The Future of Journalism Education (the Remix)
A curated collection (with a few added remarks) from
the 2015 Knight Foundation report “Above & Beyond.”
Aggregator’s note: Text that is not in quotation marks is my own opinion unless clearly noted as coming from the report. If an individual attribution follows a quote, then that text was presented as a direct quote in the original.
“It is the assertion of this project that there is room in the academy for a more nimble, innovative, intentionally disruptive and hyper-professional journalism school.” (original)
“While still the generators of 98 percent of the industry’s revenue, legacy newsrooms (in print, television and radio) are eager to learn from their more nimble digital counterparts — not to become them, but to poach their digital-first strategies around everything from audience engagement to user-generated (free) content.” (original)
Is that a good idea? “Not to become them”?
Because I was writing this (in part) on Feb. 27, the day after a dress became the talk of the Internet: “If the conclusion that you draw, as a media professional, is ‘we should be getting in on things like that dress, we should be more like BuzzFeed,’ you are probably going to damage your organization while not actually getting that sweet sweet traffic that you so desire. Because it’s not about traffic as much as culture.” — Paul Ford, here
Writing
“That starts with hiring, training and retaining reporters who can ‘write for the Web,’ says [Marty] Baron [executive editor of The Washington Post].” (original)
I feel perplexed by the idea that writing for the Web is somehow different from writing. Of course, if “writing for the Web” means not writing thousands of words when hundreds would suffice, then “writing for the Web” is a thing. I would like to suggest that most audiences might be better served by such a standard.
“Great Web content is imbued with authority, immediacy, interactivity, aggregation, and a conversational, accessible and entertaining narrative style.” (original)
Not really very different from writing well.
Some of those interviewed “argue that journalists must have some understanding of various kinds of digital tools but the traditional fundamentals of journalism — reporting, writing, history, law, ethics, news literacy — will trump the tech tool kit every time.” (original)
Note the use of the word some. (Italics mine.) How is there still any question about this? Among people who know anything about journalism as it is practiced today, who would say journalists do not need some understanding of digital tools?
“Each story is going to teach you how to report a story, what’s a fact, how to write a story, how to transform data into something that people actually read. You then get a hybrid of what The Texas Tribune does for Texas and what we do for the nation. It seems like if you combine these skill sets of traditional journalism professors with the new data journalism — programming, numerate thinking — everyone may benefit.” — Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief and co-CEO, ProPublica
Aggregation and curation
“There are newsrooms all over the place doing good work; we don’t have to invent them here. Let’s find those, let’s do the reporting, let’s get additional context, let’s write it better.” — Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post (original)
That could mean stealing, or it could mean adding value. (I’m sure Baron meant the latter.) Let’s make sure our students understand the difference. And let’s be sure to teach them how wrong this is.
Business models
“I know of no other medium … where so much work is put into producing a product or service without any understanding, guidance or money put toward the marketing, distribution or activation of that content. It’s just insane.” — Kevin Davis, CEO and executive director, Investigative News Network (original)
“There is today no consensus on a proven, sustainable business model for commercial journalism in a digital marketplace.” (original)
“[T]he [March] 2014 Pew Report suggests that the journalism marketplace is still struggling to identify revenue streams sufficient to sustain an industry reeling from the sharp declines in print advertising …” (original)
“The business model right now it is try a lot of different things to see what works.” — Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post (original)
We are still throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, a full 20 years after the Netscape beta opened the Web to the world.
“Jessica Lessin says building community can also be about building profit. Founder of The Information, a subscription site whose masthead asserts its role as ‘the most valuable source of news about the technology industry for the world’s professionals,’ Lessin says the challenge is to build an experience that readers value and can’t get anywhere else.” (original)
Journalists “not only don’t know what a business plan is, they don’t understand road maps, they don’t understand product requirements, they don’t understand what partnership and strategy is all about, and how revenue is actually generated. … We don’t really train anybody in these things, but this is the language of our industry now.” — Marcia Parker, former assistant dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (original)
J-schools
“Journalism education is not keeping pace with the news-and-information industry it is dedicated to serve.” (original)
That, we knew.
“[A] digital-first school would foster the skills and habits of mind critical to journalism in the 21st century: self-instruction; numeracy; data analytics; human-centered, iterative design; active curiosity; and early adoption. And its mission would unabashedly be the exceptional preparation of journalists for an industry it can neither anticipate nor imagine.” (original)
“Today, many faculty acknowledge that it’s all but impossible to teach the tenets of a digital-first news culture they have neither experienced nor studied.” (original)
“[T]raining for the new environment isn’t an event;
it’s a never-ending process.” (original)
“I worry because I see J-schools emphasizing that jack-of-all-trades model.” — Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information
“A misconception in journalism academia is that people do audio slideshows.” — Catherine Cloutier, data journalist at BostonGlobe.com
And so many other things! Teaching students “how to build websites” doesn’t correlate with real jobs in journalism either. One thing this report doesn’t discuss is that “the skills journalists need now” will be defined differently by different professionals in the field, and the people on a j-school’s advisory board (often high up on the managerial chain) might not be the closest to the ground in that regard.
