Recently I wrote several stories (found here and here) about concerns that tech-oriented courses were taking over journalism programs. In those articles I mentioned two cases that have spurred debate on the issue: the University of Colorado's announcement that it might dismantle its journalism school, and the University of Montana j-school's decision to remove public affairs reporting from its list of required courses.
Peggy Kuhr, dean of the Montana j-school, responded to those articles with a letter sent to me and to Jim Romenesko's blog. I was happy to publish her missive - even though she implied I had my facts wrong about her program, which I didn't - but before I did I had one question: Why take public affairs reporting off the list of required courses? That, after all, was the question people were asking, one her letter didn't really answer.
Nadia White, an assistant professor with the j-school, explained that in the past, the program "divided students by discipline: print, photo, broadcast, broadcast production." The print students had always been required to take public affairs reporting.
But "newspapers were begging for students who could write and shoot still or video images; television stations badly needed reporters who could do standups and write stories for the Web, for example. So, after several years of heartfelt debate, we tore those walls down. It is now easier for students to gain experience across the disciplines," she said in an e-mail.
With the barriers between disciplines gone, the school simply didn't have enough faculty to teach public affairs reporting if it was required of all journalism students. So instead it was made an elective offered to all j-students, whatever discipline they were pursuing.
"We knew we didn't have faculty numbers to require the course of all our juniors and seniors, so this was a way to open up the class to more students across the board," Kuhr told me. "We decided to consolidate some courses and drop others and offer public affairs to students who really want to be journalists, no matter what medium they choose to pursue."
Kuhr said the school now actually offers more sections of public affairs reporting than it did before. And White added: "I can tell you I've never had a Public Affairs Class so on fire to learn as the one I am teaching now, the first since it became an elective. Yesterday, I had to shoo them out of class they were so engaged."
Still, I asked Kuhr what she'd say to those who'd argue that making public affairs reporting an elective in j-school was akin to, say, making gross anatomy an elective in med school.
"We know from alumni surveys - which I'm sure are consistent with findings in nearly all journalism programs - that many students value the degree for the critical thinking and writing skills it instills, but don't intend to work in the news media. They'll learn those skills in a variety of other courses, but won't necessarily put them into practice reporting about government
affairs," she said.
As a college journalism professor myself I'm loath to give anyone in the trade a hard time. Instructors are being pulled in a dozen different directions in trying to train students for a profession that's changing with each passing day. The changes at Montana sound innovative, and a scan of the faculty bios there reveals something all-too rare: a department staffed with instructors with real newsroom experience. I applaud that.
But I still believe that journalism programs should require bedrock courses like public affairs reporting, because those are the courses that get to the core of our mission - to inform the public and serve as a watchdog on government.
The full text of Kuhr's original letter to me.
Is There Too Much Tech Training at the Nation's J-Schools?
A Teacher From the Old School Worries About the Future of Journalism Education
Comments
So your correspondent Nadia White writes: “…But “newspapers were begging for students who could write and shoot still or video images; television stations badly needed reporters who could do standups and write stories for the Web, for example.”
And that’s the root of the problem. J-schools are still generally just trade schools trying to primarily prepare students for jobs in a dying industry which is: (a) run by managers trying to enforce an industrial model of news production; (b) sets very low standards of competence and scoffs at innovation or any experiments allowing for “fail fast, fail often”) ; (c) has long considered on-going staff training a luxury or a boondoggle [Hey, a week off to go to Poynter! What a vacation.] and (d) focuses on new ways to deliver the same old “quote-and-anecdote” news stories instead of teaching true analytic skills, e.g. statistics, GIS, social network analysis, etc.
There is a somewhat new phrase to describe these attempts: “Active inertia” [http://trinetizen.blogspot.com/2007/09/active-inertia-why-good-companies-go.html”
We see this not only in industry, but J-schools as well. Will we ever see J-schools leading the industry by creating new perspectives and tools for analysis and delivery of news? I fear not; it would be just too hard to change both cultures.
Equating “journalism” with public affairs reporting is a narrow conception of a field that is much more vibrant, messy and wide ranging than most faculty and mainstream journalists acknowledge.
As the folks at Montana pointed out, providing public affairs as an elective meets the needs of the students who are passionate about reporting. Requiring the course of all students would be akin to forcing everyone who walks in a grocery store to start their shopping with 2 pounds of vegetables, regardless of what they came for or need at home. Arguing for a policy that would absorb resources the school doesn’t have to provide something that some students don’t want and will never need, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Journalism courses are generally infused with a public ethos; even without public affairs reporting students get plenty of opportunity to practice the public affairs mission of journalism.
We can either constrain journalism schools to teach what’s been taught for the past 80 years and gradually be replaced in the same way that newspapers and television stations are being replaced, or we can change. And if we’re smart, we’ll study the changes we make with the same analytical tools that Tom argues we should employ in the industry. Let’s study what happens as every school in the country experiments. Rather than spending time arguing about courses, we can work to practice a public ethos in our courses and communities in the most creative ways we can develop.