Dan Gillmor on the future of journalism education

Dan "We, The Media" Gillmor sez, "What I'd do if I ran a journalism school..."

I would, among many other things:

* Emphasize undergraduate journalism degrees as great liberal arts programs, even more valuable that way than as training for journalism careers. At the same time, focus graduate journalism studies on helping people with expertise in specific areas to be the best possible journalists in their fields.

* Do away with the still-common "track" system for would-be journalists where students focus on print, broadcast, online, etc. These are merging. There would be one track. We wouldn't just recognize our students' digital future; we'd immerse them in it.

* Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary learning and doing. We'd create partnerships around the university, working with business, engineering/computer science, film, political science, law, design and many other programs. The goals would be both to develop our own projects and to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media.

The Future of Journalism Education

• [pjcamp]

  Selling Journalism school as a great way to do liberal arts simply raises the question: if that’s what you want, why not just do liberal arts?

  Seems to me if you want a program to justify itself, it needs to represent a unique solution to a problem or example of a knowledge base. Selling it as a low rent example of something else we already have simply makes it seem redundant.

• [Anonymous]

  ‘Journalism career’ is a non sequitur wrapped in bacon.

  You can get 500 words for 50c now, and sucker 5,000 words out of them, by telling them you’ll publish their ‘joint’.

  Ha,ha,ha,ha. Every journalism student should have to write a term-paper on Pavlov and Gula.

  http://www.moillusions.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/bsfc4q676v_2_sharbat_gula_450_Natural_Hallucinogen_ish-s450x390-27627-580.gif

• [spocko]

  Nice suggestions. I especially like the bit about Persuasion. This has become a very powerful area. Currently there are 4 PR people to each journalist. (This is from the book the Death and Life of Journalism). The ratio was 1 to 1 in the 1980′s.

  I wrote Dan last Monday about a problem I don’t see addressed much. How can you get into news conferences if you are not part of some “official” media organization? The whole concept of citizen journalism is kind of busted if during the times when people in power need to answer questions they can avoid it by lumping you into “the public” instead of “the media.” and keep you out of their conference calls and events. All they have to say is, “Sorry, credentialed media only.”

  Let me give you an example.
  In 2007 I organized 6 bloggers investigating the melamine tainted pet food. We uncovered new information, coordinated our research and we had excellent questions to ask the players, but the FDA would not allow us into the press conference. I made sure to get the info to the establishment journalists following the story, but they didn’t always have the same deep insight as we did (based on our original research). Because of this the FDA never answered some of our questions, such as, “Which Chicken Processor fed the recalled tainted pet food to 20 Million chickens?”

  I found out who it was because I did the leg work. I made the phone calls. I called the top ten chicken processors in the state of Indiana as well as the poultry industry spokespeople. But I couldn’t get it confirmed by the FDA because they wouldn’t let me on the call. (The very fact that the FDA wouldn’t reveal the name to the public should also be a concern. Who were they protecting the people or the processors? Clearly it was the processors.)

  Now because the FDA would not acknowledge the name of this chicken processor 20,000,000 chickens who ate the same food that killed 4,000 cats and dogs went into the human food supply. Does that concern you? It should.

  The chickens ate a steady diet of the same industrial chemical that killed babies in China (melamine) and the pets in the US. It was fed to chickens which then went to schools, hospitals, restaurants and supermarkets.

  The Chicken industry put pressure on the FDA and the USDA to let the food go out. They threw together a report that the science reporter from USA Today described as “weak science.” The Union for Concerned Scientists also had problems with the report but they had other battles to fight with the FDA, so they dropped it. In the end the “Dilution effect”,as the FDA called it, won out over real science and testing.

  Why didn’t I just reveal it? I didn’t have the backing of a news organization to protect me from food disparagement laws (What the beef industry used against Oprah.) Also I had just had my blog shut down by ABC/Disney because I exposed the violent rhetoric of KSFO hosts to their advertisers. I wasn’t in a place where I could piss off another industry giant. Therefore I dropped it after passing it onto the reporters at the LA Times. The reporter there included my information in their FOIA request of the FDA/USDA. We might have proof of what I found out in 2012 if we are lucky. Would it be news then that a major chicken processor convinced the FDA to create a dubious document to get USDA approval for possibly tainted chicken? Probably not. “Nobody died (that we know of) what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that they put profits ahead of health and listened to the industry they were supposed to be overseeing instead of the people.

  People who think that bloggers will pick up the slack on reporting are fooling themselves. As Dan suggests I’ve been trying to use the journalism skills I’ve learned to help the public, but it’s hard to do when the old metaphors are stacked against us.

  (By the way, the work that we bloggers did was praised by Sen. Dick Durbin during the testimony from the pet food processors. USA Today did a story about the bloggers whose work I coordinated. All of that is nice, but it still didn’t convince the FDA to let us on their conference calls on the issue.)

• [Anonymous]

  I’m in the process of finishing up a grad program in journalism. This means I’m also in the process of looking for a job in the field. People really don’t want to hire a journalism major. They want to hire an expert on something who can also write.
  Also, journalism school taught me nothing about getting by as a journalist in the age of the internet…mostly because my professors have nooooo clue about the internet.
  The problems with J-schools won’t be fixed until the current professors are aged out and replaced with people who grew up reading news online.
  Good thing I discovered Cory Doctorow and all his wonderful advice on creating a successful blog, writing headlines in the age of search engines, et cetera.

• [mn_camera]

  Very often, the best journalism is done not by those who are simply J-school grads, but by those with solid knowledge of their subject matter, coupled with an inquiring nature and a willingness to engage with others on that topic.

  Skills – such as photography, video editing, and even interviewing – can be learned, though there is no substitute for either knowledge or talent.

  The one thing none of this addresses, though, is that the “consumers” of journalism have swung far over to preferring the sensational, and any news director can tell you that the overseas stuff causes channel-switching, while the celebrity-oriented tabloid nonsense and “missing white woman” stories draw viewers like magnets.

  Better journalism will require better viewers, there is no doubt of that. And a sad truth it is…