A Truly Bold Idea for U.S. J&MC Education: Sincerely Trying True Excellence for Once

On June 4 this year, Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute gave a speech called “The Future of Journalism Education” at the European Journalism Centre’s twentieth anniversary celebration in Maastricht, the Netherlands, in which he presented the results of a survey of journalists and journalism professors about the value of a journalism degree, among other things.

Finberg said he had surveyed more than 1,975 persons, with 42 percent being academics, 34 percent from media organizations, 11 percent freelancers/independents, and 13 percent students. Highlights, as he recounted them, were as follows:

Also,

Later in the speech, Finberg added these figures: “*54% of the academics say a journalism degree is very to extremely important when it comes to getting hired. *Only 38% of professionals say the same, with only 33% of senior managers agreeing that a degree is very to extremely important when it comes to getting a job.”

How does Finberg respond? He likes Eric Newton’s (president’s senior advisor, Knight Foundation) suggestions for journalism education:

But Finberg also suggests that Newton’s ideas “aren’t being bold enough.” Finberg then spent the rest of his speech bragging about Poynter’s News University, encouraging journalism schools to offer a lot of News University–type online courses, saying that “maybe a journalism degree isn’t the endgame” (after earlier having said “I do NOT suggest that this survey says that a degree is unimportant”), suggesting that journalism and mass communication (J&MC) programs do “practical research, not just academic exploration,” and pushing a combination of student work portfolios that go way beyond “just traditional clips or tapes” and “digital badges that represent skills or other competences” of students in addition to the über-portfolio and the course transcript.

Finberg packed quite a bit into this Maastricht speech, and it requires more than a little bit of unpacking, which I will do here without defending the status quo. (Finberg says, “This is not the time to say ‘we have always done it that way.’ This is the time to disrupt everything,” and cites Newton for referring to “the ‘symphony of slowness’ to change at journalism schools that hurts both students and society” [all but “symphony of slowness” are Finberg’s words].)

It is unclear whether Finberg’s survey was random or even only representative of U.S. journalism professors, media professionals, and journalism students. But let’s assume that the responses he got are, more or less, what those in the academy and profession think. In any case, second, of course J&MC professors would tend to think that obtaining a J&MC degree is very to extremely important in learning J&MC skills because to think otherwise is to cast doubt on what they do every day. And, of course journalism professionals are going to give journalism programs a lot less credit than academics give themselves because professionals think they do, even need to do, a lot of on-the-job training of even J&MC program graduates (let alone non-J&MC program graduates), professionals are more likely than J&MC academics to have degrees not in J&MC, even some professionals who have J&MC degrees will think that their J&MC degree program could have been better (or maybe wasn’t very good at all), and professionals may very well be more creative (let alone unrealistic) about how a person might obtain J&MC knowledge and skills without getting a J&MC degree.

That half the professionals and one-third of the academics say that J&MC education isn’t keeping up with industry changes isn’t that large of a gap, considering how they see things from very different perspectives. (For starters, how many professionals even have checked a J&MC degree program curriculum lately? They would be outright shocked at those programs, now a significant number, that overhauled half or more of their curricula in just the last year or two or three. There’s a real smugness in many professionals’ assumptions that they know what goes on in 2012 in J&MC programs, while J&MC professors have no idea what’s going on in the “real world.” On the contrary, I bet that some professionals think, for example, that Tom Bowers, the late Peggy Blanchard, and the late Bob Stevenson are still teaching at Chapel Hill. . . .)

That 54 percent say a J&MC degree is very to extremely important to getting a J&MC job while 38 percent of professionals say that also isn’t that large of a gap either, again considering their different perspectives and J&MC academics’ self-interest. (Professionals also have had the experience of hiring persons with J&MC degrees who were incompetent anyway, while most J&MC professors don’t give enough thought to their graduates who aren’t ready for a job.) More important, it’s notable and commendable that only 54 percent of J&MC profs think the degree is important to a job. It shows that they also know of current and/or former journalists who don’t have a journalism degree, or at least that one could/should be able to get a journalism job without a journalism degree. Comparing the academics’ important-to-job figure (54 percent) with the 95-96 percent who say a J&MC degree is very to extremely important to understanding journalism and having journalism skills strongly suggests that J&MC professors know that J&MC degrees are not strictly necessary but that J&MC programs are the only game in town to learn journalism skills/knowledge. Finberg would surely dispute this, using News University as exhibit A, but any academic making such an argument has a good point. Talk to media professionals these days, and they will tell you that their workforces are so downsized and outsourced that there is no time for on-the-job training/mentoring of new employees. And this, in turn, makes it all the more obvious to professionals when a J&MC graduate on their staff is not up to speed.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room here, of course, is that while only 38 percent of professionals and 33 percent of senior managers say a J&MC degree is important to getting a job, the number of entry-level journalism employees out there who have a J&MC degree is probably twice that. One must pay attention to what these journalism professionals do, not just what they say.

