Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Studying at USC: The Annenberg Advantage

While an education rich in the humanities and a love for writing was all one might have needed for a career in journalism in the past, these days the future reporters and producers of the world need training and guidance to stay competitive in a crowding field.

Enter the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. Located in the heart of Los Angeles, the Annenberg School offers one of the top programs for aspiring journalists.

Like many journalism programs, Annenberg has a distinguished faculty as well as multiple platforms for students to gain experience. An education at Annenberg, like many other schools, has a foundation in the basics. Courses for journalism majors require students to spend an entire semester improving their writing skills. Subsequent terms build off of this to improve their reporting and production abilities. Together, these three components make up the Annenberg Convergence Core Curriculum. Unique to USC, the broadcast and print sequences have students study each other’s style as well as the online medium. This portion of the major pushes students head first into the program and gives them the skills needed to become more than proficient in all three formats and some of the best in the business for their selected method.

The Annenberg School’s decision to be one of the first to embrace the changing landscape of journalism education has not gone unnoticed.

Back in March of 2002, Steve Outing spotlighted the fact that Annenberg was one of the first schools to take this big step forward in Editor and Publisher Online. Larry Pryor, a professor at USC, helped implement the online portion of “the core” at Annenberg. On the site he founded with USC Annenberg, the Online Journalism Review, he explains the success and weaknesses of the program. As the program improves, other schools stand to gain from USC’s pioneering move. “I admire them for their efforts,” Paul Grabowicz says. As the New Media Program Director at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, he responds to Pryor’s article explaining that some schools cannot afford to implement a program like USC chose to. His advice to those unable to fit the bill is to wait and see until a more reassuring approach can be identified. In the end, Grabowicz believes that everyone will benefit from the lessons learned at USC.

This leads to another point. As a private research university, USC had the resources to take on such a change. The Annenberg School’s endowment alone is around $180 million. This allows for state of the art equipment in addition to the innovative curriculum.

Lastly, since the university was founded in 1880, it has taken great pride in its location, Los Angeles. The city is what places Annenberg in a league of its own from other great programs in Austin, TX; Pullman, WA or Columbia, MO. Some top programs may be located close to major media markets like Chicago, San Francisco, or Washington, DC but Los Angeles is without a doubt the media capital of the world. Two schools in the city deemed the “news capital of the world,” New York, either offer only graduate degrees in journalism or have a small program unable to offer other great resources unrelated to location. No other university has a J-School and setting that complement each other so well. Los Angeles, the country’s second largest TV market and the world’s media hub; is at USC students’ footsteps.

Altogether, the curriculum and faculty, student resources, as well as location create an Annenberg advantage found no where else.

No comments: