Today there are new demands for theorizing journalism and for understanding the organization of journalistic work, but most importantly, there are new demands for journalism education. The educational process must reflect and, theoretically responding to the challenges of the times, constitute a living, constant renewal of formats. This is why student media are becoming an alternative to a purely market-oriented approach for many universities.
The formation of a student media holding company is the creation of a kind of laboratory for the formation of professional qualifications. But when you think about it more, you realize: it is important not only for the students, but also for the faculty, because it is impossible to develop theory without learning about practice. However, work in the field (in editorial offices) is not always available to university professors, for whom the teaching load and research activities are now a necessary part of the educational process.
Therefore, student media is also an important component in the development of a journalism department’s human or human resource capacity.
Student media means new technological competencies for teachers and a new understanding of reality, because producing content for a student newspaper, student news – television and radio news – is a simulation of a real situation.
And for teachers it is new knowledge, without which they cannot feel themselves modern, adequate to the times.
In this difficult discussion, two traditions collide: the fundamental university tradition and the applied, managerial one, which is not always realized at the university, but the demands on the teaching process today are still changing.
The basics of journalism and the specialization in it must be learned by producing a concrete product. It is obvious that today it is no longer possible to work with our students using the old methods. They do not absorb monologue lectures well; they stop loving the profession when you recite to them the rules of journalism from professional organizations. The move toward student media should be made not only as a format for determining future professional competencies, but also as a form of getting to know the reality around students, and therefore the topics of these media should be well supervised by the instructor. Based on our understandings, it is necessary to form the agenda of educational media for mastering fundamental disciplines at university: sociology, economics, history, jurisprudence, in a word, everything that seems necessary to us.
Universities should set the task of training journalists for different political camps and for niche media. Universities should train good generalist professionals. Student media is a new form of assimilation of knowledge and a response to the market situation, to changes in students’ media literacy and forms of education. It is a transformation of educational formats. And the more we deal with students in small teams, in editorial offices, giving them controlled freedom, the better. Attention is often lost at lectures, at seminars they read essays downloaded from the Internet, and only the student newspaper and student television is an independent form of creativity and an indicator of how program knowledge has been absorbed.