The Ancient Argument

This discussion has been going on for a hundred years, since Missouri and Columbia first opened their doors. Have good journalists come out of the University of Missouri and Columbia University over the years?

I would rather hear from editors who have come out of journalism programs. Those who have not can hardly be objective about this subject. Their comments only ratify their belief that the proper path to success (their own) is non-journalism education.

In more than 50 years of association with journalism schools and newspaper and broadcast news editors, I have discovered that, as the saying goes, they prefer blondes, but marry brunettes. The smaller stations and smaller newspapers (which feed, eventually, the larger ones) hire journalism graduates in preference to liberal arts graduates. The exception is Ivy League schools that offer no undergraduate journalism education, but give extremely good experience through a campus daily. But Ivy League schools cannot provide the numbers that national media demand.

I have an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League school and two graduate degrees in journalism, so I think I know what I am talking about. I wish this article had quoted just a few persons who had similar experience.

— Ralph Lowenstein Dean EmeritusUniversity of Florida

Ralph Lowenstein, Dean Emeritus at University of Florida, at 11:20 am EST on January 10, 2008

Still a Liberal Arts Snob

My old alma mater Knox College did a great job of selling me on the value of a liberal arts education back in the early 70’s when I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what I might do for a career. I have taught journalism at the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas for the past 35 years. That has allowed me to continue my liberal arts snobbery.

Mizzou, KU and all other accredited j-schools require at least 90 hours of liberal arts courses in addition to the journalism hours. So to suggest a j-school degree doesn’t include a liberal arts education is nonsense.

Consider this. Knox and its liberal arts approach supposedly taught me to think critically, analyze, problem solve, and communicate with both the spoken and written word. That is exactly what I have been teaching in reporting for the past 35 years. And by the way, we make our students do all that under deadline pressure. Perhaps we teach the liberal arts better than the liberal arts teachers.

Max Utsler, University of Kansas, at 12:30 pm EST on January 10, 2008

Public confidence in...

The President: 34% The Congress: 25%The News Media: 23%

It seems those “traditional route” journalists haven’t exactly been setting the world on fire. Supplementing the media ranks with more j-school grads may or may not help, but they certainly couldn’t do any worse.

Dennis Alexander, TCU, at 12:35 pm EST on January 10, 2008

journalism schools

This whole conversation seems rather strange as it is predicated on false notion that jobs on newspapers matter to most undergraduates in journalism schools. The fact is that overwhelmingly these students aspire to jobs in graphic design, aspects of the Web and the Internet that have little to do with practicing daily newspaper journalism, broadcasting, public relations, advertising, business, and other fields far afield from newspaper journalism. So, if anyone is going to discuss the future of these schools this conversation has to be broadened considerably.

Gene I. Maeroff, Senior Fellow Teachers College, Columbia UniversityFormer director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media

Gene I. Maeroff, Teachers College, Columbia University, at 1:50 pm EST on January 10, 2008

Is Journalism education important and useful in careers? Absolutely. I’m from that other Big Ten University in Michigan, Michigan State, and we do have an accredited School of Journalism and an award winning, highly respected, independent campus newspaper, The State News. Most of the editors, reporters and photographers on the newspaper are J-School majors. There is a synergy there, a way for students to take their classroom taught skills and immediately put them to use and expand them by working on the newspaper or the online magazine The Big Green (www.thebiggreen.net) or our TV news magazine Focal Point or the edgy www.spartanedge.com. These students are also highly coveted interns and become reporters, editors and producers at news organizations across the country and the world. I earned an undergraduate degree in journalism and started my career at a major metropolitan daily. When I took a job teaching journalism at a regional university, a close friend and colleague asked me if I wasn’t taking money under false pretenses because how could you teach journalism in a classroom? Three years later I recruited him to teach a class part-time, and it made him a true believer. We face enormous challenges as we, too, with our aging faculty have to learn (and teach) the new skills the industry needs to address the seismic changes in news delivery. This year’s freshmen were born the year the web was created. They are savvy, smart and will define the future of the industry. Will journalism survive? If it doesn’t, can democracy or this republic? Higher ed has, just as reluctantly and timidly as many industries, recognized the enormity of the cultural change wrought by the Internet and Web. In my view, journalism educators need to create the possibilities, and the potential is enormous.