“Culturally, I think journalism schools have to think about collaboration and partnership as a huge value; the concept of exclusivity no longer exists. If you really want to leverage your work for impact and reach, especially in an investigative nonprofit space, it’s all about distribution, traditional and nontraditional unique storytelling, and creating a culture where impact is thought about and valued.” — Robert Rosenthal, Center for Investigative Reporting (original)
“You can’t plant your flag in the old world and then add the digital stuff on after as a layer. It’s got to be digital first.” — Paul Grabowicz, director, New Media Program, University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (original)
“For some programs, a digital-first approach would refine rather than replace current practice. For others, it would be revolutionary, requiring faculty to fundamentally rethink their entire curricula and delivery systems, their professional networks, and their core obligations to their students.” (original)
Accreditation
“[A] new and more focused accreditation process would provide substantive review of the extent to which [the j-schools are] meeting their goals. Like the current process, such a system would involve peer reviewers; unlike the more traditionally academic process, however, a professional accreditation process would engage a team of highly qualified digital-first journalists to help review a program’s curriculum, assess its currency, measure its outcomes and confirm its quality.” (original)
“Of the nine standards of accreditation, eight focus on institutional structures, processes, and systems. Only Standard 2 centers on the quality of a program’s curriculum and instruction, and of the 12 relevant metrics, only one refers to technology and ‘the digital world’ … there is no mention of job placement, employer satisfaction data, or external professional assessment of new graduates’ skills or competencies.” (original)
A thought: Both my undergraduate institution (Penn State) and my grad school (The New School for Social Research) send me frequent postal mail and even call me on the phone (although I beg them to stop) asking for donations. In other words, they know where I am and how to reach me. Given that, why don’t more j-schools poll their graduates regularly? Why don’t all j-schools have reliable systems for tallying and reporting on the careers of their alumni? We’ve got social scientists on our faculties — they understand the value of longitudinal studies and survey research.
Why don’t we eat our own dog food?
If the j-schools are failing their graduates, surely this is the way to find out and raise the stakes for meaningful change.
Recommendations for j-schools
“The following three recommendations offer a practical, effective option for schools dedicated to preparing the next generation of digital-first journalists:
- “Establish a digital-first academic startup, the educational equivalent of the ProPublicas, FiveThirtyEights and Vox Medias of the news-and-information marketplace.
- “Leverage the disciplinary expertise of the full-time faculty while creating new delivery structures for skills-based learning.
- “Create a mission-specific accreditation process for programs that define as their core mission the preparation of 21st-century journalists.” (original)
Note: You can find these recommendations and full explanations of each one about two-thirds of the way down the fifth section of the report. Under point 2 (about three-fourths down the page), you’ll find a bullet list of concrete suggestions, such as:
“A digital-first journalism school would … [be] re-created every semester through active engagement with professionals, incubators, accelerators and faculty to design boot camps, lectures, seminars, workshops, field trips, and self-taught tutorials designed exclusively to meet the learning needs of students now.”
Sarah Bartlett, dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, suggests that “the demands of preparing students for a newly dynamic media environment may require a reconsideration of the classic professional-scholarly debate: What is the mission and purpose of professional journalism education?” (original)
“And does achieving that mission in a digital age require systems and structures different from those of the more theoretical schools imagined” in this 2013 paper by three journalism academics? (Note: That’s a PDF, 77 pages.)
See also: Rewriting J-School, by Jon Marcus (Spring 2014)
Skills
“We all know that the greatest need right now is people in the world of journalism who are not innumerate. And we know when you train people in those fields, they will have jobs.” — Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief and co-CEO, ProPublica
“It’s sort of like saying that to be a successful bus driver you have to be the mechanic. You don’t need to be the mechanic. Or that to be a successful pilot you have to be able to build the plane. You don’t need to know how to build the plane.” — Marty Baron (original)
I’m not fond of Baron’s analogies. If you want to choreograph the ballet, you have to know how to dance. If you dance Swan Lake, you have to be able to put on your own damned pointe shoes. Rembrandt had to learn how to mix colors. Mozart knew how to play the harpsichord.
Journalists who work with code are not building computers. They are building digital stories. (This is me on my soapbox.)
Tools are tools. If you can’t use the tools, then you can’t make things.
