Teaching the future of journalism

Professors can’t lecture about the future, says Tim McGuire, who holds a chair in the business of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. But he plans to teach his students this fall about the business models of media and how the tension between producing quality journalism and making a profit might shape the future of the media. He has posted his syllabus online, complete with links to a lot of online readings. In it he writes, “We will try to understand where the media is headed amid this mind-boggling change. We will try to develop our own ideas about those future content and business models.”