What he said ...

Rob Fishman's blog on the Huffington Post is called "Old Dogs, New Media: Why J-School Apps Are Up." His comments about J School and "new media" and the demise of the current industry model are achingly familiar:

Of course, no one should blame Columbia for teaching the old ways. As has been painfully evident over the past year, no new model for journalism yet exists. Where one can fault the J-School -- and by extension, journalism as a whole -- is in its superficial embrace of "new media," understood at 116th Street as a crash-course in web design as an addendum to the regular curriculum. "New media" -- those chilling words that induce in anyone over 30 a bone-chilling sweat -- is like the Emperor's new clothes: we all pay lip service to Macromedia Flash, .html coding and RSS feeds, but no one has any real conception of how they might "save" journalism.

Jeez, it sounds a whole lot like what I've been saying—and hearing from fellow grad students—at school these days. Replace the word "Columbia" with the appropriate institution's name ... .

But Fishman doesn't explain why grad school applications for journalism schools are up. And neither can I. I can tell you my reasons for applying — I decided that a practical degree made more sense than one based in theory (I started in Communication and bailed), and figured I'd get more writing and editing work if I have a journalism M.A. after my name. Not a particularly uplifting narrative, is it?

So, if any journalism graduate students are reading this, tell me: Why did you apply to a graduate program in journalism, given the imminent demise of the reporting industry?