Maybe it is too soon to hang crepe on the news business, and on the business of educating the next generation of journalists.
A dozen prominent editors and practitioners of both traditional and new forms of journalism sat down with more than 150 professors, journalism students and deans from a dozen journalism schools at what Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Paley Center for Media billed as a Summit on Journalism in the Service of Democracy in New York City on January 8-9. They heard firsthand about the bind confronting both newspapers and the broadcast television networks as they lose readers, viewers and advertisers.
But they also heard some surprisingly upbeat words about the talents, skill and enthusiasm that a younger generation is bringing to the profession, and even some praise for what is taught in the nation’s leading journalism schools. The summit was a natural outgrowth of the evolving conversations about journalism education that are an intrinsic component of the six-year-old initiative, created by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to help give journalists a rigorous intellectual education as well as practical skills to do their jobs, and to give deans a platform to speak out on behalf of the profession and the role it plays in a democracy as the public’s eyes and ears.
Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, said he spoke “as a convert to the cause of journalism schools.” Keller used to advise young people to plunge directly into the business as he did by apprenticing themselves “to that mythical grizzled editor” at a small paper “who will teach you the skills and the values of journalism.” But “a lot of those local and regional newspapers no longer exist, and a lot of those grizzled editors have been bought out,” he said. “Along the way I’ve come to think of journalism schools as maybe the last resort” where aspiring reporters can get the preparation they need. His mind has also been changed by the fact that more than half of those the Times hires have journalism degrees on their resumes as well as experience at other newspapers.
Amanda Bennett, whose tenure as editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer ended in 2006 when the Knight-Ridder Corp. sold off that daily and the rest of its chain, said her approach to reading the newspaper “changed 180 degrees” when she became a consumer. “It happened to me overnight,” she said. The “utility factor” became paramount, and now each morning, “I read the news as, ‘What can I do with this? What can I vote for? What can I buy? Who can I call? Who can I write a letter to?’”
That’s an approach to news that newspapers traditionally disdain as too pragmatic, but not Bloomberg News, said Bennett, now executive editor for enterprise at the financial news service, where editors know instantly how many subscribers click on stories sent out to Bloomberg terminals. “If they can’t use it, we are not going to write it,” she said.
Jim Willse, editor of the Star Ledger of Newark, N.J., the nation’s 15th largest newspaper, said, “The business model of newspapers that we all grew up with has blown up. It’s gone.” But Willse also spoke about innovative ways the Star-Ledger is reaching audiences online, including “a living Op-Ed page” called NJVoices.com and another site that pulls together all the New Jersey-related videos from YouTube.
Asked by moderator Geoffrey Sands, a McKinsey & Co. director, if they see any signs of the talent pool drying up, Bennett and Willse both spoke of the “amazing” talents of the students applying for internships. “Their resumes are astounding,” said Willse. “There is still a very vibrant, robust talent pool out there that still believes, that still hears the music.”
The Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education was launched in 2005, although the conversation about revitalizing journalism education in America began in 2002 with the journalism deans of Columbia and Northwestern universities, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California and the director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. It has twice expanded and now includes Arizona State, the University of Maryland, the University of Missouri, the University of Nebraska, the University of North Carolina, Syracuse University, and the University of Texas as well as the original schools. The initiative includes curricular reforms that bring top professors from across these universities to teach courses in their specialties to journalism students, and each summer since 2006 the foundations have sponsored a model newsroom program called News21 Incubators in which new graduates have produced dozens of stories on homeland security (2006) and religion in American life (2007) for both traditional and new media.
Pat Mitchell, president and CEO of the Paley Center (formerly The Museum of Television & Radio), said that in a changing media landscape, “the mission of journalism and the press in this country [is] to make sure that all of us are as informed as we need to be as citizens…to strengthen and sustain this great democracy of ours.”
Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian said society needs journalists who are well educated and know how to synthesize confusing masses of information, and hence, universities “have a moral, social [and] intellectual responsibility” to help bolster the teaching and practice of journalism.
Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation, said most journalism schools are too wedded to traditional methods of news gathering. Ibargüen, former publisher of The Miami Herald, said, “The universities, 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.” Rather than just teaching “what I used to do when I was a reporter or editor, maybe this is an opportunity to develop a whole class of people who understand new technology, who understand new thinking,” said Ibargüen, who spoke on the opening panel with Gregorian, Keller and David Westin, president of ABC News.
Westin said he once asked a group of veteran ABC editors, anchors and producers if journalism schools produced the best journalists. “To a person, they said, no, [there was] absolutely no relationship at all,” explained Westin. But the ABC executive conceded that journalism schools may serve as “a self-selection mechanism” for determining who has the passion and commitment to succeed as journalists.
On the panel with Bennett, Sands and Willse, Betsy Morgan, CEO of the Huffington Post, said that web site’s forte is organizing community discussions about topics in the news and pushing the notion “that news is not a one-way medium…but a conversation.” The site received more than 4,000 comments on the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Speaking about blogging and comments from the public, John Stack, vice president of news gathering for Fox News Channel, said, “Even technology needs an editor…I think journalistically, we need, at some point, to be traffic cops, vet the information and get it out in the appropriate way.”
At the summit’s final panel on “The New Journalist in Action,” Steve Grove, director of news and politics for YouTube, said YouTube lets its huge audience make judgments about what is news and what is worth watching.
Grove, an alumnus of the Carnegie Fellows program at ABC News, said, “Editor is almost a dirty word around YouTube.” The popular video service—where eight hours of content is uploaded every minute and where viewers from around the world view hundreds of millions of videos each day— “is definitely a different animal…We really have a “wisdom of crowds” situation going on.” Grove worked briefly for The Boston Globe and ABC News before joining YouTube.
Another young journalist, Christof Putzel, a correspondent for Current TV—the participatory network that former Vice President Al Gore helped launch—said he grew up without the habit of reading newspapers, despite being the son and grandson of print journalists. But Putzel, a successful documentary filmmaker who has reported from trouble spots around the world, said it was his hope that Current TV would break the kind of stories that another panelist, veteran journalist Paul Steiger, led as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
Steiger is launching a nonprofit investigative reporting enterprise with foundation support called ProPublica. Steiger said cutbacks in the news industry could imperil investigative journalism like the Journal’s 2006 expose of backdating of stock options by corporate insiders in 2006.
Putzel said his generation aspired to do work the caliber of what Steiger has done, prompting the former Journal editor to say, “We’re coming from the other side. Hopefully we’ll find the place to put the golden spike someplace in Utah…We need to bring those strands together: your ways of communicating, our ways of getting the information.”
Putzel told the summit, “It’s probably the most important time in history to be a journalism professor.” Young journalists need the “solid background” that faculty can impart, along with the ethics and values that “haven’t changed or shouldn’t change.”
Vartan Gregorian, in his welcoming remarks, thanked the students as well as the faculty and deans “for being in the truth business, for being in the democracy business, for being in the citizen business—not just the business of making money.”