I would have answered Finberg’s questions with write-in answers or at least caveats. How vital is a journalism degree to understanding the value of journalism? I would say “it depends” or “not very much, because many/most J&MC programs don’t do a very good job of teaching the philosophy of journalism, the history of journalism, and/or the purpose of journalism, particularly how journalism is absolutely necessary, not irrelevant or harmful, to both democracy and capitalism.” If the question were “How vital should a journalism degree be to understanding the value of journalism?” I’d say, “Extremely so.”

Again, Finberg asked, how valuable is a journalism degree to equipping students with the skills or abilities in journalism? And I’d repeat, “It depends.” My own experience was unusual but not unique. I started on student newspapers at fourteen, had my first internship at fifteen, and also started free-lancing at fifteen (for the publication where I had been an intern). All of that continued for years, so that by the time I was able to get into a news reporting course, a publication design course, and a news editing course when a junior at University of Oregon, I had been doing all of that for many years. The main value of my Oregon journalism degree was in subjects one doesn’t get in the newsroom: media law, newspaper management, journalism history, and writing the nonfiction book. And there are the endless stories about the brilliant kids who work on the student newspapers at institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, or Duke (none of which have a J&MC program), get a summer internship or two in college, and graduate to a job at the New York Times or New Republic.

As for the importance of having a J&MC degree for getting a job, I quickly learned that half my fellow interns at the Oregonian in 1983 weren’t J&MC majors, but then and especially now (with too many hiring functions handled by HR departments and not enough staff for on-the-job training) I wouldn’t leave home without it (a J&MC degree). But then I didn’t attend Duke and intern in New York City. . . .

Finberg is correct that Newton’s ideas are not bold enough, though for varying reasons. A couple of them are not new. Team teaching a science journalism course with scientists has been done, and while it hasn’t been done enough, the real problem is the severe shortage of J&MC students who have any interest in science journalism. Numerous journalism programs also fulfill the “community content provider” role with students staffing news services, required to publish articles for grades, working on student newspapers that circulate off campus, practicing investigative reporting in innocence projects, taking on projects during internships that staffers don’t have time for, and more. Newton is correct that we can teach students more about collaborative journalism, but the idea of a team working on a story is hardly new. As for using software more in journalism education, sure, why not, but let’s not emphasize software for the sake of emphasizing software.

So where Finberg’s speech ended up going was essentially saying that anyone and everyone can be, or already is, a journalist, and because journalism is necessary for democracy, anyone and everyone should understand journalism better—and that J&MC programs can facilitate this through online courses. To state that it would be helpful if more citizens knew more about journalism is correct, but also obvious. I am exhausted by average citizens smugly psychoanalyzing journalists when they usually know as much about journalism as the typical driver does about how automobiles are designed and manufactured. I am exasperated by the success of certain U.S. conservatives who have apparently succeeded in convincing the majority of the general public that all journalism is biased and most journalism is inaccurate merely by making that assertion loud enough and often enough for the past thirty years. But Finberg is confusing technology with purpose and effects if he thinks that anyone with a YouTube channel or a Facebook account is a journalist. And Finberg is certainly off base when he claims that a lot more people would learn about journalism if only they could (through J&MC programs offering online education the News U. way): “The world is full of people who want to write better, who want to tell stories better, who want to share their experiences. These are potential journalists, whether they are have a degree or not. These folks are our ‘non-customers.’”

In fact, Finberg lays out an entire argument that journalism knowledge is limited because “there’s a societal and economic model based on the scarcity in getting an education and degree. . . . While there was an assumption that the journalism degree meant a quality journalism education, there was no guarantee. There was a scarcity—not every school had a journalism program and fewer schools had an accredited program.”

Again, it wouldn’t hurt if every blogger, YouTuber, Twitterer, and Facebooker knew more about journalism. But to claim that they would already if it weren’t for the scarcity of journalism education is just silly. The United States has about 475 journalism programs at four-year universities, plus hundreds more at community colleges. A lot of them are essentially “open admissions” or might as well be, with enrollment limits being rare and what I think are minimal admissions standards and minimal graduation standards being common. For those who don’t have that kind of money or time, Americans interested in journalism also could buy trade books and textbooks about journalism, subscribe to American Journalism Review or Columbia Journalism Review, join Society of Professional Journalists, watch videos about journalism, read blogs and other websites about journalism, etc., etc. But there is no evidence that would-be J&MC students, supposedly shut out of America’s apparently hopelessly elitist and inaccessible J&MC programs (the overwhelming majority of which are at public universities), are snapping up dog-eared used copies of News Values by Fuller, Breaking the News by Fallows, or Elements of Journalism by Kovach and Rosenstiel.

