The Mission
Searching for the Perfect J-school
"Mere knowledge, like mere writing, is an equipment of as little value to a journalist as one-half of a pair of scissors is to the tailor who is trying to cut out a suit."
— Talcott Williams, first director of
Columbia's Journalism School, 1912
The idea of balance seems a good place to begin my journey into journalism education, given that much of what has been written and said about it in recent months has lacked this bit of Reporting 101.
What should journalism schools teach? A balance between knowledge and craft was clearly what Joseph Pulitzer had in mind when he mused about creating a school — albeit an undergraduate school — at Columbia in a 1902 memo. Still, when Lee Bollinger, Columbia's new president, derailed the Journalism School's dean search in July and declared that the school needed to rethink its mission, he fanned the flames of a debate that has smoldered since Pulitzer's day, and has never been entirely resolved. A 1932 New York Times article, for instance, on the addition of "professional instruction" to the school's curriculum, quoted the dean, Carl Ackerman: "We believe we should endeavor to bridge the gap between the sheltered environment of education and the unsheltered environment of newspaper life . . . ." Another Times piece, this one in 1983, began this way: "The administration and the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism are engaged in a sharp debate over what the institution, the nation's best-known journalism school, should be doing and how it should be doing it."
My own thinking on journalism education has been anything but balanced. When I learned to write for newspapers in the 1980s, journalism schools still taught the inverted pyramid with a straight face and imparted the notion (now apparently quaint) that a reporter, armed with a notepad, a pen, and a healthy skepticism, could cover anything; that you go out and learn what you need to know story by story.
Journalism, after all, is not a body of knowledge the way law or physics or history is. It is a process of critical inquiry. Our job is to try to make sense of things, and for that it is sometimes helpful to ask the uninformed question.
So when Bollinger said teaching "craft" was worthy but insufficient, my initial reaction was to retreat, club in hand, to the safety of that cave of predispositions. I worried that he would turn Columbia into a place where students no longer cover the lives of poor people in the South Bronx, but rather sit around discussing things like "The Effects of Links, Story Type and Personality Variables on Readers' Perceptions and Use of Crime Stories in Online Newspapers."
My editors, though, insisted that I find out what revolutionary things were happening at other journalism schools, to get some idea of what Bollinger may have in mind. At first I resisted. I am thrice conflicted, I argued, as a graduate of Columbia's Journalism School, managing editor of this magazine, and a member of the school's adjunct faculty. All the more reason to go forth, they said.
The story did seem timely. The end of the twentieth century, and the corresponding rise of the Internet, have spurred a bout of tinkering in the academy. Everyone is trying something new, and at most places it is treated not as a heretical attempt to rewrite sacred texts, but rather an evolutionary process to ensure that journalism education keeps up with a changing world. (Hey, New York media, did you know that Northwestern's Medill School just embarked — rather quietly — on a review of its curriculum?) This debate isn't new at Columbia, either. In the last five years, there have been two major studies by outside committees on how to improve the school. Even now, as Bollinger attempts to wrangle a star-studded task force into an efficient curriculum-rethinking machine, a group of faculty and administrators at the school is using $500,000 from the provost's office to develop a proposal for an experimental two-year master's program, for maybe a dozen students a year.
The further into this I got the more I realized that I was never totally at ease with my initial defensive crouch. On the one hand, this debate over journalism education has always been framed as scholars versus practitioners, as if what journalists do is somehow less intellectually rigorous than what goes on in academia — which is ridiculous, particularly when you consider that journalists have the added burden of making their research intelligible to the rest of the world.
Yet, if you can't rethink at a university, where can you?
The world is interconnected now in so many ways, and the pace
and volume of information is overwhelming; Enron's elusive
accounting, bioterrorism, global warming, radical Islam, IPOs
— all require a fair amount of sophistication just to know
what questions to ask. "I'm not sure you can say anymore
that, 'If I know how to report, edit, and write, then I
can penetrate things like this,'" says Trevor Brown,
who runs Indiana's journalism school. At the same time,
things like the Internet, public ownership, and consolidation
are fundamentally changing the media — and not always for
the better. Journalists, and journalism education, must try to
understand, explain, and ride (or in some cases resist) these
waves.
