Falling ad revenue. Plunging profits. Layoffs. Downsizing. Bankruptcy filings.
The news in the news business can’t get any worse. Some days it seems as if those who write the first draft of history have little in the way of a future.
So what are journalism professors, those charged with grooming the next generation of reporters, editors and producers, telling their students these days about the news business in general, and print journalism, that seemingly most endangered of species, in particular?
“I'm telling my students to find a new profession,” says journalism Professor Tony Chan of the University of Washington at Seattle.
“Print, as we know it, is dead. Kaput,” he adds. “Print is ‘Dead Man Walking.’”
But others are more optimistic.
“The newspaper business could not be in worse shape,” admits Columbia University Journalism Professor Sreenath Sreenivasan. “But there’s a hunger for information we’re seeing in everything from the business meltdown to the Mumbai attacks to the automotive industry.
“People want information, people want to know what’s happening,” he continues. “They may not want it in the way we’re giving it to them, but they want it. And there’s more need than ever for good journalism.”
At Columbia, Sreenivasan says, there’s a much greater emphasis these days on training students in using new media, and in specialized reporting in areas like business and the arts.
That’s not to say that students aren’t worried about what kind of job market they’ll face after graduating.
“Students have concerns – they always do,” Sreenivasan says. “But we’re very bullish on news gathering. We’re banking our future on journalism.”
Steven S. Duke, managing director for training and an associate professor at the Medill Journalism School at Northwestern University in Chicago, says he and his colleagues are stressing versatility.
“We're telling students they must be prepared to practice journalism across all platforms, and not to think of themselves as TV journalists, newspaper journalists or even Web journalists,” Duke says. “Everybody has to be able to do a bit of everything.”
Students, Duke says, “have to understand audience needs and interests so they can tell important stories in ways that will engage and interest people. If they can't stimulate interest, no one will read or view their stories, no matter how important.”
Duke also says he encourages students to take the long view of the changes happening in the news industry.
“We also tell students that just as at the inception of radio, and later television, this is a time of disruption of old models, but also an opportunity to create new ones. The most entrepreneurial journalists will fare the best,” he says.
Temple University journalism professor Linn Washington says the key phrase in his department is multi-media journalism.
“We tell our students that employment opportunities exist in multi-media journalism even as cutbacks roil through newspapers and broadcast stations,” Washington says.
Washington says all students in Temple's journalism department receive training in software like Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash. They must also take the program’s Multi-Media Urban Reporting Lab course, in which they prepare multi-media reports from inner-city neighborhoods and then post those reports on a website.
Surprisingly, Washington says some students still resist the multi-media approach, especially if it falls outside their particular area of study, such as magazine journalism.
“At the beginning of every semester, we have to go through a drill pointing out how the media-scape has changed radically during the past five years, pushing the fact that convergence is the current wave and they better get on this wave or be left standing on the beach,” Washington says.
