I think that’s the right idea.

J-school for me was a one-semester affair, repeated for years on end. I’m fairly certain I could teach AP style and basic reporting to anyone in one semester.

It was a minor for me, but as a minor I took all but three of the classes required of majors and offered through the department. See, the university I went to relied on English grammar and lit classes to stretch things out to four years. Otherwise it would be a 12-18 month program.

What’s missing in a lot of today’s journalists (and photojournalists) is a depth of knowledge in some field other than journalism.

I’d like to see people with backgrounds in science writing science beats, and people with backgrounds in business writing business beats.

A minor in journalism should give would-be journalists enough of the basics to fit into a newsroom, and their other course(s) of study should allow them to run circles around staffers at papers who can just (barely) manage their beats.

I hear ya. I have more than $40,000 in student loans to pay back and I learned none of the journalism skills I listed above. Sure, I learned how to write, edit, about ethics and law, but I never learned any of the in-demand skills that are needed today.

But I did learn page layout, which will take me places in this industry. In fact, I was required to take a class on publication design, but the class on Web design was optional (it sucked so I skipped it).

Luckily, I have been doing Web stuff way longer than journalism, and I have attended a couple of seminars in the past year. But there is so much more to learn. I’m always trying to learn something new. Right now I am working on PHP and MySQL.