The slow crawl of journalism education
You can’t generalize about journalism programs across North America. Some programs are pumped full of online journalism opportunities and skills training. Some still have zero emphasis on today’s real world of journalism. This is illustrated well in the comments on a post by Megan Taylor (disclaimer: one of our online-J students).
Pat Thornton got agitated about head-in-the-sand journalism professors. He’s not entirely wrong, but maybe from the standpoint of a 23-year-old, he doesn’t see the whole picture. Where I agree with him is that some (many?) journalism educators are making too many excuses — or worse, they know what’s happening in the field and they are just flat out ignoring it in their classes, with a “That’s not my job” attitude. Where I disagree: There’s more to this story than foot-dragging educators.
The industry itself has been shockingly slow to adapt, and even today, many experienced journalists will admit they “don’t get it” vis-à-vis online and are struggling to educate themselves.
You might say the journalism educators ought to be one step ahead of the profession. There’s merit to that idea, but here is a reality check: For six years I sat in a room with my professor colleagues and members of our advisory board — editors and even some publishers of some of the top newspapers in our state — when they came to advise us about what’s going on in newsrooms and what we ought to be teaching the students. In each of those six years, fall and spring, the advisers told us: “Don’t teach them HTML or any of that online stuff. It’s not important.”
I remember precisely the first time our advisers changed their tune. It was the fall of 2005, and I had just returned from living abroad for eight months. Every one of my teaching colleagues was knocked back as if by a giant boulder being hurled at each of us simultaneously. For the first time, our advisers said, “What are you teaching them about online? Good god, they’ve got to learn online! Now! Can they write HTML and CSS and JavaScript? We want that! Can they do slideshows with audio? Can they do Flash! Quick, teach them that!”
We had had a couple of professors in my school (not only me) trying to spread the online gospel for years before 2005. But in the face of advice from the industry itself, our colleagues felt they had good reasons to ignore us.
Add to that the budget constraints (it’s hard to teach audio, photo and video with no equipment), space constraints (it’s hard to get almost 3,000 students into four 20-seat lab classrooms) and curriculum reform challenges (it takes longer than you might imagine to add a new course or change requirements for graduation), and what you’ll find is that the educators who do “get it” are seeking out and finding some very creative ways to route around the damage. Damage caused by the industry’s own head-in-the-sand attitudes, I mean.
I didn’t intend to defend the inadequacies of journalism education today, but rather to place them in a context that includes the industry we serve.
Working journalists are often very quick to bash the professors, calling out “Ivory tower!” and “Way out of touch!” and “Insulated by tenure! They ought to be fired!” I would like to suggest that this signals the ignorance of those who do the bashing.
Sure, you can walk into a Department of Communication Studies and find a 70-year-old guy who thinks they still use lead type to print the newspaper. But he’s not the one teaching Reporting 101. In most respectable journalism programs, if you look up the credentials of that Ph.D.-toting professor you’re so quick to disparage, you will find that he or she has six or more years experience as a reporter or editor at daily newspapers or mass market magazines. That’s the way it is in our journalism program at the University of Florida, and I know our peers (the other good j-schools) can claim the same. You’ll find a few people who lack newsroom experience, but they were hired based on other important criteria (and will never teach Reporting 101). All of them know when lead type went out of style.
What is true — and you can bash all you want on this account — is that our print and broadcast news faculty are struggling to figure out ways to bring the online skills into our classes and curriculum. Unfortunately, that does not translate into the skills being taught in all the classes right now, today. While the struggle progresses, the students still have to sign up for courses, accumulate credits, learn how to report and how to write like a journalist, learn ethics and law, find internships, work for the student newspaper and the radio and TV stations in the college, and graduate.
The skills ought to be taught in every single class, in every single course, right now. There’s no denying that. It’s just that getting it done takes a heck of a lot longer than “getting it.”
Categories: teaching
Thanks Mindy, for bringing in a voice from the other side. It’s really easy to blame j-schools for not keeping up, when we don’t understand what it takes to “keep up.”
You left out a shot at “while working within the 30-hour accreditation rule.”
Thanks for pointing that out, Craig. Our accrediting body, ACEJMC, requires that “students take a minimum of 80 semester credit hours or 116 quarter credit hours outside of the unit and a minimum of 65 semester credit hours or 94 quarter credit hours in the liberal arts and sciences (as defined by the institution) outside of the unit.”
A lot of journalism educators complain about this “limitation.” I support it. Our students need a minimum of 124 credit-hours for graduation. Minus 80: they can take up to 44 credits in journalism. Most classes are 3 credits. So a student can take 15 journalism classes. That ought to be plenty. Minus 19 credits in required “core” classes: still 25 credits left, or eight classes.