Does everyone need to go to journalism school? Of course not.
But these days, when most newsrooms aren't investing much
time in training, schools are hardly irrelevant. The question
then is, What do journalists need to know, and how much of that
can we expect J-schools to teach?
1. Starting Point
First, though, a word or two about what actually goes on at Columbia. To suggest, as some critics have, that students learn little here beyond how to write leads and interview sources is just not accurate.
Reporting and Writing 1, the soul of the Columbia program, in which students spend the first semester covering neighborhood beats from the Bronx to Coney Island, can be a rich and layered journalism training ground — much better than an entry-level job that might land you in some suburban bureau where you are expected to crank out two stories a day for an editor who is either no good or doesn't have the time or inclination to teach. My beat was East Harlem. Over the course of the semester — under the deft guidance of my teacher, LynNell Hancock (a veteran of The Village Voice, the Daily News, and Newsweek) — I wrote about things like the neighborhood's asthma rates, which are among the highest in the nation; the grass-roots effort to block the influx of box stores like Costco and Wal-Mart; and the complicated relationship between the Anglo missionaries, who ran social programs that were instrumental in the development of East Harlem in the decades after World War II, and the rising Latino leadership class. These were not single-source stories written in the inverted pyramid. They were real-world lessons in urban development, health care, politics, race and class issues, as well as sophisticated writing exercises.
Another professor, Samuel Freedman, builds two-hour panel discussions around the topics his RW1 students are covering. The panel for his September 6 class on immigration was typical: Somini Sengupta, a New York Times reporter, Philip Kasinitz, a professor of sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, and Chelley Gordon, an immigration attorney for the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. A bit more than Who, What, When, Where, and Why, though students get that, too.
My colleague here at CJR, Mike Hoyt, who also serves as an adjunct teacher, notes that the questions students come back from their RW1 beats with are hardly basic. The week we spoke, one student wanted his advice on how to approach a seventeen-year-old prostitute and rape victim; another needed help handling a story in which a star public school teacher had confessed that he is emotionally stunted, and has no relationships outside the classroom. A third wanted to find some way to illuminate what happens inside Ashcroft's closed INS hearings.
Columbia's regimen offers an education at least as valuable as what you can get from reading a book, or listening to a lecture (students do this, too). You learn how things actually work, not how they are supposed to work. The faculty is composed of working journalists. They teach what they know. Why wouldn't you want that to be the core of any school that trains people to be journalists?
None of this is to say that there isn't much that could be done to improve the Columbia program. The quality of the RW1 experience can vary depending on your teacher, for instance; and students come to journalism school with a wide range of needs, so herding them all down a single path in ten action-packed months may not be the best way to do it.
I began to look around, to see what other schools were doing.
2. New Ideas
Much of the experimenting at journalism schools (for the most part I limited this to graduate programs) falls into two categories: broadening and deepening the subject matter students study, and giving them the flexibility to shape their own course of study. The former sort of necessitates the latter.
Tapping the resources of the wider university is the obvious way to broaden the curriculum. There are many ways to do this. Schools are requiring courses in qualitative and quantitative research methods, for instance, and developing dual degree programs with law, health care, religion, business, the arts. Adding a foreign language proficiency standard will be among the things that the Medill faculty considers in its curriculum review. At some schools, journalism professors teach in other departments. At USC, Michael Parks, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times who now runs the journalism department, will have a joint appointment with the international relations school, where he is developing a course with a professor there called "Negotiating and Reporting Global Change."
That caught my eye. Such hybrid courses — if taught by both a journalist and a scholar — seem like a good way to tailor the subject matter to a journalist's needs. Robert Schmuhl built an interesting program at Notre Dame around this interdisciplinary approach. Begun in 1997, The John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics and Democracy is an undergraduate minor (there is no journalism major or graduate program at Notre Dame). Students who get in take five courses, no more than two of which can be reporting and writing skills courses, and an internship. The rest are selected from a range of options, including a number of courses developed for journalism students by professors in other departments. The ethics class, for instance, is taught in the philosophy department; journalism history in the history department. These classes have a mix of students from journalism and elsewhere, which can make for richer discussions.
