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Fears of a Journalism ProfessorQ. “I feel like I’m teaching [my students] something that will be as useful as Sanskrit when they graduate. . . . [E]very morning I read stories about how huge, venerable newspapers will likely be shuttered by the end of the year, and it absolutely freaks me out. . . . I feel horribly guilty, wondering what will become of them.”
A. “It is not your job to guarantee them stable employment. I’m not even sure that stable employment is good for young journalists. Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless. If they know nothing about what it is like to be powerless themselves, they may come to exercise their considerable power on behalf of the already powerful. . . . So I do not think it is such a terrible thing that your journalism students are entering an uncertain world. It’s the kind of world that is ripe for enterprising journalists. It is the kind of world that needs to be reported on and explained.”
—Cary Tennis, advice columnist, Slate.com Click here.
Editorial Comment: What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?
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Thank you for picking up on this. As a journalist straight out of grad school it gives me some hope that journalism 10 years will benefit from what people like me are experiencing today.
ReplyDeleteI used to feel that way, but no longer. The decline of newspapers is why there needs to be MORE journalism education, especially in high school, for all students. Like studying history or philosophy, I think studying journalism helps students develop a certain way of thinking. Our university has something called The Six Learning Goals of the Baccalaureate and it is all about being a critical thinker who is engaged in society. All six of those goals are exactly the kind of education you get in a good journalism program. Many students who earn architecture degrees do not become architects, either, but I don't think their professors feel guilty. A rigorous journalism program teaches students to think critically and write clearly. Doesn't seem "as useful as Sanskrit" to me.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Hope that critical thinking about what passes for news is an essential skill for all students, not just journalism majors. As mainstream news media erode, their standards are slipping and commercial bias is growing stronger. The new providers of news on the Web and elsewhere range from terrific to terrible. As Brooke Gladstone pointed out recently on Bill Moyer's Journal, we are in an age of "buyer beware" for news. SUNY - Stony Brook is now trying to teach every undergraduate news literacy. They are pioneering something important.
ReplyDeleteHey, don't knock Sanskrit! Kiss my vedas!
ReplyDeleteKrishna
I have to make a sound from the peanut gallery. Cary Tennis is wrong. Powerlessness is an important experience for a journalist to draw on, but generally they'll have that before they delve into journalism (one would hope). In fact, ideally, the feeling of powerlessness is what propels young people into journalism. This is certainly an uncertain world that needs to be reported, but I can't imagine Mr. Tennis expects journalists to trudge along at substandard wages and effectively give voice to the powerless. Ideally journalists will know the experience of the marginalized of their society intimately, but we should not expect them to accept the position of powerlessness the news industry has carved for them. In fact, we should expect them to push back, on behalf of themselves and all those marginalized and told that they should work on the cheap, be happy where they are or just expect that hard work will pay itself off.
ReplyDeleteTwitter 101?
ReplyDeleteI taught an adjunct journalism class at the University of Central Florida last week. I told the students about my years in the print media as a reporter and editor, suggesting this might be better suited for a history class (a few laughs). Then one student asked, “When you were a reporter, how did you go about asking a parent who lost a child in a tragic accident how they felt?” The link of real journalism remains intact.
ReplyDeleteA back atcha for Hope in Washington: I'd like to see your university's Learning Goals.
ReplyDeleteTed
This is why I've always envied art teachers. There's practically no chance anybody's going to "get a good art job" with a degree from even the
ReplyDeletebest art school.
This (journalism school) isn't an employment agency; it's where you get the best liberal arts education available. Learn to find information,
think, anayze, and write the results so that anyone can understand! With all that you want a job guarantee too?
Phooey! (to quote Nero Wolfe).
--hodges
Journalism skills will always be useful. I graduated from the University of Florida, with a degree in News-Editorial journalism in the sixties. The skills have served me well as a free-lance writer, and many other ways it's necessary to get to the truth of what's happening, and put those words together in a way that anyone can understand. My photojournalism class, taught by the great Buddy Davis, set the bar for taking good photographs.
ReplyDeleteTed,
ReplyDeleteLet me add my view to that of Cary Tennis. I wanted nothing more than to be a daily newspaper reporter for the first 35 years of my life. I graduated from the News-Ed program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and worked at dailies in Michigan for more than 10 years. And when the opportunity presented itself I used VA money from four years in the Navy to get a masters degree and a Ph.D. From there I went into various kinds of communication-related corporate work at such giants as GM, Weyerhaeuser, and AT&T—the usual suspects. And here’s what I discovered. Once you’re trained as an ink-stained wretch there’s very little you can’t do, any where, any time, in corporate America. Various execs I worked with, and for, were in awe of my ability to synthesize reams of complex information into a few basic concepts, then write my findings in hours, or even minutes, rather than days, weeks or months, and do it in plain, readable English that normal people could understand without having to wade through line after line of business-speak.
So I hope that that worried journalism professor will stay with it , knowing that, as Tennis says, there’s lots to do, and you don’t necessarily have to do it at a print newspaper. There will always be a market for clear thinking and clear writing.
Dan
I'm with you, Dan. As I tell my students, it doesn't matter which pencil you use--journalism is journalism, and the skills and attitudes about engagement and responsibility are portables down whatever career path chooses them.
ReplyDeleteThe enduring market for clear thinking and writing I have to take on faith, however. How well and completely the public keeps itself informed is less clear to me, now that more of the responsibility for making sense of the world falls on them instead of on a few news outlets. There is certainly much more information out there, but vetting it is hard work.
In the first ecstatic responses to the "information superhighway," and all the wonders the brave new electronic world would bring, some--like former New York Times TV critic Les Brown in an essay we titled "The Paradox of Democracy"--worried about the effects of so many sources of information. When everyone could select her own versions of news and information, would people lose common ground? where, he asked, would society be able to get together and talk?
So, like you and others who comment here, I think there's more, not less, need and demand for the kind of information-gathering and sense-making that journalists do. A lot more noise in the channel these days, though.
Ted