Whose fault is it if two-thirds of the kids sign up for “TV & American Society” instead of “Reporting and Writing for Online Media”?
Great post Mindy. To be honest it never occurred that the whole department has to move as one, so changes may be slow.
I have to say though, it bothers me when there are full time tenured professors who KNOW that students need the above skills, and instead waste more time telling us how screwed we are than actually giving us practical skills.
I feel like so much of my class time / life is wasted by being told how things are changing. I know that already.
Good post, Mindy.
Obviously, it’s a complex picture and there are many schools doing a fine job, and some, not so fine.
But there is also the aspect of the student, which is also complex. I suspect that many students arrive in college because they worked on the school paper (which until recently, often didn’t have a web site) and somewhere along the line they watched “All the President’s Men” and so have very print-centric mindset. That’s ok, and only becomes a real problem when the college education doesn’t expand their outlook.
Mindy, when I do I ever get agitated? I want to say point blank that I realize that most news organizations have been very slow to adapt (I’d point to my own as exhibit A), and I honestly can’t say that educators are behind the professional world. I’m sure you’re correct that professionals were sending the wrong messages to j-schools for years about which skills they wanted students to learn.
A lot of the fire in my post came from Paul Conley’s post about some of the asinine things he heard at the National College Media Convention. That’s just unacceptable. And I was generalizing a bit.
There are some very talented j-school educators like yourself and some of your colleagues and some very forward thinking programs. I was very impressed by Berkeley’s new media program when I was out in California earlier this year, and the training I received as part of their Knight New Media program was top notch. I would highly recommend journalists looking for new media training to consider it.
I would say, however, that the average j-school in this country is not very progressive. My school, Lehigh, was middle of the road. I was encouraged by my professors to pursue online journalism. No one ever told me it was a bad idea (I certainly never heard anything like Conley did), and we did have some substantive discussions about the future of journalism and how online media would play into that. Plus, it was my adviser, Jack Lule, who recommended by honors thesis topic on online journalism and newspapers.
I certainly learned a lot from all my professors and they helped make me the journalist I am today, and I would say they were all very strong journalists who the students respected a lot. But I already had online skills, and the professors just expanded my thought processes, while also giving me solid reporting skills. What about the students who weren’t that into computers? What about the students who didn’t know HTML or CSS?
For those students, I feel like they may have been left behind a bit. I have friends who had more impressive internships than me (a few were Dow Jones interns) and graduated with very high grades, and yet they are working at smaller papers making less money than me. The only difference is that I have online skills.
But the point of my post, in its essence, is not about what j-schools are doing or what newspapers are doing. It was an attempt to defend some of the close-mindedness that we see in recent graduates, because I think it’s hard to place all the blame on them for what skills they have or what they are willing to do. Professors have to understand that students look up to them and respect them immensely. If they tell students that online journalism isn’t important or not real journalism, students will believe them.
If they tell students to expand their horizons and try new things, however, students will. I have no doubt. It’s not even a question about teaching students the skills, but rather, it is imparting in them the importance of taking their reporting skills to whatever format a story calls for.
It seems you’re saying college journalism programs are slow to adapt simply because the process (adding new courses/creating consensus among professors/changing requirements) is so difficult.
How, then, are other programs like computer programming, information systems and the like managing to keep up with technological advances in those fields. Friends of mine who graduated from programs in those fields had the computer/Web skills they needed to land jobs. I’m not convinced journalism is a more fluid profession than programming.
Thank you Mindy for articulating so well how unfair it is to blame j-schools entirely for failing to prepare students for today’s newsrooms. Several students have told me recently that the most important question they get in job interviews these days is “What multi-media skills do you have?” Yet, when they arrive in the newsroom, they often discover they are among the only ones with any multi-media skills and they quickly realize they are expected somehow to help lead the newsroom into the new media world. That’s a lot to expect of those students and of us, as j-educators.
I can’t imagine that engineering firms, hospitals, or law firms expect their young interns to arrive straight out of school knowing more than their experienced engineers, doctors and lawyers about the core skills now required to do the job.
@Pat: “… my post … was an attempt to defend some of the close-mindedness that we see in recent graduates, because I think it’s hard to place all the blame on them for what skills they have or what they are willing to do. Professors have to understand that students look up to them … If they tell students that online journalism isn’t important or not real journalism, students will believe them.”
That’s a great point to make, Pat, and I agree. I read Paul Conley’s post, and those remarks he reported are very, very disturbing. Any professor who ignorantly or deliberately mischaracterizes the job market or the industry to students is acting is a very negligent manner.
Note too what Sean wrote in an earlier comment — he’s tired of hearing that the business is changing without learning more concrete skills.
