Jeff Jarvis wrote provocatively about disrupting journalism education.

Pretty sure he would agree with this, but I'd like to add my own two items.

1. Every j-school student operates their own server. A requirement. Installs software to run a linkblog, river of news, and whatever else they want.

2. Every undergrad, no matter what their major, is required to take a semester of journalism. Today's students are going into a world where blogging is something many if not all educated people will be doing, for a lifetime. Prepare them to do it well. Write a story that grabs the readers' attention and holds it. Learn how to interview someone. Learn how to listen (that is actually a skill that can be taught, btw). The importance of multiple sources. How to care for the Internet (especially important for future VCs).

A good education is also about enriching the society our students will live in. This is important. And the writers, the humanists, not being scared of the technology, and not be intimidated by geeks, is essential for a well-running world.

Like Jarvis I don't believe in turning writers into programmers, unless they have a gift for both (some do). But I do insist on attacking the fear of technology head-on. Give the students the kind of experience with a server that a med student has with a cadaver. Everything they learn about this will help them, but the most important thing is to take the fear out.

And for crying out loud the kids should learn when they're being bullshitted and how not to be full of shit. That's the point of #2.

 6/18/2012; 1:19:15 PM.

Recitals.

1. We're about to go into a presidential campaign season like none before, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling that said there were no limits on the money super-rich people can give to fund campaigns of political candidates.

2. Where will that money go? Into TV advertising. Huge amounts of it.

3. Not just for the presidential race, for congressional and local elections too.

Okay this is digusting. To watch a small number of insulated and opinionated people with really perverse sense of their own importance (they are human, not gods, and they get sick and die like the rest of us), basically undermine the last vestiges of popular power in the US.

But wait, the laws are still on the books. We don't have to vote for the candidates they want us to. If we don't, then they have to find another more visible, illegal way to hijack the political process.

So what if we don't watch the ads? What then?

Well, change, for one thing. The price of the ads will drop. The TV networks, who have been pumping up the candidates who raise the most money, greedily anticipating their coffers filling with the cash, would have to re-think their business models. Goodbye Blitzer and Madow. Reverend Al and Billow.

Now, without ads to tell you who to vote for, you'd have to find the information some other way. That, in itself could be pretty revolutionary.

 6/18/2012; 9:01:10 AM.