Update: This post has been sitting in my drafts since I wrote it two nights ago. I wasn’t quite happy with it, but now that Kevin Anderson has pre-empted me with almost the same title, I’d better hit “publish”.
Responding to my rant about journalism students who want nothing to do with the multimedia future of their trade, Adrian Monck (who is head of my j-school alma mater) wrote:
The things that inspire you to undertake a career are usually drawn from your past. Add to that the competitive pressures, and the financial commitment required and you can see why some students might wish to enter an industry that looks like the one they wanted to join when they were growing up.
This is a fair point.
One of the reasons so many students appear to aspire to old-school journalism jobs must be that the only image of journalism they ever receive through popular culture is hopelessly dated. I’ll happily admit that when I was 16 years old, I aspired to a career that looked a bit like All the President’s Men, albeit with desktop publishing. This was 1995 — more than 20 years after Watergate.
(I must have snapped out of it quickly, because I built my high school newspaper’s first web site a year later.)
Perhaps the first thing every journalism course needs to do — on day one of each new intake — is to provide some examples of impressive current careers, so that students can aspire to be the pioneering journalists of their own generation rather than the ideal-types of their lecturers’.
Teach some new heroes: You know, the people out there doing impressive stuff with new technologies right now. The war reporters traveling the world doing solo multimedia reporting; the investigative reporters using sophisticated software to take on the CIA, the laid-off print hacks going it alone to build successful online publications, the people bringing software development skills into journalism.
Need a recent journalism film to dislodge Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford? Try Shattered Glass — a story where the fraudulent titular hack is found out by an online journalist. The hero there is Adam Penenberg, then of Forbes.com. A key part of the story is Penenberg’s scepticism about the phoney website the technologically-unsophisticated Glass had set up to disguise his made-up stories for the New Republic, er, magazine.
Then on day two, you can start preparing them for strange new jobs like “mojo”, “database editor”, “podcast editor” or “community editor”.
Update: Over at Strange Attractor, Adrian Monck suggests adding an exemplary journalism student to the list of new media role models: Dave Cohn, a student at Columbia University and editor of NewAssignment.net, is certainly a good example to point out. He has a great piece in the Columbia Journalism Review today about his use of Digg.
Who else should be added to the list?
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Hi Martin,
This is the first post of yours that I have read, and it’s prompted me to write an absolute essay on the subject on my own blog today.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. I’m a journalism student at Lincoln University, and all formats of journalism are taught as completely seperate entities. Which as you rightly point out, is dangerously archaic.
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An inspiring post that I’ll certainly be recommending to my students, and the point about careers early on is also one I’ll be recommending we adopt. Last year we introduced a ‘Production Event’ in year one where journalism students work as a news agency – producing copy for print, TV, radio and online during a ‘themed’ week (like the BBC’s Africa week, for instance). It’s a great way to demonstrate the range of forms you may be asked to produce material for, gets students working with specialists in a range of media – and they love it!
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David Cohn will be speaking at our CMA session in New York this March. Good thing we booked him before he became a “hero.”
Martin — thanks for your confidence and compliment.
This entire thread of links and comments is right on the noise — journalism students need new heros.
Your example of Adam Penenberg is perfect. He was a hero to me, especially because he had a column at Wired News when I was an intern there.
I think I got lucky in the draw — I was intrigued by journalism, the idea of engaging in the national conversation, but I am also, for lack of a better word — a geek.
In addition to Woodward, Bernstein and other journalists, I look up to Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales and other geek idols. They inspire me to go beyond research, reporting etc (all the irreplaceable fundamentals) to question the modes, mediums and practices of journalism.
Don’t you hate when you make a comment, read it over and realize you made a word slip. I meant “this entire thread of links and comments is right on the nose.”
Eh… it happens…and a little humility never hurt.
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DC for chaplan
I’m a journalism prof in the U.S. One of my teaching and research areas is ethics. I’ve asked other journalism profs via posts on a couple of Web sites to nominate journalists, living or dead, to put before our students as moral exemplars. I also asked them to briefly explain why they think these journalists qualify. So far . . . nothing. Does that speak to the state of journalism ethics or the state of journalism education or both? And while we’re at it, who do you think belongs on any such list?
hello?
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