At Missouri they try to merge the scholarly and the practical in everything they do. For example, every master's project — the journalistic equivalent of a thesis — must have a research component to it, and the faculty committee that evaluates the project must include a scholar. Team-teaching is another way to do it. Esther Thorson, associate dean for graduate studies, teaches a course on public health-based approaches to reporting with a free-lance science writer, a public health expert, an online journalism expert, and an investigative reporter. "To me," Thorson says, "the dream journalism school is one that is connected everywhere, to scholars, doctoral students, newsrooms, people on the front lines. Isolation is the worst thing that can happen to a journalism school."
At Berkeley, Dean Orville Schell says he was somewhat dubious about journalism school when he arrived in 1996. Since then, though, he has tried to create what he calls "a workshop where students can be in-residence." It required a looser approach, but one that remains anchored in teaching students to report and write. "Basically I am in favor of anything a professor wants to teach," Schell says, "as long as it helps create conscientious, well-educated journalists." To that end, Schell has taught a class on reading Shakespeare, and says he would like to teach one on listening to and thinking about classical music. There are also courses on the political novella, on covering humanitarian intervention, covering philanthropy, and writing "heroic profiles of ordinary folks." "The challenge for journalism schools," he says, "is for teachers to ask, 'How did we learn to become journalists?' I learned through countless hours working with talented editors at The New Yorker. They haven't improved on the idea of the apprentice since the Middle Ages."
3. One Size Doesn't Fit All
To take advantage of all this breadth and depth, though, students need room to maneuver. By 1999, the graduate school at the University of North Carolina had replaced its traditional sequence-based curriculum with what Patricia Curtin, who coordinates the master's program there, calls "a Chinese menu approach." Incoming students — there are about twenty-five to thirty each year — work with advisers to map out a coherent course of study based on their goals and backgrounds. At Illinois and Medill, some students who demonstrate that they can do basic reporting and news writing can skip the first-semester skills courses.
Students also need time. Medill has added an optional quarter to its program, allowing students to go abroad to work. Starting next year, Boston University will add a mandatory third semester to its print, online, and photojournalism master's programs. It already has what's called an Advanced Journalism Studies Program, which allows students who have finished their master's (or professional journalists who want to deepen their skills or knowledge) to add another semester of specialized instruction. "There are so many electives in the journalism school, not to mention elsewhere in the university, that students just did not have time to take," says Nancy Day, who teaches at Boston. Columbia students experience similar frustration.
Adding all these semesters and courses brings complications of time and money, which is a part of the puzzle, particularly at a place like Columbia, where tuition is already high. It also makes me wonder what happens to the skills training. Missouri has its print majors on campus two weeks before the fall semester starts for an intensive twelve days of reporting and writing. "That way," says Esther Thorson, "we aren't dinging around in the semester on the inverted pyramid." That seems appealing, but my students this semester — even the ones who arrived with professional experience — are just now, two months into the year, showing real improvement in their reporting and writing.
Not surprisingly, I learned that much of this new J-school thinking coincided with the rise of the Internet. In the mid-90s, schools created online media centers. The next step, in some cases, was to revamp the curriculum around the idea of convergence, or teaching students to work and think across "multiple platforms."
As far as I can tell, a converged curriculum means teaching students to write for broadcast as well as print, to know their way around a video camera and a Web site, and to think visually as well as textually. The University of Kansas did it in 1999 (despite some early resistance from the print majors), USC introduced a converged curriculum this year, and Medill is talking about it. Berkeley and USC now offer classes on Web logs, or blogs. "To a certain extent we are preparing students for jobs that don't exist," says James Gentry, dean of the J-school at Kansas. "But we know they are coming."
