Why a new approach needed for media education to make it relevant today?

When the career paths were charted, print journalists wrote the country's first draft of history, broadcasters brought the globe into homes, and advertising creatives shaped culture through jingles, there was a time. Now, those so-safely trodden ways are disappearing fast. The media industry, once a mirror of power and stability, stands on shaky ground. Digital disruption, Artificial Intelligence, declining public trust, and crumbling business models have turned the profession on its head. And most media education in India still looks eerily the same as it did two decades ago.

The truth is painful but inevitable — Indian media education is out of date, disjointed, and perilously out of touch with reality. Unless colleges carry on using outdated textbooks and serial models of communication, they will be sending out young graduates unprepared for an industry already operating on data, algorithms, and crisis of credibility. The times require a new type of media professional: one who is flexible, moral, multi-tasking, and technologically skilled.

Then comes unlearning. The previous system was for the era when newspapers were the sole thing and Doordarshan dictated the national agenda. Advertising during that time meant full-page advertisements, and public relations meant faxed press releases. The course was tuned to that static reality — in tidy boxes of "Print Journalism," "Radio Production," or "Television Editing."

But that siloed paradigm doesn't exist anymore. News gets released first on X (formerly Twitter), gets amplified through rapid videos on Instagram, and analyzed on podcasts or YouTube in hours. Audiences no longer sit back to watch — they participate, ask, and create. But yet, our students are being taught to work for yesterday's newsroom, not the digital environment of tomorrow.

A 2025 course titled Print Media-I is not just old-fashioned; it's deceptive. It prepares students for a diminishing world, one in which print incomes have fallen off a cliff and linear television commercials have reached their peak. In its 2024 report, FICCI-EY had said digital media incomes overtook TV for the first time at INR 802 billion. That transformation isn't merely financial; it's societal. It is the beginning of a new order of information wherein attention of the audience, and not airtime, becomes the benchmark of worth.

To go on teaching print-focused curricula is to mislead young ambitions to acquire skills for a labor market that no longer exists — or exists in much smaller numbers. Universities need to see that the economy of the media has shifted online and with it the meaning of narrative, of promotion, and of credibility itself.

Artificial Intelligence hasn't merely automated the tasks — it's disrupted the value proposition of skills in every news desk and communications agency. AI can now produce first-cut drafts of reports, edit out video, create ad campaigns, and even monitor audience behavior patterns in real time. What it can't do, though, is replace human judgment — the skill to balance ethics, subtlety, and compassion.

It is exactly here that future media professionals need to carve their niche — not as replacement machines but as complements. Rather than teaching students how to carry out mechanical functions such as writing copy or building press lists, media schools should equip them to be strategists, analysts, and ethical decision-makers.

AI literacy needs to be as basic as language literacy. Not just how to operate AI tools but how to audit them — how to recognize bias, check facts, and run it through ethical filters. Technology-enabling journalism must remain grounded in human conscience. Tomorrow's newsroom will require editors who can navigate AI workflows and yet ask the most human question of all: "Is this true?"

The Crisis of Credibility

The issue isn't technological — it's ethical. Along the way, Indian media sacrificed most of its ethics. Clicks have become more significant than searching for the truth, and sensationalism has triumphed over content. It's not a crisis of reputation — it's a crisis of existence.

Audiences today are educated and jaded. They view vast amounts of content but trust little of it. That disillusion is why even the most popular online media struggle to monetize traffic with paid subscriptions. People simply will not pay for anything they do not believe.

For teachers of media, what this implies is that ethics cannot be anymore an option paper in the third semester. It has to be built as the foundation of the curriculum. Verification, transparency, and accountability have to be taught not as ethical values but as survival skills.

Future journalists will have to learn how to authenticate online evidence, detect deepfakes, and verify sources with forensic accuracy. Fact-checking and good AI policy have to be built into every assignment, every production pipeline, and every classroom conversation. Because without trustworthiness, no technology and design magic can salvage journalism.

The Acceleration Gap

As the industry grows at a breakneck pace, academia lags. The "acceleration gap" between education and the imperative has rendered thousands of graduates jobless. The India Skills Report 2024 was a chilling wake-up call: less than half of the young job seekers have skills that match prevailing market requirements.

