Over at Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits, Mac Slocum has posted one the most spot-on summaries I've seen yet of what it means to be a journalist in the age of Google and MySpace. He presents it as a list of three online journalism skills he wishes he had learned in school.

In brief:

1. How to be a researcher and guide: "The sheer amount of Web-based information is a double-edged sword. All this great stuff is wonderful in theory, but wading through page after page of search results is tiresome ..."
2. How to generate traffic: "This isn't a business discussion, it's a 'role' discussion. As Web journalists, we play an integral role in the creation of traffic. The more traffic we generate, the easier things get. ..."
3. How to lead and moderate communities: "A successful forum or blog relies upon a robust user community. However, these communities don't magically form. They require enormous amount of time, effort and leadership. ..."

Those three disarmingly simple bullet points neatly encapsulate all of the key demands of digital journalism today. Yes, you can -- and, in all likelihood, will -- learn them on the job but I can't argue that it'd be great if new journalists entering the field got some practical exposure to those ideas in the classroom.

(Developing multimedia skills is conspicuously absent from Slocum's list -- as it should be. Knowing how to work with video, audio and animation is definitely desirable but, frankly, they aren't nearly as fundamental to journalism today as the skills that do make his list. Indeed, you can argue that they're merely tools for meeting the goals of the first two list items.)

Slocum's inspiration for this list was a post that Medishift's Mark Glaser wrote about how contemporary journalism education remains stuck in an "oldthink" mode:

From what I learned from Ball State's administration, there are three groups of professors: those that understand the shift that is happening and are happy to figure it out; those that refuse to change their curriculum that has been set in stone for years; and those that are on the fence. The hope of administration is that the oldthink types can be moved along the path to retirement, while the middle group can be convinced to join the vanguard.

Meanwhile, the students present an interesting conundrum. I figured that they would be chomping at the bit to work in new media, as they are the digital generation born with a laptop and cell phone in their hands. David Studinski, a Ball State senior who is editor of the student newspaper, explained to me over lunch why students were as slow to embrace change as their professors.

"They use the technology all the time, they all have cell phones and they text message," he said. "But they don't take it seriously as a work thing. They think of blogging as gossip and MySpace is for fun with their friends. They don't think they could work in that type of environment as a journalist."

Now, that truly bodes ill for the future of journalism.