I don’t care about some journalist who hasn’t been important since before I was born. Journalism is not about journalists — it’s about the people. It’s about serving our audience.

Saying that it’s a crime that I don’t know who some journalists is who died a decade ago is ridiculous. Journalism schools should be teaching students how to create good journalism — not how to have a big ego.

And let’s keep it real here: Journalism is not writing — it’s journalism. So, let’s stop talking about how people need to read good writers (which we all do) and let’s start talking about journalism. The days of journalism being about writing passed decades ago.

Reading the comments on this blog tells me exactly why this industry is failing.

It’s sad but no surprise to me that a journalism student wouldn’t know Royko. When I used to speak to journalism students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, few had heard of “All The President’s Men,” let alone Woodward or Bernstein. And these guys are still alive and working.

I never went to J-School, but I grew up reading guys like Royko, Breslin, Bob Greene, Frank DeFord and later Molly Ivins. All of them influenced me to become a journalist. Granted, when this 20-year-old was growing up he couldn’t have read Royko in his local newspaper. But that a J-School prof doesn’t see the value of reading the masters is troubling. As an English major when I was in college, what would I have studied if I hadn’t read Twain, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald and Woolf? Nobody said J-profs should focus entirely on the past, but one must know what has come before to go forward with any success.

Of course you have to teach students about what’s happening now and how the industry will evolve in coming years. But it never hurts to have the context of history, especially when issues of the past — media consolidation for one, “yellow” journalism for another (much online reporting bears a close resemblance to the opinion-driven sensationalism of the early American press) — resonate even more loudly today.

So if your student doesn’t know Royko, your question shouldn’t be “Why should she?” but “Why the heck doesn’t she?” And if your answer to that is some variation of “Because in today’s nonstop news cycle only the here and now matters,” then you’re ultimately contributing to an erosion of historical perspective — which, whether your like it or not, still informs the best journalism, both in print or online.

There’s a lot of change under way in journalism today. It’s very important to teach students how to be good, honest, accurate reporters. It’s important to teach them how to find a good story and how to recognize a good story when they find it.

If you use Royko’s columns in your classes to teach that, I have no problem with it.

If you think a journalism student is fit to do journalism if all she knows is the past, I do have a problem with that.

What matters for young journalists is not how many writers they know, but that they have an understanding of their profession’s evolution — and, more practically, how its best practitioners plied their craft.

On Mark Hamilton’s blog, you make the weak and somewhat troubling point that you care less about whether students know Breslin’s name than that they know his story about JFK’s gravedigger. Do you really want your students to only know the story? Or do you want them to understand how Breslin got the story — i.e., what compelled him to track down the gravedigger, how he extracted details from Pollard, how he wove those details into such an evocative piece?

If you’re any kind of journalism teacher, then you want students to learn the story behind the story — at which point they’ll know more than just the story or Breslin’s name. They’ll have a better idea of what it takes to be a journalist. If you’re not attempting to teach your students at least that much, then it’s hard to figure what they’re gaining from your alleged expertise.