It all sounded good. Then I called Jay Rosen, the chairman of New York University's journalism department (and the author of the book What Are Journalists For?), where the debate over what to teach tore the faculty apart in the late '90s. Rosen argues that creating new courses and centers isn't enough. Journalism must first be "redescribed," he says, then it can be studied in a new way. "I don't think the traditional description of what journalists do is correct. Reporting, accuracy, balance, news judgment — these of course are part of what journalists do. But journalists also legitimize people and ideas, and discredit others. They frame discussions. They are timekeepers, scorekeepers, and amplifiers. But these things are generally not taught in journalism schools." Rosen says he has ideas of how to translate this philosophy into education, but wants to try them on his students at NYU before he shares them with CJR readers.
Rosen's colleague and fellow experimenter at NYU, Mitchell Stephens, was more willing to share. I sat in on one of Stephens's classes this fall called "Rethinking Journalism." It is an undergraduate honors course with four students, in which, according to the syllabus, "students will consider some of the limitations of contemporary journalism . . . and will experiment with stories — for print, video and the Web — designed to overcome some of those limitations."
The students read nonfiction and novels, from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. They produce news videos, build Web sites and try, as Stephens says, "to find a way to use this new medium to say something deeper." The day I was there students read the first couple of paragraphs of a story in The New York Times and discussed the voice, or lack of voice in it. Then they read snippets of Tom Paine, Ernie Pyle, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and discussed how the Times piece could be recast with a different voice, and whether they wanted that from their daily newspaper. "I'm not sure the answer to making journalism education more intellectual, or whatever, is just to add a bunch of courses in philosophy and history," Stephens said to me later. "It's to have them read people like Virginia Woolf and see what they can tell us about what we do today. We have a responsibility to experiment with ways to do it better."
4.Intellectual Capital
Beyond the trade-school bit, the other knock on journalism schools has been that, unlike law and business schools, they are not think-tanks for the profession, places that produce useful new ideas and help working journalists solve their problems.
The reason for this is that academics — especially mass communication theorists — typically don't understand the newsroom, and newsrooms are notoriously wary of outside criticism, especially from journalism teachers.
There are attempts within the academy to change this, to produce ideas and research that are useful to front-line journalists. Phil Meyer, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, is trying to develop a way to quantify quality journalism so that it can be used by analysts and investors as a factor in their assessment of newspaper company stocks. Jay Harris, the former publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, runs the new Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at USC; among the things on the center's to-do list is to find ways the media can get people to re-engage civically. And the Center for Advanced Social Research at Missouri's journalism school, working with The Tampa Tribune, is beginning a research project on convergence that will attempt to resolve the "pace problem" — meaning academia moves glacially and the newsroom wants it done yesterday. Doctoral students will be doing some of the work, and someone from the center will ride herd on the project on a daily basis, checking progress and making adjustments. "This will be a prototype research project, and we will see if it works," says Esther Thorson.
I suppose these are things that journalism schools should be doing, but I keep coming back to something James Carey, a journalistic scholar who teaches at Columbia, said: "I want to keep the focus of journalism education outward on the world, not inward in the profession," he says. "The test, both for faculty research and their creative endeavors, and for the curriculum, too, is whether it furthers the education of the journalist."
5. My Fantasy School
After talking to so many people and thinking more in a month about journalism education than in all my previous years combined, I found myself constructing my own rough idea of a fantasy school.
Here it is:
It must be menu-driven so that students, working with their advisers, can craft a program that makes sense for them. Such an approach acknowledges that people come to graduate school with vastly different needs. I came with five years of daily newspaper experience, but I didn't want to specialize. I wanted to work on magazine writing and get connected in the magazine industry, but to do that I had to endure some redundancy.
There would be as small a required core curriculum as possible, and that too could vary with the student. If someone comes in with a law degree, maybe he doesn't have to take journalism law. But if he wants to be a foreign correspondent, and speaks only English, he will have to take language courses. Most students would have to take courses in statistics and research methods — both tailored to the needs of a reporter — and computer-assisted reporting. There could be courses on such things as interactivity and the open-source movement (taught by people who can tie them to journalism), but more importantly the idea of technological literacy would filter through everything, so students would at least be exposed to working in converged media.
