Destroy all silos — or perish!

Thanks to a journalist in Manila, in the Philippines, I found a fall 2007 Nieman Reports essay by Karl Idsvoog, a journalism professor at Kent State University, in Ohio. (The Internet is a wonderful thing.)

Idsvoog wrote about curriculum and a luscious new journalism building at Kent State, stuffed to the gills with technology and tools — but it’s this anecdote that sent me to my keyboard:

At a recent planning meeting, one of our brighter and more talented students listed a few potential stories, then asked the student from the school newspaper what she would put on the front page. He then posed the same question to the student representative from the TV station; how would she lead her newscast? He was demonstrating the ways in which newspapers and broadcast media approach the telling of news differently. But nobody raised any questions about how to cover these stories for a multimedia Web site. Each saw coverage only from inside of his or her own silo.

Reading this felt like déjà vu from almost every meeting I have attended where “convergence” or “cross-platform journalism” was the topic of dicusssion. The TV and radio news people talk about putting their existing content on a Web site and teaching the kids to write “briefs” for the Web. The print people talk about writing and linking. The online people (always outnumbered, always out-gunned) try to talk about reporting in new ways — but no one ever seems to hear what we are saying.

If the journalism schools could break out of this trap and “think different,” we could provide a great service to this field we all love. Idsvoog wrote:

Amid the downsizing of newsrooms now going on, even veteran journalists are finding it essential to learn new skills. And some are returning to school to do so. Kent State’s graduate coordinator, Von Whitmore, recognizes that “graduate programs will have to adapt to this new demand by developing alternative ways for working professionals to take classes [that] must teach students about multiple platform content from the very first course in the curriculum.”

The first requirement is that the faculty in the graduate program must change the curriculum to address the changes in the field. I would strongly caution anyone who is applying to grad school for journalism to take a super-close look at the graduate curriculum at the selected school(s) — and also take a close look at the faculty bios. Do they match? It seems to me that some schools are offering a shiny new curriculum without clearly showing who will be doing the teaching.

My own department approved a new professional master’s program in journalism, contingent on hiring one new faculty member with suitable professional experience. Then a hiring freeze went into effect, so the whole process screeched to a halt. We recognize that we can’t move ahead without adding that person. We are on stand-by, indefinitely.

“It’s the trifecta of money, time and personnel,” says Whitmore. “[But] foundation money for journalism programs is shrinking while federal and state support for higher education has all but vanished.”

Without universities willing to bring in faculty members with the skills and experience necessary to prepare students to meet the rapidly changing demands by getting rid of some academic barriers — such as requiring faculty members to have a PhD — journalism schools will remain on the precipice of becoming irrelevant to the profession.

Idsvoog has identified an important part of why j-schools are not keeping up with the times — there’s no money, little time to retrain, and a shortage of people skilled in the new ways of journalism.

I think Idsvoog goes astray, however, when he criticizes university job ads that say “Ph.D. required.”

A university is not a trade school, and the role of the university in society is not what many people assume it to be — teaching skills. Newspapers in many European countries offer their own master’s degree — a one-year skills-oriented program that is sometimes conducted in classrooms in the same building as the newsroom. In some European countries, the state-sponsored journalism school is, in fact, a trade school — so much so that journalists with a degree from such a school cannot be admitted to a U.S. master’s program, because the degree is not deemed equivalent to a U.S. bachelor’s degree.

Idsvoog thinks it is possible to change the system from within. I certainly agree with him that journalism education is vitally important. I’d like to see it remain in the university. But you can’t turn a university department into a trade school. Not in today’s academic world, especially.

Maybe Idsvoog would like this idea: A stand-alone school just for training journalists, established by OhmyNews.

Back to blowing up the silos — in another essay in the same issue of Nieman Reports, the dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill noted:

… core skills taught in broadcast and print sequences are not replaced by visual communication alone. Students still need to learn to develop quality story packages for television and to study writing, reporting and editing. They need specialized information to master areas such as business journalism.

At the same time, she adds:

… we are thinking about what happens if we require students to take additional credits as part of their study at this school (we now require 28 credits): Would such a requirement shortchange their liberal arts education — a vital part of the education journalists need? Would this curtail their opportunity to take business courses, which are increasingly important for journalists?

We have to beware of overly simple answers. Changes are necessary in most j-schools today — fundamental changes in what we teach and how we teach it. But all these baby steps — and renaming courses but keeping essentially the same content in them — will not tear down the silos separating broadcast from print and marginalizing online.

Until we do that, most of this is merely talk, pasting new labels on old courses, and keeping heads firmly buried in the sand.