Forgive the cross post, but students, faculty and alumni might be interested in this ethics piece from the Columbia Journalism Review and some of the resulting comments from students and others.
By Katy Culver, assistant professor
After a group of six prominent foundations that fund journalism innovation published an open letter to university presidents this month, many people asked for my reaction and a surprising number of them characterized it as a “shot across the bow” of academia.
The funders’ semantic gunfire is apparently a warning shot to those of us in university journalism programs that we had better wake up and innovate or face loss of funding.
My reaction to the “shot across the bow”? It looks a whole lot to me like the bureaucratic torpedoes we’ve been firing at our own hulls for years. Once again, we’re mired in intractable structural discussions – like some grand naval exercise – rather than squarely focusing on nimble efforts to achieve small wins and eventual victory in moving education and journalism forward.
The open letter was a reasonable call to action, not a blast to the face. The funders would like journalism programs to make more use of professionals in teaching and to tenure them. They also would like to see these programs use a “teaching hospital” model, where clinicians are tenured alongside traditional academics, so medical students learn the techniques of patient care from the former while the latter advances the discipline through cutting-edge research.
The letter didn’t say anything that hadn’t been brought up in any number of faculty meetings in the hundreds of journalism programs across the country. None of us sits here and thinks of ways not to innovate. Many people support the funders’ goal of incorporating professionals into curricula, and some would support the “teaching hospital” approach. (I would point out that anyone wanting to witness testy hierarchical battles over tenure and promotion criteria, as well as stubborn refusals to update curricula, should roam the halls of academic medicine for a day or two).
The piece was a distilled version of an earlier call from Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation. Newton’s address to a journalism educators’ conference was a longer and, in my mind, far more problematic approach that appeared to pit professionals against academics. It also cast “top-tier schools” in relief against “the middle of the bell curve,” with the former clearly ahead in innovation.
He called on schools to destroy and recreate themselves. “Radical change requires radical reform,” he wrote in the prepared text for the speech. “The digital age is turning journalism and communication upside down and inside out. It should be doing the same to journalism and communication education.”
But in calling for this creative destruction, Newton uses an infographic to propose a new degree structure for graduate education. Let me say that again. In asking programs to catch up and then move ahead of a stunning age of digital developments, he would like us to stop to create a professional journalism doctorate, get it accepted among our academic peers and beyond that, create a joint degree between that and a traditional PhD.
I’m sure he doesn’t know it, but Newton just aligned himself with the exact reason so many of his mediocre “middle” schools remain where they are. By endorsing massive, wholesale, programmatic change rather than individual, creative, course-based advances, reformers subvert the very innovation they claim to support.
I do a fair amount of training of other journalism educators, and so many of their programs are impaled on the twin spikes of “when …” and “once …,” as in “Once we adopt the new curriculum, we will have mobile reporting in our intermediate course” or “When we get approval for the new online course, we’ll have programming somewhere.”
To paraphrase Newton, once we get a professional PhD, we’ll get more new ideas flowing through journalism schools.
I am sorry, sir, but we simply do not have the time.
We cannot wait for structural change in doctoral programs to meet the urgent needs of our students and the communities they will seek to represent. Instead, we have to take whatever freedom we have in our existing structures and change today. Right now.
I give the same advice to all teachers I teach, regardless of whether they come from the academy or the newsroom. Pick one thing. Pick just one new idea, unfamiliar technology, emerging trend. Just one. And take that into your classroom in the upcoming semester. Don’t wait for your new curriculum. Don’t get trapped by the “dinosaurs” you tell me stomp through your faculty meetings and delay change. Don’t care about the dean’s approval.
Leave all that behind and move one thing – just one thing – forward right now.
I have been incredibly fortunate in my teaching career. I have worked here in the journalism school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My colleagues did blow up their old siloed, medium-based curriculum and did it back in 1999 (before any other program I’ve been able to find). They left in its wake an approach that seeks to enable experimentation and innovation.
I’ve been lucky to operate in that free environment for a dozen years and have never been held up in tailoring my courses in whatever way I see fit. I’ve road tested radical collaborative digital environments, big-dream entrepreneurial assignments and every variation of social media engagement I could imagine being productive. I’ve succeeded, failed and faced more than a few question marks.
