Can you imagine another college department (e.g., math, music, chemistry) saying, “We’re needed because our applicants are coming into our programs with such poor skills that without our training, they will never get jobs?”

Moving beyond this is my concern with the “Church of Journalism.” What I don’t want to hear is that we need J-schools because too many kids don’t know how to write and how to research, and because they have no concept of media ethics. If that is the reason we have J-schools, then let’s eliminate those problems by improving the skills of all students from kindergarten on.

And if there is going to be a “Church of Journalism,” perhaps it should be training “missionaries” who convert non-journalists into responsible citizen journalists. Just as the barriers are coming down between staff writers/reporters and citizen journalists, then perhaps the barriers between the reporter priesthood and their parishioners needs to disappear as well.

Do we need a professional class of journalists these days and should it have arisen in the first place? Some of our most famous journalists got into the business without having attended J-schools, so did we create a need when there wasn’t one?