With News Jobs Vanishing, Why Are Journalism Schools Still Enrolling Students?

As I read about the latest contractions in the newsroom of the New York Times (100 reporters and editors) and the San Francisco Chronicle (investigative reporting staff–gone), the question occurs: Why are universities across the country continuing to churn out journalism graduates? Do they know something that the rest of us don’t? Do they have some reason to believe that demand for academically-trained newbee journalists is about to stage an extraordinary recovery across the land?

Job openings for graduates of all professional schools have fallen sharply in the last year. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, newly-minted MBAs and teachers are in excess supply in a cyclically depressed economy. But there is reason to expect that those markets eventually will recover, even if they don’t return to the growth levels of the recent past. Journalists, however,  face bigger obstacles. Traditional news media will continue to shed jobs, even in a general recovery, faster than digitally-based replacements for those businesses can be invented and built.

One explanation for journalism schools’ still-open doors is that surviving news organizations are looking to them to provide professionally trained, but cheap, labor to  replace veteran journalists whose skills and experience no longer justify their premium cost. Under this theory, journalism school education  is substituting for the de facto apprenticeships that news organizations used to maintain to train their new journalists.

But if so, it’s fair to ask whether this is really a function that journalism schools should be providing. Does it make sense for them to be subsidizing the accelerated dislocation of one generation of their graduates to make room for a younger generation of their graduates?  In the investment world this is called a Ponzi scheme.

Another explanation is that most journalism school students (whether they know it or not) are really headed to careers in public relations–for which demand will, in time, recover–rather than journalism. Fair enough, but journalism school is not (and never has been) the appropriate background for PR. This is not a criticism of the PR profession. Public relations specialists, like lawyers (a club to which I belong), lobbyists and ambassadors, are all professional advocates. Being an effective paid advocate of a client’s point of view has absolutely nothing to do with journalism, other than perhaps the writing of press releases (a skill that can be learned in about 20 minutes).

One thing is clear: journalism schools that continue to operate as such need to focus their energies on teaching their students, as future journalists, the skills necessary to fully exploit the journalistic applications of digital technologies. I’m talking about more than posting videos to YouTube or tweeting the headlines of daily news stories. Any 12-year-old in America can now do that.

The challenge is to adapt the skills of enterprise reporting to an online environment in which creative exploitation of digital media is an essential and integral aspect of the story, not an after-thought. More than a clever headline and powerful photos, the possibilities of online technology have to be integrated fully into the reporting–something that can best be done, in the first instance, by the journalist writing the story, not the techies in another building who run the paper’s website.

Time is running out. Bill Keller, the brilliant Editor of the New York Times, confessed in a talk to some of his staff last month that he has only recently begun to experience the Times mainly in its digital format. This notwithstanding that most of the Times’ readers today view the paper on the web rather than in print; that virtually all of the Times’ readership growth in the last ten years has been online; that five years from now, ten at the outside, there will not be a print edition of the New York Times–which is true whether or not the paper resumes charging for online access (which I think it should do, but that’s another column).

Hopefully, an all-digital Times will still have an edit staff of over one thousand reporters and editors located around the world providing an intelligence and depth of news coverage that is unparalleled and stands as a model for all other news organizations. But that won’t happen if the journalists persist in viewing the web as merely a paperless replacement for the paper’s traditional print distribution.

Therein is the opportunity for our best journalism schools and their future graduates.

——-

Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

Comments

[Dr P]

My new mantra is, "Save journalism, not the newspaper.­" The newspaper is only a vehicle, one that may or may not survive the current upheaval. So, journalism schools are still valid, but obviously they have to adapt (and many of them have). The core skills of uncovering, organizing and presenting information are pretty much eternal.

At my school (where we teach about other media professions but not journalism specifically), we are frequently asked my administration to consider adding a journalism major. The impetus for this appears to be prospective students, who inquire of the admissions people whether we have such a program. Perhaps they are coming from high schools that publish newspapers, which means the journalism profession resonates more with them than, say, public relations, which is often invisible.

Dr. P. Dissects the Media
mediamaven.nfshost.comst.com

[springsm]

Hope runs eternal!
Perhaps one day there will be another bright young journalist who really wants to do it right...I don't know who the role models will be....but just maybe.
In the meantime why is MSNBC still using that Gen. Jacobs as a war analyst? He was almost spitting with his support of the Iraq war..one of the specialists paid for by the Pentagon, doncha know. Truth in advertising.

[Fabini]

Yesterday, I was at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and I asked the same question. Why do business schools exist?

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

They exist to give business types the prestige of a degree withouy having to do college level work.

[Charity]

are you kidding me? j-schools teach more than print journalism. visit one today - a good one.

talk to the students - see what they are learning in regard to web reporting, video, etc. or how about giving a call to the head of a reputable j-school and find out what courses are offered and what kind of extra curricular activities the students are engaged in. when i went to j-school i spent an inordinate amount of time at the independent student newspaper. today, they are not only doing the same but also carrying their Flips with them, engaging in real-time blogging, designing news web sites.

not all journalism is print. and the first ones to understand that - and the problems therein - are the j-schools.