Jane Briggs-Bunting, DIrector, School of Journalism at Michigan State University, at 2:40 pm EST on January 10, 2008

J schools

I’d be more willing to think journalism schools are useful if I saw journalism professors engaged in an industry desperately seeking relevant research and insight on how to proceed. Business schools are bulging with folks offering practical advice and best practices to spread. The Poynter Institute has become the Harvard Business School for serious journalists because journalism schools are absent. If they are not adding to the body of knowledge necessary to sustain the craft in its hour of need, or decades before, how can journalism schools be preparing the journalists of the future?Them that can’t, teach?

Kevin McKenzie, newspaper reporter, at 3:20 pm EST on January 10, 2008

Revivind the J school...

I didn’t know that there was so much controversy regarding how to learn “who,", “how,” “when,” “where,” and “why.”

Greg Bonkowski, at 6:10 pm EST on January 10, 2008

what j-schools should do

After more than 30 years teaching journalism — 20 of them full-time at Columbia — I offer two observations and a challenge:

1. J-school is useful for many who wish to enter the field. Many others can do without it. It all depends on their overall educational background, personality, and opportunity for meaningful alternative, on-the-job training. Prospective students still call me, and I still surprise them by asking about those issues before offering advice. Honest admissions directors would do the same. I got my J-school MS after a BS in physics, by the way. It was worth it to me!

2. Too many media organizations demand perfection in journalism “mechanics” from prospective new hires. To the extent we teach that, while excluding broader knowledge and even the journalism-specific skills we believe will be needed just a few years down the road, we do a disservice. One obvious example: Spreadsheet and data skills are common in news organizations today. That all started with a half-dozen of us, mainly in academia, 30 years ago.

Here’s the challenge: Yesterday’s news was full of mea culpas on New Hampshire polling. Fact is, constructing the New Hampshire sample to poll was especially difficult. The population has shifted since 2000, the last primary year there with a big turnout. Fewer people, especially young and urban, use landline phones. Each party had more than two credible candidates. The “undecided” column was HUGE a few days before the election. Anyone who understood the mechanics of all of this would have been far more careful on election night. It was clear to me watching that the network TV “talent” was near-uniformly clueless about how the numbers were put together. Some J-schools teach that. On-the-job training rarely does. Can we commit to fixing this before the primaries render the issue moot for another few years?

Steve Ross, editor at Broadband Properties, at 8:00 pm EST on January 10, 2008

Still undecided after all these years.

I have an undergraduate degree in journalism from Washington & Lee and a graduate degree in journalism from University of Missouri — Columbia. Yet I am still undecided about the worth of a “formal” journalism education. I like the point about “we have to depend on journalism schools since the small to medium sized dailies that used to teach the craft are disappearing.” However, journalism is a craft, and a craft is best learned on the job, not a classroom. The role of journalism — and the role of J-schools — has definitely been muddied by the rise of blogs. There are some bloggers doing a great job of journalism, even though they have not been trained as journalists and did not go to J-school. So what is the best path for aspiring journalists? Like the profession, I really don’t know.

Nick Wreden, CEO at FusionBrand, at 9:45 pm EST on January 10, 2008

J-Schools can teach the the three golden rules my first editor told me: “Accuracy, accuracy and accuarcy.” (Oops).

Dr Greg Smith, Lecturer at Edith Cowan University, at 5:20 am EST on January 11, 2008

changing times

My first university offered me a scholarship but not a journalism degree; I borrowed money to get an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. I have mixed feelings about this issue.

Many workplaces now require a new employee to have some sort of university degree. If a person knows he wants to be a journalist, why shouldn’t a journalism degree be offered to him?

As newspapers change with the times, many of them downsizing, the ability to take on inexperienced reporters has changed. There aren’t enough jobs to go around, and there aren’t enough staff to be able to mentor them. Many people are taking on the workload of two or three people. So while it’s fine to say hands-on experience is preferred to a degree, I think the opportunities for that kind of experience are waning in newsrooms all over the world. The few jobs that are left need to be filled by people who know what they’re doing.