And most of the time time I’ve done it alone in a wilderness of self-training and self-doubt. Imagine if I were also in a school that had a restrictive curriculum and little faculty support. I’d be lost.
This is where the funders’ open letter fails. They like the teaching hospital model. But they’ve missed a critical component of that approach: continuing medical education. CME takes doctors in communities and doctors in teaching hospitals and moves them forward. Without it, those teaching doctors would be using the same techniques they learned in medical school years before. Just like a journalism professor who teaches text exclusively because he doesn’t know audio, video or programming, these doctors would be slicing abdomens open to remove an appendix that could now come out laparoscopically. They wouldn’t know any better without CME and support from colleagues.
If Newton and fellow funders want broad-based, systemic improvement and innovation in journalism schools, they need to create and fund a system of continuing journalism education. Many CME courses are funded – often controversially – by industry, Big Pharma and device manufacturers who want doctors to know and use the latest treatments. No such funding model will underwrite journalism training in the latest techniques and tools in reporting and producing news vital to this democracy.
Journalism foundations need to pay for it and use their influence with news organizations to leverage industry funding. I don’t mean major grants to individual schools. I recognize the appeal of those, planting a $2 million seed and watching something like News21 bloom.
But the number of schools and students served by those big projects is small compared to the staffing and enrollment at programs flung across the country. We have no shortage of educators who want to bring evolution or even revolution to the material in their courses and the ways they deliver it. But so many of them lack the support to do it.
So I’ll see the “shot across the bow” and raise it with my own clarion call to funders:
I am not talking about rote technology training – “click this button to do that thing.” Instead, I envision the kinds of opportunities that stimulate teachers to experiment in class, to dream up new assignments that hurtle students toward inventive thinking. They will need hands-on-keyboard instruction, certainly. But they’ll also need inspiration and lasting resources, including the guts of assignments, grading rubrics, troubleshooting guides and conversation space.
We already have some effective efforts at the Poynter Institute, the Knight Digital Media Center and others (disclosure: I have conducted workshops for Poynter, the Wisconsin Newspaper Association and individual universities). These are a start.
But educators and professionals alike desperately need dollars to get them to the continuing education they need. Schools face the exact reality newsrooms are staring down. Change will no longer come and go. Change will be constant. They need support to keep up and then become the incubators for new ideas.
If philanthropists want to bring change to journalism schools, abandon the quagmire of structural debates. Get down in the guerrilla warfare of providing individual educators the resources and instruction they need to teach students the current state of the art and to inspire them to develop whatever is coming next.
An SJMC professor and colleagues across the country are looking forward to 2042 and imagining how communities will meet the information needs of citizens, in a broad range from making emergency police calls to finding a job to finding local well baby care and finding the local civic and political information necessary for full democratic participation.
The American public has measurable and unmet information needs at both the individual and community levels, according to a report presented to the FCC in Washington Tuesday, June 26.
Lew Friedland, SJMC professor and Director of the Center for Communication and Democracy, was co-Principal Investigator and lead author of the report with Dean Ernest Wilson of the USC Annenberg School and Professor Phil Napoli of Fordham University. Video of their FCC presentation is available online, as is the executive summary. The full report and bibliography will be available mid-July.
Associate Dean Carola Weil and Ph.D.student Katya Ognyanova of Annenberg were co-authors. SJMC Ph.D.students Sandra Knisely and Matthew Barnidge were lead research assistants, along with Seomin Soo of Columbia.
The report comprehensively reviewed literature on community information needs in eight areas: emergency and risk communication, health, education, economic opportunity, the environment, transportation, civic and political life. It concluded that while some research on information needs in these areas exists, there is not sufficient work to demonstrate whether and how the needs are being met, and that the preponderance of evidence points to major gaps. The report focused on the diverse needs of Americans in a rapidly changing society, stressing that by 2042 the U.S. will no longer be a country divided into a “majority” and “minorities” but a truly plural nation.
