image from jscoopmedia.com / Alyssa Wells

Okay, so I was hoping my first jScoop blog would address something a bit more universal, but I think Malcolm Gladwell’s recent rumblings regarding formal journalism training call for immediate discussion. Here’s a snippet from Time.com’s Q&A with the illustrious journalist and book-writer:

If you had a single piece of advice to offer young journalists, what would it be?
The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

In a nutshell, I half-agree with Mr. Gladwell. Generations X, Y and Z seem to place an ever-growing premium on “expertry” as they consume content, and rightfully so. The days of the generalist are indeed long gone, antiquated by the Web and readers’ now-immediate access to the people who, quite frankly, actually understand the whole story.

Take the personal finance category, for example. A career journalist, trained in producing content alone, may start his or her vocation working the soft stories at some outlet and gradually learn the financial ins and outs along the way. But his or her contributions will rarely match the tailored insights produced by a financial professional, who studied such matters in grad or undergrad and mastered the system on the ground.

So why read/hire the befuddled journalist when you can go straight to the expert source, the hundreds of celebrated specialists littered throughout the Web? Because great journalism programs don’t just teach you about grammar and attributions. To the contrary, great programs teach you just as much about consuming as they do producing.

Products of the finest programs learn to become front-line retention marketers for their own content. They investigate their audiences, learn to entice them, develop the most sensible big-picture pitches and do nothing without reversing roles first. As simple as these practices may sound, most media power players will tell you they take years to master. And for better or worse, in today’s uber-fragmented media landscape, your ability to attract and retain readers is as invaluable to an editor as the insights you divulge.

That said, I vehemently agree with Mr. Gladwell – today’s new breed of journalist will require a pointed, educated, and proven expertise in order to attract readers and employers amid a slew of self-published insiders. But without proper training as a content provider, the best of ideas will go undoubtedly overlooked.

Most journalism programs require students to develop some sort of secondary academic concentration – history, economics, education, etc. – but maybe it’s time to move this often begrudgingly met requirement into the spotlight. And if you’ve already earned your Bachelors in journalism, consider specializing during grad school, or even during a stint inside the field you’d like to cover.

In any case, the old adage asserting journalists should become experts at becoming experts each day seems outdated, departed with the days that newspapermen determined the news. Whether in study or practice, you’ll now need to make yourself the source.