
Are journalism schools teaching their students the right skills? - _pius
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/cindy-royal-are-journalism-schools-teaching-their-students-the-right-skills/
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tsunamifury
I sit on the boards of two Journalism schools and attended the top Masters
program just before the journalism crash of 2009. I am on these boards mostly
because both schools think that some guy in Silicon Valley has insight into
what journalism students should be doing. Its not true.

The problem was that massive disruption of print media really came to a head
due to the great recession, when low media buys plus a real uptick of traction
from ad networks put a final nail in a lot of print journalists careers.

Looking back its easy to think if they were more tech savvy they could have
somehow survived -- but thats just not the case. Tech and journalism are more
closely related than ever, and specifically scripted languages and knowledge
of markup (CSS and JS Libraries) can improve the final product's production
quality, but journalists are not programmers no should they be. Its similar to
saying journalists should know how to roll their own print presses in the 50s
-- its not their job.

The problem lies more in the fact that we simply can't fund journalists to do
their job anymore. We charge them with both doing investigative reporting,
staying neutral and coming up with a sustainable business model for it -- and
you know what? Its just too much to ask. Local news stations are slowly dying
out, local newspapers are already mostly thinned out and upstarts like Patch
(flawed as it was) were not able to fund real journalistic work.

After a few years going back and forth on this I have come to believe that a
BBC like model in the US would do the nation great deal of good. Funding
journalists to do their job and keep up the good work without pressuring them
to make compromises is essentially to keeping voters informed.

I hope we can get over our mindset that all things need to be privatized at
some point in the near future and begin funding PBS, NPR, and local news to
keep doing what they are doing.

~~~
joshlegs
Well, you really have a pretty good grasp on the state of journalism affairs.
In the five years I spent reporting, I saw newsrooms decline substantially at
all the papers I worked at (and was the victim of one layoff).

You're absolutely right in saying that there is just too much demand on
journalists now. People really don't know what they actually do. Everything
from aggregating (by HAND, nonetheless) public information that isn't
available easily online to investigative reporting to daily "fill-the-paper"
stories (you know, the stupid stuff that nobody really cares to read anyway).
Most of my time was spent writing the boring shit until the exciting stuff
came along. And frankly, you can't spend all your time writing the exciting
stuff because you still have to have a local product, not to mention the
massive amount of time it takes just to do a single investigative report.
Investigative articles are really what I consider the heart of journalism as
the fourth estate, and is what sells the papers. But you can't have five days
of nothing and a day of explosive articles. Or hell, maybe you can, who knows.

In any case, just wanted to pipe in with some props on realizing that
journalists are way too overburdened to be effective any more.

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InclinedPlane
Um, no. Next question.

The very idea of journalism schools is that the most important aspect of
journalism is journalism specific knowledge. Knowing how to write in just the
right way. Knowing how to keep your word count down. Knowing how to write on a
schedule. Knowing how to mold the material into a familiar shape.

But most of that is bullshit. It produces a grey ooze of pablum, and it
reinforces the conceit that journalists are more knowledgeable than they truly
are and, more importantly, that by following the "news" we can become educated
in the important topics relevant to our time.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that most of the time
it takes someone who is truly an expert (or at least a very enthusiastic
amateur) in a given field to be able to understand it at a holistic level and
to be able to educate the public about it. The most important factor is
knowledge, not style. Typically the skills necessary to pass on that knowledge
to the public are comparatively easier to pick up than the expertise itself,
and not requiring of a degree in journalism.

If you look at the vast bulk of material that comes out of j-school graduates
you notice the same things. Bland, boring copy designed to spoon feed the
tiniest amount of new knowledge, often poorly understood by the writer
themselves, to the public. This I would not count as a great service to
humanity.

Edit: the crisis with j-school educated journalists today is not that
journalists are insufficiently tech savvy, it's a mistake to think that way.
The issue is that journalists are becoming disintermediated. That's what the
internet does, and what it will continue to do. At the end of the day
journalists are middle men. Back in the early 20th century we needed an army
of middle men to collate news from around the world and format it correctly
and in the appropriate terms so that it could fit and be understandable in the
medium of printed newspapers. Today none of that is necessary because now
transmission and storage of data is nearly trivial. We don't need an army of
formatters, we need a much smaller force of knowledgeable experts who are good
at communicating. We don't need folks rewriting the same story for hundreds of
news outlets and ending up with a hundred different largely similar versions.