My workplace would be more likely to accept an intern from a local university than someone off the street who wanted to work for free, and one of the reasons would be that the university coordinates everything and even insures the students if something happens. But even then, we can only take interns for a few weeks each year. Speaking from experience, it is much harder to properly supervise and instruct an intern or beginning reporter in a short-staffed office than a robust one.

I paid quite a bit for my second degree (and will be paying it off for years to come). For professional development, I think it was absolutely worth it, and I think the world of Mizzou. But my university credentials aren’t really recognised in Australia, where I now live; employers know nothing of Missouri and care only about my experience. And the fact that it’s an advanced degree doesn’t seem to make a difference either.

Erin Lewis, Chief of Staff at Star News Group, Melbourne, Australia, at 5:20 am EST on January 11, 2008

American Society Needs Us Now!

Thanks for the fine piece on “Reviving the J-School” and thanks, too, to the many fine professionals (in academe and still in the “real” world) for the passionate defense of journalism education. I left a very successful career in television news to teach journalism because I was increasingly disappointed with the quality of the news we were delivering to our audience each night. Consultants had taken my station down the same road so many have traveled, deep into the meaningless murk of infotainment. I came to the academy hoping to become a subversive agent, seeking to inspire promising young journalists to wage war against the demeaning forces of commercialization and strive to do real reporting. I believe we owe no less to our society today, when government leaders practice drastic deception to take us into war, and major corporations buy concessions from government that feed their greed and punish America’s workforce. To examine these serious issues, journalists need well-developed, basic journalistic skills in reporting and writing (and presentation, in the case of broadcast news). And, it seems to me, they need to know how to do the job across all news delivery platforms. Journalism programs and schools can give them that, in a relatively short period of time.And while we’re teaching them to shoot layups and dribble, we have the opportunity to instill in them a set of professional standards and ethics that will influence the quality of journalism they contribute to society when they enter the workplace. Yes, we need journalism education—if it’s focused on the old-fashioned idea of serving the public, informing them about issues and events that affect their lives. Thanks again for stimulating this discussion and keeping us all aware of why we exist.

Mark Kelley, Director of Journalism at New England School of Communications, at 12:00 pm EST on January 11, 2008

Value of J education

One of the things I teach in my editing classes is to challenge statements such as the following: “(since many journalists, and most senior ones, don’t have journalism degrees).” It’s pretty vague—how much is “many?” And what does “senior” mean? If I had stayed in the newspaper industry, I’d be one of those senior folks, and I have a handful of degrees, including journalism. I know quite a few in my age and experience cohort also had J degrees. So I guess more research is needed.I’ve watched this debate for a couple of decades, starting before I got a doctorate and moved into academia. It’s always struck me as a false dichotomy. Journalism education, even specific technical education, helps students get hired and probably more so today. There is some research supporting that claim. Liberal arts education also helps students become better journalists. That’s pretty obvious. Many of us advise students to double major, which they can do in most J programs. And actual experience completes the picture—through campus publications and internships.Yet for some reason, the debate goes on. Go figure.

John Russial, Associate professor, at 3:45 pm EST on January 11, 2008

The role of j-schools

A few years ago, I was chatting with my friend Mark Deuze, author of the recent book “Media Work” (http://books.google.com/books?id=kK6j4M400mcC), and I found myself saying something to him that really bothered me AFTER I had said it. It was something like this:

We have to teach the journalism students the old ways of doing things, even though we do not believe they are the best ways, because we must prepare the students to get jobs in today’s newsrooms. The people who make the hiring decisions in the newsroom are steeped in the old ways. If the students don’t know the old and familiar methods, they will never get a job.

Immediately after I had said this, I started thinking about how wrong it is.

In the j-school, we can be visionaries. We can reach for the stars, and encourage the students to reach beyond their grasp.

Why don’t we do that?

It does not take two whole years to teach the students to write an inverted pyramid and cover a public meeting, you know.

Mindy McAdams, Professor, Journalism at University of Florida, at 12:05 pm EST on January 13, 2008

Reviving J-schools

And so it goes. . .

Thank you for your report on Wednesday’s meeting of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. The report suggests to me that this purported future-oriented meeting revisited the ages-old debate about the value vs. non-value of journalism programs and arrived only at the conclusion, articulated by Alberto Ibarguen, that j-schools “ought to be real hotbeds” of experimentation, a sentiment Mindy McAdams echoes when she says, ”In the j-school, we can be visionaries.”