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

Yes, but in a highly credentialised world you NEED that degree to have even a chance of getting into the field.

[Citygirllost]

Yes, any chimp can learn to churn out a press release in 20 minutes, but what I got out of my j-school education (At Medill, arguably one of the best) was the ability to recognize misspellings, grammatical errors and punctuation problems. I learned how to communicate clearly and concisely. Far too often lately I've seen egregious grammatical mistakes, misplaced punctuation and the general abuse of words that makes me cringe in the media. Don't even get me started on Facebook! Sure you can hire anyone to write your press releases, but you have to consider, are the people in your potential audience laughing at them?

[Citizen54]

But can you get someone to pay you for your skills?

I hear you on the typos and bad writing and content errors, but I'm not sure the people who watch the bottom line -- that is, the people who run the media/news­/publishin­g biz -- care about mistakes in text. Often the first people to go in a magazine or newspaper or web site layoff are the copy editors and proofreaders. The executive who just laid them off doesn't even know what they do; all he knows is they're a "cost center."

Anyway, the best copy editors and proofreaders I've had the pleasure of working with came from Medill. So, you do have that going for you.

[lawlere1]

I'm a student in Michigan State University's J-school, and I do see a lot of people around that shouldn't be there. There are people in my classes that are still scared to interview people, lack the ability to synthesize information, and altogether will never be good reporters. But cutting the program entirely would leave serious students like me without a degree in something they have a passion for.

Incidentally, most of the journalism students that are going places here have more than one major or degree. I'm majoring in journalism and public policy, and have minors in religious studies and political science. I'm the editor in chief of a campus magazine www.thebiggreen.nett) and I'd venture to say on top of the pile here. That doesn't mean I'm not nervous about getting a job. But I'm glad this university is giving me the opportunity to pursue my passion.

Also, the commenter before me clearly never went through my program. Like everything, journalism courses are what you make of them.

[NHBill]

For every lawlere1 there are 100 other kids going $30-40,000 A YEAR in debt! for this useless degree.
Morrow and his boys never went to J school!

[springsm]

Edward R Murrow went to Washington State College, majored in speech, became interested in politics and reporting while in college and then moved to NY. I expect the rest is history. And speech does entail research and writing. But you are correct..y­ou either have a nose and heart for the work or not. I think you have to have ethics and integrity.­...and earn credibility. So many are just talking heads.

[Charity]

"I do see a lot of people around that shouldn't be there."

would it surprise you to learn that the same was said when i went to j-school in the 70s? after woodward and bernstein suddenly everyone wanted to be a journalist. one of my favorite professors once told me: "i don't know what half of the kids are doing here."

i went to j-school with kids who couldn't grasp who-what-w­hen-why-an­d-how. some certainly didn't make it in the profession. but others, who also grappled with basic journalism, began to learn their craft and went on to become professional journalists. that's why they call it "school."

i dare say the same could be said of any other college or school in the major universities. it's a process - a time for discovery, it's "school."

[larry278]

Enrolling J School students brings more tuition money to the institution. J School courses are easy A's for students. Nobody is getting or holding jobs since the meltdown. J Schools keep students occupied & off the streets.

[Citygirllost]

You must be joking that journalism classes are easy As. Maybe it's true of the school you attended. At my alma mater, those classes were among the most difficult, with the most cantankerous of instructors.

[Jim Thomas - Huffpost Blogger]

The journalism schools are in good (bad?) company. New law jobs are fewer and the economics of those remaining has changed for the worse, yet law schools keep churning out debt-laidened grads. The flagship law school in Colorado just announced that 65% of its 2009 grads are still unable to find work. http://www.abajournal.com/news/placement_office_scrambles_at_law_school_where_65_of_grads_had_no_jobs/

Do we blame the schools or the consumers? Of all people, students looking at journalism and law should be well informed.

[Kate Perez]

Yes, the economy is terrible right now but isn't the real problem with the idea of "professional journalists" that they are like vultures with ADD; flocking from one scandalous train wreck to another and repeating the same inane comments over and over again, then losing interest as soon as the next train wreck appears? They claim that they only report what the public wants them to; I beg to differ. And then there is the question of,

Who do they work for, and what spin does the parent corporation want them to put on the "news"?

What killed journalism is the fact that so many bloggers with no journalism training are so much better at writing and reporting the news than the trained journalists.

[jesselee26]

ouch!

[Citizen54]

You should do an analysis of all the major news stories of the year and see which ones were broken by full-time reporters and which were broken by "bloggers with no journalism training." It would be interesting. I don't mean to diss bloggers/online writers. Many do great work and provide astute commentary. But how many are breaking big news? How many have the access sometimes needed to break big news?

I also wonder who would rack up the most stupid and useless stories. Traditional and new publishing seem to be running neck and neck in that race.