile delivery. But for me, what makes it so effective is that what she recommends for colleges applies to businesses as well—that our focus on digital must be resolute.
Royal writes that we must no longer approach “digital in a piecemeal fashion—injecting digital topics into existing courses…I think there is a better route, another way to conceptualize an entirely new curriculum around Digital and Data-Driven Communication.”
She is writing about a whole new way of thinking that must be adopted—not how an article will look in a print newsletter or magazine on a Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon but how that article or webinar invitation or blog post will look on a tablet or smartphone at 5:30 a.m. on a weekday or 3 p.m. on a Saturday.
Let me interject here that this is what the new bloc of content providers that SIIA has assembled—SIPA, The Association of Business Information and Media Companies (ABM) and SIIA’s excellent Content Division—has set out to do. The new Mobile Essentials series got off to an amazing start a couple weeks ago and continues in September. The Content Division’s thought-leading Data Content Conference takes place in October in Philadelphia and then SIPA’s Marketing Conference visits Las Vegas in December.
The comparison of business to academia works here because most of us are to digital what students entering college are to journalism: novices. Royal has three guiding principles:
1. Flip the Curriculum;
2. New Concentrations;
3. Experience Learning.
In Flip the Curriculum, she wants students to take courses in which “digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.” The courses include Multimedia/Mobile Writing and Reporting, Digital Media Law and The History and Culture of Digital Media.
Already, students in Advanced Online Media at Texas State University learn Web development, responsive design, data visualization, Web scraping and content management system customization. Think most of us couldn’t use those courses? Her point in knowing the history and culture of digital is that’s where innovation often comes from. “This approach offers a mindset that encourages students to think innovatively about what could or should come next.” Sign me up.
For New Concentrations, Royal would like to see a visual emphasis where graphic design would focus on Web and mobile delivery. “Courses would introduce more advanced programming concepts, Web [and] mobile development [etc.],” she writes. “This concentration could be supported by collaborations with other departments or with local professionals or organizations, with the goal of ultimately co-opting these skills with a communications context.”
And, of course, social media. She wants students focused on “engagement and “advanced social media implementations, like the use of analytics and the creation of comprehensive social media campaigns.” Again, I‘m there.
The third principle Royal puts out there is Experience Learning. The key here, she writes, might be getting a faculty that is more digitally clued in. Similarly, businesses need to find those people as well. At SIPA’s Las Vegas Conference, you will meet some of them. My fellow track chairs include digitally-oriented folks like Nancy Brand of Chartwell and Jenny Fukumoto of Ragan, in addition to Tom Gale who runs a company, MDM, that is ahead of the digital curve in almost all areas.
Here’s Royal’s last sentence: “It’s time that curriculum reflects the future of media, rather than its past, creating a comprehensive framework and courses that establish an innovative mindset amongst our students and ourselves.” Just substitute “our businesses” for curriculum, “atmosphere” for courses, and “colleagues” for students, and you have what should be our mantra moving forward.
Join us as we lead you down this intricate but necessary road. We can’t put you back in college unfortunately—sorry, we’re not that good—but we can help you put forth this digital-first mindset in everything you do.