In education for the media, this conflict is even more compelling. Colleges prefer memorization to creativity. Students are able to recite communication theory but are unable to create a digital campaign or decipher analytics dashboards. They are able to analyze 1980s-style newsroom ethics but are stumped when it comes to moderating disinformation on social media.

In order to fill the gap, Project-Based Learning (PBL) will have to displace rote learning. There should be less class time spent listening to lectures and more spent building — operating live campaigns, creating podcasts, authoring news apps, or starting up micro-media ventures. Experience of the world in the form of structured, credit-bearing industry projects must become the rule, not the exception.

Additionally, Industry-University Collaboration (IUC) needs to be institutional, not accidental. Media companies, start-ups, and communication firms' experts need to co-design and co-teach classes. Universities need to cease perceiving the industry as unknowns and convert them into co-creators of learning.

The New Media Professional: T-Shaped and Human-Centered

The future belongs to T-shaped professionals — broad, cross-platform skills (the horizontal bar of the T) and deep knowledge of a single or double specialty (the vertical stem). A student of the media must not only understand how to write or shoot but how to read audience measurement, how to optimize digital distribution, and how to build revenue models.

This emergent professional identity requires a radical transformation of media curricula. Silos of the past — Print, Radio, TV, Advertising, PR — need to be replaced by interlinked courses in Convergence, Digital Monetization, and Strategic Communication. Undergraduate education needs to stress storytelling across platforms — text, video, podcast, data visualization — and connect every creative exercise with its business result.

Postgraduate specialization needs to extend deeper into computational journalism, strategic media entrepreneurship, and AI-enabled communication. Graduates should graduate not as job seekers but as innovators who can create their own media enterprises.

And as technology becomes more adept at handling mundane work, the uniquely human capabilities — empathy, critical thinking, creativity, and moral judgment — are the true differentiators. Media literacy should focus on these H-skills, which teach students to think critically, hear with heart, and make well-informed decisions.

Reinventing the Classroom

That change won't happen by tweaking trivial courses or rebranded electives. We must transform how we teach. Classrooms must become newsrooms, studios, and incubators. Evaluation must be based on impact and creativity, not theoretical memorization.

Instructor training is imperative. Teachers have been trained in the pre-digital age and have not been retrained to educate students on AI, analytics, or cross-platform content creation. Compulsory continuous professional development (CPD) is a requirement. Teachers are not only required to teach but should mentor and work together with students on real projects.

Infrastructure must also be revitalized. The availability of broadband internet connectivity, production software, and data visualization packages is the bare minimum facilities, not the luxury of a few select institutions. Both the government and the private sector can play an important role in making such availability feasible.

Building a Sustainable Future

The new media landscape is risky but a rich one. With declining traditional ad revenue, the business has had to innovate with new models — membership programs, crowdfunding, native advertising, and individuals engaging. Media studies need to teach students about the economics of the new systems.

The students must be taught how to think entrepreneurially and locate market niches, and construct sustainable media products around them. Teaching in audience economics, content monetization, and startups can no longer be voluntary; it is a survival skill.

Most importantly, the curriculum needs to foster ethical entrepreneurship — creating spaces that prioritize truth, inclusion, and public dialogue over salaciousness. Because the future of media will not only be about who arrives first, but who arrives with a conscience.

From Instruction to Incubation

India's media teachers have a bleak option: adapt or perish. The NEP 2020 provides a policy rationale for interdisciplinarity and flexibility — but needs to be supported by more than paperwork.

Media schools need to shift from being teaching colleges to innovation incubators. They need to gear students towards a global landscape where the half-life of skills is not more than five years and lifelong learning is the only perennial.

If done properly, this reform has the potential to produce a new generation of communicators who are both technically competent and ethical — storytellers who can work alongside AI tools without sacrificing the human touch, brand builders who can establish brands without sacrificing truth, and journalists who restore the people's trust where they have lost it.

Indian media education stands poised on the edge of being remade. The question today is not whether it should be altered — but whether it can alter swiftly enough. The future of the craft, and indeed the health of our democracy, very well may hang in the balance of how we respond to that query.