While there is a lot of “junk info” on Twitter – I would argue that there is also some good stuff. Communities of professional experts, (including journalists and academics, which I happen to follow), have grown up within Twitter, and these are useful sources with a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Some of that info could be used by reporters to discover trends and story ideas and get a read on what folks are talking about, just like my journalism professors used to recommend hanging out at coffee shops and local diners.

I may be misunderstanding what you mean by “communication” but I think that the tools the Web offers us to engage the audience will actually produce better journalism and bring our enduring values to life more than ever by helping make our work more accurate, relevant, and complete.

I agree with you about the combining of various platforms into “journalism,” and we’re doing that at my university. But I’m at least equally concerned about a trend (which began long ago) that I view as negative: away from “journalism” and toward “communication.”

And while my students and I are bloggers (and I incorporate blogs into my journalism classes), I am less enamored with Twitter–which I see as an offshoot of that “communication” trend. Not everything that can be said is worth saying, or is worthy of attention.

For example, last week when I asked a group of j-students about something in our local newspaper, almost none knew what I was talking about–but they almost all could share some meaningless junk info that they’d picked up that day (that hour, that minute, that second…) on Twitter.

For instance, my university, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, merged its news-editorial (print journalism) and broadcasting majors this year.

For those of us already in the program – speaking as a senior news-ed major – we’re grandfathered in.

So while I’m glad the college is taking steps forward for incoming students, what needs to be done to give today’s sophomores/juniors/seniors a badly needed wake-up call?

I know my rude awakening about my narrowly focused skill-set came about a year ago. Since then, I’ve spent as much time as possible learning audio/video editing programs, getting involved in new social media, etc. I’ve made decent progress, though I always feel like I’m playing catch-up. (Then again, it’s that feeling that drives me to be constantly learning.)

So what’s my point?

I’m not saying that our students are terrible, by any means. (Many are darn good.) But I worry that many of our current students – not necessarily our incoming ones – will learn too late that being good just isn’t good enough anymore.