The 1 thing every journalism professor should do

…is give class credit to any student who gets published during the semester.

I had a former professor and Inquirer writer Tom Gibbons speak my “Journalism and Trauma” class (one of my favorites, taught by Pulitzer Prize winner Jim MacMillan). In the lecture, he said he often gave students extra credit for getting published.

Why isn’t this done more often?

This would help combat reason #4 in my “Confessions of a Journalism Student” post, where students are often forced to choose between doing work for an internship/school paper and doing work for class.

Now, I understand not enacting this policy if you are teaching the class to write features and they are only getting hard news published.

But for more general writing and journalism classes, why not?