VOICES
The Deans' Dilemma
We train broadcast students for serious work. Then they graduate.
Deans of journalism schools have traditionally been content to serve as quiet managers of farm teams for the big leagues — to train young journalists to take up the journalistic cloth. Some wonder whether this is not a poor substitute for learning by doing — just jumping into the media pool and picking up the craft by buddying with a more senior mentor.
But there are a couple of things wrong with this scenario. First, the hectic, bottom-line-crazed modern media seldom afford the kinds of old-style master/apprentice relationships that once helped the copyboy-to-editor food chain be more than a myth. Second, at least when it comes to broadcast news, there are fewer and fewer outlets where smart, able young people with ambition and a sense of dedication to quality can do satisfying work.
When you talk to the best students in broadcast, there are no more than a handful of commercial outlets to which they aspire. They want to do in-depth work and to use television to its full journalistic potential. But where can they actually do that? Yes, there is still occasionally some excellent programming on local and network television, such as Nightline and those few hours for "serious" documentaries that the anchors have hived off the networks as concessions in contract negotiations. But, otherwise, there are virtually no jobs here.
One might be inclined to write off the attitudes of young broadcast graduate students as elitist were it not for the fact that so many older and far more experienced television newspeople are themselves feeling increasingly compromised by the way their profession is evolving. Many of them pass through my office, and, I am sure, through the offices of other J-school deans as well. At the top of their game, fortified by big salaries, they still don't take long to ask if "there might not be some sort of teaching position" to which they could repair to relieve themselves of the ambivalence they feel about their current jobs.
This situation has created something of a dilemma for those of us at journalism schools who accept tuition from these students. We are training people for a type of work that is vanishing before our eyes. We are left to wonder: Are we engaged in a form of false advertising?
Perhaps it is time for us deans of journalism schools to collectively emerge from our sheltered academic lairs and lead a more vigorous discussion of the broadcast industry. What is at stake is not only quality work for the next generation but the shape of broadcast journalism itself. It is not easy for journalism schools to criticize the very industry in which they seek to place their students. Moreover, many deans may plausibly wonder if anyone is listening. The challenge is to get through to those corporate executives whose media holdings may constitute only a small portion of their conglomerate portfolios. This has been no easy matter.
So, what can be done?
One strategy is to find new ways to work with those far-flung islands that form the archipelago of intelligent news programming. Here at Berkeley, we have begun a modest pioneering effort with Frontline on WGBH, PBS's Boston affiliate, which continues to do excellent hourlong documentaries. Our new venture is Frontline/World, a magazine-format program on global issues that also has an active Web site where students can develop international stories for possible segments or even longer documentaries.
But we also should not give up on commercial broadcasting just yet. Broadcasters are searching for ways to engage younger viewers. Thus, there may be an opening for students and recent graduates to move into the breach with digital recorders and cameras to experiment with a new kind of coverage that might be described as Dogma 95 broadcast news, (referring to a school of production launched by the Danish film-maker Lars von Trier that eschews the artificiality of most television and film-making). For example, my fellow deans from the University of Southern California, Northwestern, and Columbia, and I are organizing a collaboration on a new kind of low-budget TV coverage of the coming elections.
But we need partners. Fortunately, this is the perfect opportunity for a cable channel or network to step forward with some financial support, editorial mentorship, and airtime. Who knows what such a partnership might develop? After all, commercial TV is always questing for the next "new thing." The cost is low, but the returns could be great.
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