Part 1: Interview with David Perlmutter, director of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication

David D. Perlmutter is the new director of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication effective June 30. He comes to Iowa from the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. Perlmutter is author of several books, including "Blog Wars." Watch him on The Daily Show. He explores the historical context of online social media, politics and society at PolicyByBlog. He also writes an academic careers column, P & T Confidential, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The following is an interview with Perlmutter conducted in May. This is the first of four excerpts. (The telephone interview transcript has been edited for publication.)

Q. How should journalism schools prepare students for the changes under way in the field?

A. At schools of journalism and mass communication, and I want to stress the mass communication part, we don’t know where our students will be working tomorrow, or five years from now. They may be working in communications at the White House, they may be working in communications for the Sierra Club, they may be working in communications for Exxon Mobil or they may be a reporter in New Hampshire.

The key is we want to provide graduates who are adaptable, flexible, not only in their mental state and their cognitive abilities, but also their technological skill sets. A parent might ask me, “What job will my so or daughter get?” and I say, “I have no idea” because I don’t know what are going to be the jobs five years from now. The jobs that our students are going to have 10 years from now, maybe we don’t even know what their titles are, they haven’t even been invented yet. That adaptability is the Swiss Army knife model of getting ready for the future: if you need to be a screwdrivers, you can be a screwdriver, if you need to be a magnifying glass, fine, I can do that, too.

It used to be 20, 30 years ago, when I first went to a school of journalism and mass communication; we trained somebody to be the camera guy. The person, it was usually men because the video cameras were big and heavy, would get a job at a TV news station and be the person who filmed at the scene. They maybe skipped between stations, but pretty much they’d be doing the same thing for 30 years. Now, I don’t know if the camera guy and woman needs to be an editor needs to be able to do on-air, needs to be able to put up stuff on the Web site, needs to do the Facebook page.

Again, that’s adaptability and a willingness to learn new things, that’s going to be the most important training that we give them.

Q. What needs to change in journalism schools?

A. I’m pretty proud of schools of journalism and mass communication, we adapt. Let’s face it, if I go into a classroom and say, “OK, I’m going to tell you about the latest thing in mass media and it’s called the Internet, maybe you’ve heard about it," I’d be laughed out of the room. My students are spending two hours a day on Facebook. I’d better be telling them about Facebook and what’s coming after Facebook.

Schools of journalism, more than any other place in the whole university, have to adapt or we become laughable and irrelevant. The pressure is on us as much as it is on students and on media themselves. Twenty years ago schools of journalism and mass communication were less concerned with technology because we assumed students would learn a lot of that technology on the job quickly. We were more concerned with critical thinking, strong writing skills, strong visual communication skills.

Now, we certainly need to do all the old things very well. Yes, our students should be able to write well, be able to tell stories in images and words, they should be ethical, they should be very knowledgeable about the history of communications. They should do all these things well, but I sense we can’t assume that they’re just going to learn the technology later, we have to train them.

I do believe we need to increase strongly the technological component, whether its Flash, video editing, how to put up a Facebook page, all the different kinds of technology out there, we need to do more of it. I think the students want it, and I think the industry wants it.

Twenty years ago, we were concerned about producing students who would get a job in the media industry. But now, I don’t think its necessarily the case that all of our students are going to be working for some media company somewhere. I think a lot of our students are going to be working for themselves or they’ll be permanent freelancers. They’ll get income from media companies but they won’t officially be employees, they will be competing against other freelancers, or they’ll be banding together with other people to do start-up companies.

One of our challenges is to ratchet up the entrepreneurial training of journalism school students and think more in terms of adding value to themselves to either own companies, rather than just thinking of were can I get a job with somebody else.