Professor and former reporter Alexa Capeloto, writing for PBS.org’s MediaShift, says that the textbooks used in high school and college journalism classes don’t reflect the latest advances in digital media.

Capeloto cites the case of SF State journalism Professor Rachele Kanigel, who just updated her 180-page text The Student Newspaper Survival Guide. The original came out in 2006 and she updated it for 2010 with mentions of Twitter and smartphones. But her publication deadline was too late for Google+, a platform that has a lot of potential for student journalists.

“A one-year turnaround between writing and publication is no big deal if the subject is history or literature, but it is a lifetime in today’s fast-changing media landscape, and it means books can sometimes seem outdated almost as soon as they hit the market,” writes Capeloto, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/City University of New York.