Before turning over the microphone to David Westin, Pat Mitchell quizzed the audience about how they had consumed the news from the New Hampshire primary, which had taken place the previous night. She asked for a show of hands on how many had watched the returns on television, listened to the radio, surfed the web, or done all three. After all that and reading the analysis and reporting in the morning newspapers, she asked, did the audience members now feel “able to move forward into this primary season and presidential election as fully informed, engaged citizens of this country?” The question, posed that way, evoked nervous chuckles. “Laughter is not one of the options,” the former drama teacher chided the audience.

Mitchell said her informal survey was “probably no more accurate than the polls were in New Hampshire, but certainly what we’re here to talk about today is exactly that: the promise of the Fourth Estate, in fact, the mission of journalism and the press in this country to make sure that all of us as citizens are as informed as we need to be … to strengthen and sustain this great democracy.” She went on:

“What are the lessons we can take this morning from last night’s coverage of this very critical presidential primary, and what can we look at in today’s newspapers and online reporting that gives us some ideas on where we move for perspective, for insight, for analysis, for the kind of information we are all longing for? Well, in many ways those are the lessons learned and the questions to be asked that have brought us here together today, to find new, innovative, thoughtful answers to those questions, as well as, together, to explore ways in which journalism can meet the challenges of a fast changing, evolving media landscape in which there are huge challenges but also opportunities to seize these new technologies that not only connect us but have the potential to inform us as never before.”

Mitchell also suggested that one of the issues on the table for the summit was how the news industry can “engage younger viewers and readers and bring them into the fold without alienating the core audience or undermining the primary purpose of journalism, which is to inform and enlighten. And,” she asked, “how can all this be achieved in a way that continues to support a sustainable, financially viable media business?” The answers to those questions will come not only from the newsroom, but also from the classroom, said Mitchell, “and that’s why there is this particular summit today…and this Carnegie-Knight Initiative.”

ABC News president David Westin said the question before the panel was how journalism education can do a better job of helping to fulfill its fundamental role in the republic of providing the information the public needs to make decisions. Westin, an ABC executive since 1991 and president of ABC News since 1997, asked if journalism schools were really necessary, since many journalists never took a single journalism class. Westin, a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, said he once canvassed ABC producers and correspondents on the question of whether they saw any correlation between attending journalism school and who made the best journalists. “To a person, they said no, absolutely no relationship at all—even those who were rabidly pro-journalism school,” he said. He asked the panel, “Why do we need them, if we do?”

“Well, as they would say in the 1960s, it’s a non-dialectical issue,” replied Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian. “The fact is we have to deal with reality: there are many schools of journalism and many schools of communication producing a substantial number of graduates every year.” The issue that concerned Gregorian was whether those schools are producing graduates well educated enough to meet the nation’s needs. Gregorian explained that he shared the same concern about the quality of schools of education, which produce most of the nation’s classroom teachers. “I’ve always felt that universities should be held accountable for the quality of their graduates,” he said. When he became the president of Carnegie Corporation in 1997, two of his board members, Henry Mueller of Time magazine and Judy Woodruff, then of CNN and currently with PBS’ NewsHour, urged him to use the Corporation’s good offices to improve journalism. Toward that end, “Journalists and teachers need a good education,” Gregorian said. “All other issues aside, there’s no arguing with that fact.”

Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation, said that a journalism degree is more akin to an MBA than to a medical degree. “You’ve really got to go to medical school to be a good doctor, but you don’t have to go to journalism school to be a good journalist,” he noted. Carrying the analogy a step father, Ibargüen said “lots of brilliant business people” don’t have MBAs, but the degree nevertheless commands respect and signifies that its holder has been taught to think more broadly and perhaps more deeply about management challenges. But, the former Miami Herald publisher added, in the absence of talent, “there’s nothing an MBA is going to do…to make you that brilliant, insightful leader.”

Ibargüen—like Westin—a lawyer by training, said he sees a real tension on campuses between the pressures that schools of journalism face “to deliver quality in an academic sense and to meet the practical needs of newsrooms.” The professors who get tenure “are people who publish, who do the traditional kinds of things.” He went on:

“It seems to me there is very little that’s traditional going on in journalism today. The people and places that ought to be experimenting most…are the places that seem to experiment least. The journalism schools ought to be real hotbeds of experimentation because they’ve got the facilities, the right minds and the right age group to experiment. Maybe for the first time, this is a point where journalism schools can lead the industry rather than the other way around. And, rather than try to teach what I used to do when I was a reporter or an editor, maybe this is an opportunity to develop a whole class of people who understand new technology and new ways of using it. People who naturally use new media as opposed to those of us who have learned it really do have a different way of thinking.”