There would be one- and two-year options, and perhaps some intermediate lengths and add-ons, like BU's certificate program. If someone wanted to come for a year and focus on the basics of reporting and writing, he could. If a student decides, halfway through a one-year program, that she wants to stay another year to specialize, and can justify it, she could. The admissions process would be more involved and targeted to ensure that the various tracks each had a critical mass of students.
There would be dual degrees available in anything that makes sense — law, business, international affairs, religion, economics. But there would also be hybrid courses and a wide selection of electives available both within the J-school and elsewhere that allowed students to go deeper into subjects that fit their course of study. For instance, it seems obvious that Columbia's journalism school would have something going with the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, which works to improve coverage of education. Same with any number of institutes, centers, and programs on campus. Think the folks at the Institute of War and Peace Studies might know a thing or two that would interest a reporter? How about the Center for Urban Research and Policy? Or the public health wing of the medical school?
There would be comprehensive photojournalism and documentary film tracks, and an extensive continuing-education component, with short courses and longer programs like Columbia's Arts Journalism and Knight-Bagehot fellowships. Partnerships with media in the area would ensure a ready supply of short- and long-term internships.
Students would have their own newspaper, Web site, radio station, and TV news operation.
Finally, there would be a think-tank attached to the school, affiliated with its Ph.D. program and linked to other scholars in the university; it would be a place where thinkers sought ways to improve the practice of journalism, both as a business and editorially, and also where media organizations came for help on more immediate issues. It could involve the search for a business model for online journalism, say, or an exploration of the implications of the broadband explosion.
But the core of the school — and of its faculty — would be about the best reporting and writing.
6. Heart of the Matter
Maybe the debate over what journalism schools should teach has never been settled because it shouldn't be. If journalism is about making sense of the world, and the world is always changing, then there should always be people searching for ways to make journalism better. But at the same time, the soul of good journalism — thorough, tough reporting and clear writing — has never changed, and shouldn't. Journalists, says James Carey, are people whom society counts on to say, "What the hell's going on with the economy? What the hell's going on with the education system?"
Even if the interactivity of the Internet radically changes the relationship between journalists and the public, there still must be reporters who investigate corruption at the school board, tell us how our tax dollars are being spent, explain the complications of religion or money or science. Who will do it if not reporters? It's not as though — armed with all this newly accessible information and communication power — teams of vigilantes will somehow render the journalist obsolete.
So yes, I want Jay Rosen at my school redescribing journalism; and I want Mitch Stephens experimenting with interactivity. But I want LynNell Hancock, a reporter who has spent her career writing about injustice, to teach me how to uncover the many ways the poor get trampled in this society; and I want Samuel Freedman to teach me how to write a book about it.
Good analytical reporting and writing are not easy; they are not things you just pick up along the way. If we cannot assume that students arrive at our best graduate schools with at least a solid liberal arts education — and maybe we can't — then we have a much greater problem than a journalism school can be expected to solve. But as James Boylan, the founding editor of cjr, who is writing a book about the J-school's history, says, "No one has told many of these students that writing well matters, that writing poorly, or unclearly, can destroy the most lucid of thoughts." This is important to bear in mind, since most educators I talked to told me that increasingly the students coming to their graduate programs had little or no background in journalism. We cannot give students specialized knowledge in everything that they are likely to cover in their careers, but we can give them the values and the judgment and tools to guide them as they educate themselves.
Journalism education will keep changing, building on what schools have always done — teach people to report and write and think. The basics. "It's interesting when you start experimenting how many of the old rules come up," said Stephens, as he found himself critiquing his students' work in his "Rethinking Journalism" class with things like, "Show, don't tell," and "There's not enough in the piece to support the lead."
So by all means, let's get on with the rethinking. But in the heady rush to revolution, we should make sure that we can all still shoot straight.
Also in this issue: Q&A with Lee Bollinger