There is no shortage of great ideas for new media ventures at my place of employment – the Department of Journalism at Central Michigan University, one of Michigan’s two accredited programs, many of whose students work on the award-winning campus newspaper, Central Michigan Life. CMU is a regional institution whose journalism program has approx. 3,000 graduates, many of whom work in the Michigan media but others in organizations such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Business Week, New York University and elsewhere.

But it seems to me that the journalism program at Central Michigan University and at similar institutions nationwide have one handicap – the lack of financial resources to implement their vision, or rather, to help entrepreneurial students implement their vision. Were the media industries, or even the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to contribute to the start-up of student-originated and –run e-zines, for example, the program’s students already would have implemented part of their vision. Our students have the passion, the ability and the drive to experiment, to try new things, to envision the future. What they have lacked until recently was access to the toys and gadgets (technology – videocameras, adequate software and hardware, etc.) necessary to empower their experimentation. Regrettably, the Knight News Challenge grants did not accommodate requests for funding to purchase the needed tools. A recent gift from a prominent Detroit alumnus and the infusion of money from the university’s administration have just made it possible for the department to acquire the necessary technology.

Where are the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation when departments such as ours need them? It seems to me that their money is going to the already wealthy, to the Ivy Leagues and the flagship state institutions and to sessions engaging in needless dialogue on what Ralph Lowenstein’s headline suggests is “the ancient argument.” Units such as the CMU program produce graduates who are like the Ford Focus or the Toyota Corolla or entry-level media practitioners. They are reliable, are capable of getting from A to B, have a strong work ethic and are sound, and they may well move to being the Cadillacs or the Lexuses of national and international media. But it is rare that they can start out at either: They have not graduated from Ivy League or flagship institutions. In an age when state appropriations for higher education are diminishing, they have not, short of the generosity of a kindly benefactor, had the toys and gadgets with which to experiment. . .

It is surely at institutions such as CMU that Knight and Carnegie dollars could best be used. A Knight-sponsored Newspapers-in-Residence Program grant through the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication/Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication enormously benefited this department some years ago, enabling us to team up with a multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper whose reporters, editors and photojournalists made significant contributions to this program. A Hearst Foundation endowment for Visiting Professionals has enabled us to continue the tradition of bringing excellent practitioners to campus. Without such funding, it would be impossible for this unit to bring in professionals from outside of Michigan. I extend an invitation to both Alberto Ibarguen and Vartan Gregorian to visit the CMU Department of Journalism to observe a regional program in action and to meet with students, faculty, and members of our professional and alumni advisory boards to learn firsthand about our program.

Without external funding, it is impossible for programs such as ours to do anything other than cover the curricular basics. Many students at institutions such as ours work two and three jobs just to put themselves through college. Were Knight or Carnegie to provide grants enabling departments such as ours to fund students for employment in start-up, experimental online media, then our students may be able to (a) have more time to brainstorm for innovative ideas, (b) forego a part-time position at Applebee’s or McDonald’s for work in innovative campus media, and © have cutting-edge online skills when they graduate. Right now, the department is pinching pennies to facilitate a webmaster and students to develop an e-zine. Central Michigan Life, which on average has a student workforce of approx. 70 in all aspects of news editorial, photojournalism, advertising sales, and online, cannot accommodate all of the department’s interested majors and minors. But CM Life offers paid positions to students. The Department of Journalism, which lacks the resources to pay students for their co-curricular work, needs external funding if it is to offer increasing numbers of interested students additional and/or alternative opportunities in new media.

If Knight and Carnegie want to spend some dollars usefully, please consider contributing to programs with limited fiscal resources and passionate students and faculty in areas representing institutional, geographic, and other forms of diversity. And please ensure that there is dialogue with the relevant journalism/mass communication leadership organizations, particularly with the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, and others such as the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Thank you, Maria B. Marron Chair Department of Journalism Central Michigan University and Vice President, Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication

Maria B. Marron, Professor and Chair at Central Michigan University, at 11:35 am EST on January 14, 2008