~~~
sosborn
>Bland, boring copy

I don't disagree, but you should consider the fact that journalists are asked
to convey complex information in as few words as possible and in a way that
appeals to as wide an audience as possible.

Things are generally better in publications that still have healthy revenue,
but those are becoming few and far between. At the end of the day, we (the
general public) get what we pay for.

~~~
InclinedPlane
But why would people pay good money for the average example of journalism
today? More often than not it's just a regurgitation of wire copy or something
equally as valueless. It's no surprise that traditional journalistic forms are
struggling. The ad revenue is going away because newspapers no longer have a
stranglehold on local dissimination of information, and few people want to pay
for journalism because, frankly, most of it just isn't very good.

But people are still willing to pay good money for good journalism, it's just
that it's rare to find such examples today. Nevertheless, there is an entire
category for journalism on kickstarter
([https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=13...](https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=13&sort=most_funded))
which has nearly a thousand projects. There's nearly a million dollars in
funding just in the top 20 projects alone, just on kickstarter. And a lot of
these new journalists are still struggling to find popularity since most
people are still unaware of alternatives to the mainstream media.

I believe that there is a huge market opportunity in media in the 21st
century, but traditional journalists aren't going to find it because they are
still locked in a model of journalism that is increasingly outmoded at a
fundamental level.

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pervycreeper
The biggest sources of bad/ inaccurate journalism that I can think of are:

1-Ignorance of statistics, and of how they are frequently misused.

2-Lack of awareness of how good arguments are conducted, and what logical
fallacies commonly appear.

3-Insufficient awareness of how the media can create or contribute to cultural
or individual biases.

4-A lack of an attitude of open-mindedness or fairness.

5-General scientific illiteracy

~~~
sanderjd
I think you're looking at the problem in too localized a way. When I read your
1-5, I wonder why anybody with all of those skills would go into a difficult,
low-respect, low-pay line of work like journalism rather than all the other
high-respect, high-pay lines of work they would be qualified for. As another
commenter pointed out - the problem is that we can't figure out how to
compensate (more than a vert few) good journalists for their work.

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puppetmaster3
No you are not, you are a journalist.

Also, If you do recruiting, you are not in tech. You are in recruiting. And so
on. Else tell me something technical about graph (a data structure) search vs
linked list search.

Outcome: when a recruiter and a marketing person argue at a python tech
conference, the tech conference is just a location of their argument. They are
not tech.

~~~
_pius
Does a product manager work in tech?

~~~
ynniv
Not the ones I have met.

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ProAm
I think this is true of almost any profession these days. It's hard to think
of some that do not need tech skills to work. Maybe chefs? Even comedians
needs to be versed in tech.

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return0
That's what they said when the Telegraph, Radio, TV transformed the media
landscape. They 're still not considered tech workers though.

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aet
Seems like that stuff should be more OJT rather than taught in school.

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MrZongle2
If Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't work for you, a review of what
constitutes "journalism" these days probably will.

------
return0
Someone wants a pay raise ....

~~~
apercu
I think the important things to teach in journalism never change:

    
    
      ethics in media
    
      psychology of mass media
    
      effective communication
    

I don't think understanding the history of the internet (which is something I
do think people should know) is critical to journalism, unless you are a tech
journalist.

The method of communications delivery doesn't matter.

~~~
nehapa33
maybe the history of the Internet isn't so important, but more of
understanding how what you're writing reaches it's audience is

