Following our earlier discussion on the legitimacy problem of the communication studies in Taiwan, we now turn our attention to the pedagogical problems associated with the teaching models in the journalism discipline. In this paper we proposed to examine how the course of news reporting and editing was taught and whether the teaching needed to be reshuffled.
We first chose 12 textbooks on the subject of news reporting and editing, published both in Chinese and in English, and used them as our shooting target. We analyzed the contents of these textbooks and found they, generally speaking, contained a pretty much similar pattern. For example, they all included topics such as "what is news," "what is news value," "how to write a lead," "what is the structure of a news story," etc. In other words, from the analysis of these highly used textbooks in the schools of journalism we may generalized that the teaching of news reporting and editing has been practically oriented and therefore lacks theoretical or abstract meanings.
If this picture is true across all the schools of journalism, then no wonder some people in the academic world have been busy on criticizing that the discipline should be re-structured if it still hopes to stay in university to be qualified as part of the "intellectual world."
A new method of teaching news reporting and writing was then proposed in this paper and later I also discussed the ways to integrate theoretical thinking in the practical learning. Finally, this paper argues that it is important for the journalism teachers to realize that the discipline does not have to be professionally oriented because there have been many research literature available in other areas which may be useful for our teaching.