By Stephen Lacy
Professor, Department of Communication and School of Journalism, Michigan State University
Digital distribution of information has created concerns about the future of news organizations. Observers have speculated on how the Internet has and will change journalism, with almost as many different conclusions as there are speculators. These concerns have caused journalism educators around the country to reevaluate how they teach journalism.
The Internet is a marvelous tool for the distribution of journalism and for allowing citizen participation in journalism. However, the Internet has had more impact on who participates in journalism than on the quality of journalism. When it comes to the opinion function of journalism, a well-constructed argument remains a well-constructed argument regardless of whether it appears as a blog or a column in a newspaper. In news, citizens continue to expect reporters to meet at least three goals: to provide a summary of important events, to translate complex issues into understandable intelligence, and to dig up and publish information that people in positions of power want to keep hidden. The essence of journalism is that journalists find, create and package information that people want and need. This remains true even in a three-screen, digital world.
If one accepts this proposition, then the role of journalism education is to help students learn how to create the journalism that accomplishes these three goals. To that end, here are some observations.
* Journalism education should emphasize the generation of information through a variety of methods. These should include in-depth interviewing techniques, computer assisted analysis of databases, and social science methods of generating and analyzing data—Phil Meyer calls it precision journalism.
* In addition to information generation techniques, journalism education should require that students have depth of understanding about the issues they cover. Journalists with limited knowledge of a complex topic will be unable to understand and communicate the complexity and nuances of that topic. They would be at the mercy of sources. Managers of newsrooms traditionally have assumed that any journalist can learn enough about any topic in a short period of time to adequately report on the topic. This is not true. In a world that continues to grow in complexity, knowledge is essential for journalists. The best news organizations continue to recognize the need for expertise and the most commercially oriented news organizations continue to ignore it. To help students gain expertise, journalism programs should require second majors or at least two minors.
* Journalism programs need to teach many forms of journalism presentation (video, audio, photographer and writing) and distribution (broadcast, print, Internet, cable), but writing remains the most efficient and effective ways of presenting complicated news and information. Writing must remain at the heart of journalism education. Of course, this is not an either/or situation. Programs must offer techniques in a variety of media, but journalism educators can over-emphasize the importance of presentation at the expense of information generation and writing.
* Journalism education should teach digital skills, but there is disagreement as to the depth and types that are required for every student. As has always been the case, journalists working at smaller organizations need a wide range of skills, but journalists who move to larger organizations become more specialized. The question is whether journalism education should prepare students for their first job or for a later job. Although this is not entirely an either/or decision, tension can exist between the generalist versus specialist approaches in accredited programs because of the limited credits that can be taken within journalism departments and communication colleges. One option would be for journalism programs to select one approach (generalist or specialist) and to publicize the nature of the program. Journalism programs with large enough faculties and enrollments might offer both approaches, but this will become increasingly difficult as budgets shrink.
Just how any particular journalism program approaches education will depend on the faculty’s assumptions about the relationships among journalism education, the news industry and the individual students. I believe the role of journalism education is NOT that of a minor league baseball team–training journalists to work for news organizations, usually at modest salaries. Education, journalism or otherwise, should help people develop their knowledge, analytical abilities and communication skills. Those people will then decide how they should use that knowledge and those skills. Journalism majors may or may not become journalists, but if journalism educators help students learn to think and generate knowledge in specialty areas, the students will have a high probability of success in whatever fields they pursue.
Stephen Lacy has written or co-written more than 85 refereed journal articles, more than 50 refereed conference papers, ten book chapters and four books. He has co-edited two other books and written numerous other articles. Before entering the academic world, he was a photographer, and he worked as an editor of three suburban weeklies and a reporter at a suburban daily near Dallas, Texas.