What scares me as a high school teacher is that too many colleges don’t have any web presence for their school’s media. Here in Texas we used to have about 5-6 really strong journalism schools, but they have been slow to embrace the web. And some schools, like A&M have a good web site, but no journalism major. It is sometimes frustratingly difficult to advise graduating seniors on where to look for a good j-school because the schools who have traditionally been the leaders, especially second tier schools are no longer as good as they once were.
Your comments about funding are especially true. My school decided to start a media program this year, but only budgeted $3K for equipment and nothing for software. No one knows how much good multimedia really costs.
Nearly two years ago, while teaching a journalism class at GW, I was lucky to have Adrian Holovaty in town to speak to my students. Afterward, a junior in that class said it was the first guest speaker she had heard at GW who gave her any hope for the future of journalism.
So there seems to be a disconnect among faculty who, like many of their former colleagues at newspapers (especially), know so little about new media that they adopt a message of fear or ignorance. That leads to comments like those Paul Conley heard, and to mistaken advisers to collegiate programs.
For this, both the profession and the academy can share blame. But schools at least have what some businesses do not – time and space to come up with solutions. So to hear talk about how hard it is to get a new curriculum in place is disheartening. Process is a really poor excuse, although it has a certain irony to it.
@Derek: You’re right, of course. The blame is shared. And it does seem that educators should be more innovative than they are, and the content of courses should be updated. Faculty do have leeway in how they teach their individual classes. (In some cases, a lot of leeway.) It is possible to transform a single class without waiting for a committee to say okay.
Don’t forget to include the students themselves in the equation.
A friend of mine likes to joke that “students are the only consumers in the world who pay for a product and then hope to be defrauded” (by professors not covering “difficult” material, canceling classes frequently, handing out easy grades, etc.).
What happened to the gung-ho attitude that students used to have when I went to school?
* We don’t require internships, but we strongly recommend it. I personally talk to groups of students 4-5 times a semester, in addition to individual conversations, encouraging them to intern with the professional organization of their choice. Despite those efforts, we might get 5 percent of our students who apply for an internship during their 4-5 years at school.
* We don’t require students to work for the school paper. But of the journalism majors, again, perhaps 5 percent bother to take advantage of the opportunity.
* When we didn’t require our students to take specific classes in journalism, they loaded up on the fun/easy classes and ignored important classes like Advanced Newswriting and Editing, not to mention Media Law.
* I’ve offered to teach Computer-Assisted Reporting, but despite having 300+ majors we cannot muster enough interest for even one class a year (it’s too hard, all those numbers and stuff).
* As a percentage, few students blog about anything of substance. Few take recommended courses in political science, criminal justice, statistics and so on (opting always for the “easy” classes instead).
* I post optional online readings that I gather from the very latest on blogs such as your own. Of my 60 students, I get maybe 3 hits a day.
* Perhaps 1 in 20 reads a newspaper. And perhaps 2 in 20 bother to follow the news in any form. I read the Web substantially more than they do. They know a lot about Spears and Hilton, but next to nothing about Bush and Clinton (not that that stops them from criticizing Bush and Clinton by parroting what others say). They don’t even know who Nancy Pelosi is, so we won’t go there.
I’ve got a lot of experience in journalism. After having taught enough reporters as an editor, I was pumped to get into the classroom. But I never expected that I’d have to be a cheerleader for the profession or deal with the ocean of apathy that is today’s college student body.
I used to think that offering students the opportunity to learn would be enough. I never realized I’d have to twist their arms in order to force them to learn.
Yes, there are always a handful of good students. Students who intern, who work for the school paper, and take the tough classes. They are the ones who are well prepared and have no problem getting a job when they graduate. But the vast majority are more a source of burnout for journalism educators than they are a source of new blood for journalism.
/rant off
@Mike – that’s a heaping helping of depressing stuff, I must say. However, I can’t argue with much of what you wrote.
I almost let this kind of thing ruin my attitude toward teaching one semester (my worst semester ever). Then someone pointed out that if you let all the deadwood students drag you down, you won’t be doing a good job for the one or two students in the room who are really there to learn what you have to share.
So I vowed that it is my mission to teach for that one (or two) who is actually here for an education, because if I pander to the others, that one — the best one — is getting screwed. It doesn’t matter if there’s only one. You have to do your best for that one — and don’t let the others drag you down to their level.
And remember, being surrounded by all that deadwood is a big bummer for the real students too, the same as it is for the professor. For proof, read this.
[...] or four year colleges like hers. She has a lot to say about the state of journalism education in this post. The industry itself has been shockingly slow to adapt, and even today, many experienced [...]
[...] The slow crawl of journalism education – Teaching Online Journalism [...]