“While everybody agrees that journalists need to have technical skills and understandings, there is much less consensus about the depth or level of tech mastery necessary for success.” (original)
On ridiculous job ads: “I think possibly the hiring managers don’t know what skills you need, so they list everything.” — Lindsey Cook, data reporter, U.S. News & World Report (original)
Others say “working journalists need to understand and use digital tools for data analysis and visualization, for example, but they don’t have to be experts or engineers.” (original)
“Even the newsrooms that say they want tech-savvy journalists who know how to code don’t understand the difference between necessary skills and unnecessary mastery, says Lindsey Cook [data reporter, U.S. News & World Report].” (original)
“All newsrooms are looking for journalists who actively generate new ideas and opportunities that can help move the organization forward, he [Marty Baron] says.”
“On the far end of the tech-essential spectrum are journalism nonprofits such as the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, and for-profits like Narrative Science, which define journalism in data-centric terms.” (original)
“We need more great writers, we need more great number crunchers, and we need more people who can visually display it on the Web in a way that’s compelling.” — Paul Steiger, founding CEO and executive chairman, ProPublica (original)
“Now you’re being judged on metrics like community engagement, time on site, time on section, time on story, how much are you seeding and engaged in conversation. … If your social media doesn’t sing and doesn’t get response, you’re going to be marked down for that.” — Marcia Parker, former assistant dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (original)
“[T]here’s user engagement, communicating with your audience, using social media to expand and extend your audience. … It’s really about seeding conversation, engaging in conversation, keeping a conversation going — not just because you have to improve time on your site, but because users are now in the habit of really engaging with stories.” — Marcia Parker (original)
Journalism
“We have to restore some of the conversation about why journalism and accountability matters, why we should think about journalism as an activity instead of an industry.” — Jeffrey Rutenbeck, dean of the School of Communication at American University (original)
“We used to just do the journalism, and the business side will be taken care of. … That was false security for us because we thought people were coming to us for certain reasons, but they were in fact coming because they didn’t have other choices. Now they have other options, and we are getting a better sense of the real world. That may lead to a situation in which journalists only do the things that make money, and then what happens to the stuff that doesn’t make money?” — Marty Baron (original)
“[J]ournalism remains essential to an informed, effective, and sustainable democracy.” (original)
“A free press is crucial as a watchdog in keeping [the balance between national security and civil liberties] in check, in keeping government in check and the public informed. It’s crucial that we have a free press and an informed public, so they understand the role journalists play in maintaining our freedoms.” — James Duff, former CEO of the Freedom Forum and the Newseum (original)
Five pillars
One person interviewed said journalism organizations should focus on these, and make them priorities. I found these very interesting, but they were only mentioned in the report, not expanded upon.
- “Engagement design (the art and science of why anyone should pay attention to journalism in the first place);
- “Management of complex systems and processes in an environment that is increasingly networked;
- “Analytics and the measurement of impact;
- “Transformative storytelling; and
- “Leadership and accountability.”
— Jeffrey Rutenbeck, dean of the School of Communication at American University (original)
Conclusions of the report
Dianne Lynch, author of the report, wrote: “My takeaway from six months of listening is that the common concerns of professionals and academics alike can, in large part, be attributed to the rigidity of an academic system inadequately designed to provide and support the flexibility, immersion, iteration and professional currency that are such necessary attributes of the professional preparation of 21st-century journalists.” (original)
“Importantly, the proposal does not suggest particular curricula, beyond assuming a grounding in the core competencies of traditional journalism: writing, reporting, history, ethics and law. It is instead a model of innovative systems and structures, designed to be adaptable to the strengths, capacities and opportunities unique to every journalism program and its faculty.” (original)
My conclusions
I think a lot of people, myself included, hoped this report would offer more of a blueprint, road map, or outline of how to transform the j-school. Not “what it should become” but rather “how to become that.” I was disappointed that it did not. The recommendations are good, but what do they really come down to?
- Hiring journalism professionals to come in and hold workshops, etc., in all the new ways of doing journalism.
- Building an accelerator within, but separate from, the university system.
- Still teaching “the core competencies of traditional journalism: writing, reporting, history, ethics and law.”
- Changing accreditation to focus more on the outcomes of a j-school than its internal systems and structures.
“Such a digital-first school would define success in terms of its measurable contributions to and impact upon the profession it has reinvented itself to serve.”
I am very grateful to the Knight Foundation for all it has done for journalism education over the past 20 years, including providing a j-school faculty position for me. The university is a huge and entrenched institution, and it’s a challenge to effect change from within or without. Nevertheless, J-schools have got to change. The conversation must continue, and what’s more, action must be taken. Too little, too late might soon become simply — too late.