Allow me to be what some (though not me) would call “bold.” I would submit that journalism professionals do not put a higher value on J&MC degrees precisely because they have worked with incompetent colleagues with J&MC degrees, and because some journalism professionals with J&MC degrees don’t think much of the degree they got. Why is this? For reasons I also have already stated: too many J&MC degree programs admitting too many students, low to nonexistent admissions standards, and too many J&MC degree programs graduating too many students due to lax grading, moderate-to-minimal course requirements, and no counseling out (of the J&MC program, that is) of students whom you wouldn’t hire if they applied to you for a media industry job.

Finberg complains that journalism education hasn’t really tried online education, and Newton complains that journalism education isn’t current on technology nor practical about coursework. But journalism programs have been struggling to keep up with technology for sixty or more years, and some journalism programs’ technology is actually more advanced than that of many local media companies. And within each program’s constraints, the overwhelming majority of journalism professors have tried hard to make assignments practical, if not published/broadcast, in writing/reporting and editing/production courses.

On the contrary, for reasons already stated, what U.S. J&MC education hasn’t ever tried (except for a commendable limited experiment such as the Carnegie-Knight Initiative’s News21, even if it didn’t “redefine journalism” as it claimed), and thus what would be truly bold and innovative to do, is excellence. Only the very highest quality students (not just grades, but motivation level, demonstrated interest, etc.) being taught by only the very highest quality faculty, with the most rigorous curriculum, the toughest grading, and the best and newest equipment and supplies. (Anyone who thinks that, say, the master’s programs at Northwestern, Columbia, Berkeley, and Mizzou are truly elite apparently doesn’t know that their combined enrollments at any given moment total nearly twelve hundred!)

Without a sincere focus on excellence, there will continue to be a direct correlation between J&MC degrees not being more valued by industry both by word and deed and J&MC academics describing their jobs, as one told me this year, “explaining what journalism should be to people who don’t read, can’t write, and refuse to think is becoming more difficult and frustrating.” (Other long-time journalism professors have, also this year, similarly described their current students to me.) If I didn’t know the sad answers, I would ask, why is any journalism school (let alone all of them) admitting students who don’t read, can’t write, and refuse to think?

The two major points that I know that Finberg, Newton, and I can agree on are that journalism education’s practices “change very slowly if they ever change at all” (thanks to The Eagles’ “Sad Cafe”) and that journalism education can’t stay the way that it is. And Finberg is correct when he attributes the lack of change to unnamed various factors that add up to “we have always done it that way.” To me, the dominant reason is a leadership shortage, even crisis, in the discipline. J&MC deans/directors, by both circumstance and choice, are now largely fund-raisers and bureaucratic functionaries. Clearly, they are only very rarely getting hired because they have made a major mark, national or international, on the discipline. Current journalism professors known universally in journalism education and to some people outside, such as Robert McChesney and Jay Rosen, generally have never been higher in the academic food chain than endowed chair or department chair. Journalism schools are having such a hard time finding even satisfactory fund-raisers/functionaries that dean/director searches not infrequently take eighteen to twenty-four months, and a department can even still be looking for a fall semester chair/head during the preceding summer. U.S. journalism schools also have an astonishing number of deans/directors who hold only a bachelor’s degree, or hold a graduate degree (and not even the PhD) in a discipline that has little or nothing to do with journalism, public relations, advertising, media studies, etc.—a fact that cannot do much to help J&MC programs’ credibility on their own campuses, with grant makers, etc., even with their own students. And perhaps if there were stronger leadership in the J&MC discipline, a report, linked to a journalism education initiative, that concluded U.S. journalism has “1. A need for analytical thinkers with a strong ethical sense, as well as journalism skills; 2. A need for specialized expertise: insights into medicine, economics, and other complex topics, and firsthand knowledge of societies, languages, religions, and cultures; and 3. A need for the best writers, the most curious reporters” (excellence goals all three) would have come from within the discipline rather than from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (which had never done anything journalism related before 2003). In turn, unwillingness and/or inability to prioritize excellence is a major, though not the only, reason for the leadership crisis.

In sum, a sincere goal of true excellence, which would involve, among other things, all journalism students producing News21-like work, would lead to meeting Carnegie Corp.’s three journalism “needs.” As for recommendations from Finberg and Newton, if we have hard evidence that News University is excellent (not merely popular or widely available), and if we have hard evidence that innovation, open and collaborative methods, connections to the whole university, and expanded roles as community content providers are being done excellently, and result in excellent graduates, then and only then, let’s all stop saying, “we have always done it that way,” and start doing things a new way: excellently.