USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director Geneva Overholser and Journalism Professor Robert Hernandez were mentioned in a column for Poynter about the conversation surrounding journalism education.
The column addresses the argument that journalism education is failing, saying that the "trade school model" is, instead, "giving way to something better, a change many of us have been advocating for years.”
Though the field “doesn’t ring the cash register the way it used to,” the importance of the curriculum taught in communications and journalism classes still holds. Overholser noted that students “are [now] getting better jobs out of school than previous generations ever did.”
This is because they now possess digital skills that employers demand. Many news publications are also “shifting to less costly workers.”
Hernandez was mentioned for his “pioneering concepts in peer learning,” in which journalism instructors act as “Socratic coaches.” He was referred to as an example of “a new model of journalism educator[s].”
In an article Hernandez wrote for Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab about his teaching method, he said that “students should bypass the normal route and hijack [their] school’s assets to selfishly improve [their] skills.”