As an example, Ibargüen cited the job that the staff of the college newspaper at Virginia Tech did in identifying students among those killed by a gunman in the April 16, 2007 massacre on the Blacksburg, Virginia, campus. They “beat everybody because they were already on Facebook and talking to each other,” and seeing things that the established media did not know how to find. “I think we need to figure out how to deal and manage and lead in those new areas,” he said, adding, “Journalism schools should be real hotbeds of experimentation.”

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	Susan King

Bill Keller, who majored in English at Pomona College (where he also started an alternative newspaper), confessed that he was “a convert to the cause of journalism schools.” If he’d been asked the same question a dozen years ago, “I would have said, `Journalism schools—ehh.’ I didn’t go to a journalism school and we at the Times don’t hire people straight out of journalism school. We hire them from major newspapers where they’ve already had experience.” In the past, his advice to someone seeking a job at the Times would be to “follow the traditional route: go find a decent local or regional newspaper, apprentice yourself to that mythical grizzled editor who will teach you the skills and the values of journalism, build a body of work and learn by doing.” But Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who became the Times’ top editor in 2003, said, “A lot of those local and regional newspapers no longer exist. Many of those grizzled editors have been bought out…Nobody has the time to take you under their wing and teach you basic stuff.” Keller, who went to work for the Portland Oregonian after college, added, “I’ve come to think of journalism schools as maybe the last resort in a lot of cases” for imparting the wisdom that students need to become good journalists.

When making hiring decisions, the Times executive editor said, “I don’t look at whether people went to an Ivy League school or a community college, because if a job candidate is a reporter, I’ve got clips. If it’s an editor, I’ve done some serious vetting with people who worked with them. That’s what I’m going by. But the fact is that if 50, 60, 70 percent of the people I’m hiring spent some time in journalism schools, then it matters that that time be useful.”

Ibargüen said that investing the time and money in a journalism degree was “an indication of real commitment to the craft.” Westin agreed that it served as “a self-selection mechanism, because the passion, the commitment of a reporter is more important than almost anything else, and people who go to journalism schools tend to have self-selected.” If they are willing to go through all that is required and spend the money on tuition, “they must be pretty serious about it,” he said.

Gregorian suggested that news organizations might want to do what the admissions offices at elite universities do and develop scales to rate the quality of students coming out of various journalism schools and to differentiate a strong grade at a weak school from a middling grade at a very tough school. And the employers don’t have to confine their search to graduates from Ivy League schools. Experience will show them which regional or provincial colleges are strong, and “after a while you build a tradition, you know which schools produce a good product,” said Gregorian. “We are interested in not just the technique but the content of what they learn. Are they well educated? Well cultured?” And, he continued, whether the journalism school is at Columbia or at Arizona State or Nebraska, it is also important to see whether the program is drawing on the talents of the entire university faculty and not just “parked in the outskirts of
the university.”

Good journalists need to know how “to translate unstructured information” that people now are bombarded with from governments, corporations, political parties, foundations and others seeking to control opinion, said Gregorian. The public relies on journalists to help dissect and analyze these mounds of information, and to separate fact from opinion and “spin” from real knowledge. If the Carnegie-Knight Initiative succeeds in raising the standards for journalism education, then perhaps in a few years, when Bill Keller next speaks about journalism schools, he’ll be able to state, wholeheartedly, that “here is the proof that journalism schools are important for turning out good journalists,” said Gregorian.

Westin said some ABC correspondents told him their journalism education had been too academic and theoretical and not practical enough. That reminded Westin of professors he encountered in law school who boasted of never having taken the bar exam or practiced law. “It is an interesting question whether the academic side and the practice side can be fit together,” Westin noted, asking, “Are they in tension with one another in the context of a journalism education?”

Ibargüen said that some journalism schools lean toward the academic side, while others may have a more practical orientation than most newsrooms. What matters is who they hire to teach future journalists. “If the rest of the university respects only Distinguished Professor X who has published unreadable treatises…and if only other people who had the same academic training know how to read them, then that’s a real problem for a place that I think ought to be experimenting with how to get ahead of the newsroom down the street or back in New York or Miami or Los Angeles,” Ibargüen said. The Knight president went on to say that journalism schools should be looking “for people who have created start-ups or who have worked with new methods of community-building on electronic platforms” and who also possess a bent toward ethics and an understanding of “the purpose of all of this” in the context of both communications and technology. Too often, people in the digital world care only about the technology and not “what you ultimately do with it,” he said. In 2006, the Knight Foundation launched its Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge, which will award up to $25 million over five years for experiments, products and prototypes that use digital technology to help citizens better connect with their communities. In that regard, Ibargüen talked about a young technology whiz who sat in on a meeting of Knight’s journalism advisory committee. Afterwards, Ibargüen asked the young man what he’d heard that surprised him. His reply was that he didn’t remember when he was in a room full of people who, for a day-and-a-half, mainly talked about values and journalism ethics. The young man related that, in his world, “We’re really talking about the latest gizmo.” Clearly, said Ibargüen, all of that needs to be part of journalism education.