The report was commissioned “to examine existing research into the critical information needs of the American public and market-entry barriers into participation in the communication industry,” according to the FCC. “The research will inform the Commission’s 2012 Report to Congress about barriers to participation in the communications industry, also known as the Section 257 Report.”
Friedland co-led the research team with significant participation from other UW SJMC faculty and students. Professors Shawnika Hull (health), Hernando Rojas (diversity, methods, civic life), Dhavan Shah (political communication, methods) and Hemant Shah (diversity) were key members of the national Communications Policy Research Network formed to generate the initial pool of more than 1000 peer-reviewed sources reviewed for the report. These were winnowed to just under 500 for a final annotated bibliography. Professor Katy Culver, (health and new media), UW Ph.D. students Jackson Foote, Nakho Kim, Magda Konieczna, Mitchell Schwartz, Manisha Shelat contributed to research on the bibliography.
The team’s recommendations are:
To fulfill FCC’s statutory mission, we need to investigate whether and how local information needs are met, which is the critical first step to understanding how markets, government policies and individual and group actions can meet the information needs of their communities.
Take into account variations within communities and specific populations in studying critical information needs – Look to America of 2042.
Incorporate into analysis the exponentially growing costs of network exclusion and increasingly complex functioning of local media systems.
Complement existing econometric analyses with additional analytic models such as a communication ecological approach (multilevel/multi‐method); aim to be valid, replicable and parsimonious.
Develop robust, testable indicators of performance for policy- and community‐relevant evaluation.
They will submit a final version of the report after receiving FCC and public comments.
This project builds in part on a Knight Foundation-funded workshop held at USC Annenberg in January about redefining diversity in a digital age.
As announced today at WisconsinWatch.org, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism — a nonprofit and nonpartisan local reporting group housed right here in Vilas Hall in collaboration with Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, and our School of Journalism & Mass Communication — has won a series of awards from the Milwaukee Press Club:
WisconsinWatch.org was named the best local news or feature website at the Milwaukee Press Club’s annual awards celebration on Friday night.
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which produces the website, was honored with three gold (first place) awards and a silver in the club’s Awards for Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism, the state’s premiere all-media journalism competition.
The Center now has received nine awards — six of them for first place — in the contest over the past two years.
We’re especially proud that so many School of Journalism & Mass Communication students, volunteers, and interns participated in the reporting that led to these awards! Congratulations!
The first time I spoke to Anthony Shadid in person, he apologized for getting shot.
I had nominated Anthony for the journalism school’s Nafziger Award after following his move from the Associated Press to the Boston Globe and reading his first book, Legacy of the Prophet. Shortly before he was scheduled to come to campus to accept it, he was wounded while on assignment in Ramallah.
When he arrived in Madison, arm in a sling, I asked him if the pain was manageable. He waved off the question and instead said, “I must have really worried you. I’m so sorry.”
Here he was, acclaimed foreign reporter, shot on assignment, winning an award, and he was concerned about me?
That was the first of many, many moments that defined Anthony’s humility in my eyes. He had admirable talents, undoubtedly. But I always felt the thoughtful interviewing, the lyrical writing, the creative angles and the acute insights all sprang from that same well of humility.
Journalism can breed ego. Hardened by seeing difficult things and softened by the conceit of bylines, we can come to see ourselves as something better or bigger than we are. But Anthony never allowed a chasm to grow between his work and his humanity. He never saw himself as larger than anyone or anything.
That humble approach applied well beyond his work. I saw it in his pride and affection for his family, his dedication to his alma mater and his awe for his beloved Green Bay Packers.
He brought it to our friendship, as well. Starting with that nomination back in 2001, I slipped into a habit of signing all my messages to him, “As always, stay safe.” I didn’t notice it, but Anthony did. He pointed it out and said he appreciated my “motherly nature.” It was a theme he would return to often when we interacted. Through a smattering of emails between Madison and the Palestinian territories, he’d taken a small note and teased out a larger meaning.
He once wrote, “The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes, when we write small to say something big.”
I do not have his gift of words, but I believe it’s not just the best journalism that makes this move from observation to meaning. It’s also the best humanity.
Anthony Shadid was a remarkable journalist. But he was an even better man.
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