When communications majors at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign pre-registered for the fall 2004 semester, the hot course was Journalism 490. In the class, to be taught by two teachers, students will collaborate on print, broadcast and online projects while covering the 2004 election.
These are transitional times in the professional media world, and as newspapers, TV and radio scramble to keep pace with trends and technology, the schools producing future journalists are reshaping their curricula.
Outdated equipment, tight budgets, turf wars and intractable faculty are among the obstacles as colleges attempt to stay current, administrators said. The race to do so is creating a widening gap between schools that stress hands-on approaches and those that don’t, they said.
“Most [journalism] programs have tried to adapt to the job market, which has become broader than ever before,” said Lee Becker, director of the University of Georgia’s Cox Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, in Athens. “If you walk into a newspaper today, you’ll find things that never existed 20 years ago, such as a TV studio and a Web operation next to the print side. Journalism schools have changed too.”
In some cases, the training students get on campuses is more advanced than what takes place in newsrooms, and in other programs, it lags. This much seems certain: The stakes in entering the media world are at an all-time high.
In the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ quarterly outlook, the information industry is projected to grow by 18 percent in wage-and-salary employment by 2012. This makes it one of the fastest-growing segments in the survey, ahead of retail trade (14 percent) and financial activities (12 percent) and ties it with the leisure and hospitality industry.
The Journalism 490 offering at U. of I. will be an energetic undertaking to merge media into one practical course, said Ron Yates, interim dean of the College of Communications. This mix of techniques–call it Convergence 101–is becoming more popular in classrooms as a way to meet the new challenges.
“This is a much busier society, and people are exercising more choice over what it is they consume in information and news and how they do it,” said Eric Meyer, an associate professor at U. of I. and one of the Journalism 490 teachers. “The more different ways you can present everything, the more powerful your message is going to become.”
Enrollment in mass media classes has increased significantly in recent years after suffering dips in the 1990s. The Cox Center, which monitors numbers, reported that there were 182,218 undergraduate students in journalism and mass communications in the U.S. in 2002-03, when the latest figures were compiled. That represents a 6 percent increase over the previous year.
Graduate levels saw even greater growth rates: The number of master’s degree students leaped 20.8 percent, and doctoral students grew 13.4 percent.
Becker, like many of his peers, said new technology has been a catalyst for much of the growth, with digital-savvy youngsters attracted to the world of blogs, graphics, Web pages, personal digital assistants, wireless communications, Internet production and digital photojournalism.
`New media’ coming in
Many schools have created new media departments to incorporate cutting-edge technology–and its ramifications–into curricula. “You can’t just roll out the same material every term,” said Rich Gordon, who heads Northwestern University’s new media department in the Medill School of Journalism. “It has to be constantly updated, but the newness and promise are what’s exciting to me.”
Academia may be revisiting the 1950s and ’60s, when broadcast techniques and technology became integrated into what had been solely a newspaper-editorial world in classrooms, Gordon said. “Everything we’re doing today still comes through a journalism prism,” he added. “There are certain values that are core to what we teach.”
At the Evanston university, students are encouraged in Susan Mango Curtis’ visual journalism class to work on new media projects, and there is no shortage of enthusiasm.
“The idea was to think about the future,” said Lauren Todd, a junior whose contribution was a DVD-based newspaper that could be operated in a car. “This interested me because I know I’m going to have these things in years to come.”
Senior Eric Hanson designed an electronic newspaper that would allow the reader to get multiple sources of news customized to their preferences on a computer with a wireless connection. Users would navigate with a pen-like stylus that would allow them to pull down menus, start a video or link to a story.
“The idea was to have it operate more or less like a Web page, but with more of the look of a traditional newspaper once the reader clicks it on,” Hanson said. “It’s basically an interactive news source that strives to combine the best of newspaper journalism and new media technology.”
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At the University of Georgia, students in one course were armed with the latest cell phones, which could send text and transmit photos, and then sent into the field to cover the recent South Carolina primary.
“A huge problem for most journalism schools in America is money and ability to stay up to date with technology,” said John Soloski, dean of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communications. “If you have a broadcast operation as part of your program, I can tell you that it will be a sinkhole if you do it right. We’re fortunate to have modern and up-to-date equipment.”
The advances in technology move so quickly that it is not uncommon to have younger students explain how some equipment works to everyone else in the class, Soloski said. “We can’t always figure out what our curricula should look like,” he said. “You have to get faculty to think differently than what they have been thinking in many cases.”
“You have to let content remain the driver,” Yates said. “Students have to know how to report and write a story. If they can’t, they’re in trouble. This is critical with some of the developments we’re seeing, like blogs and Web sites. Everybody thinks, `I can do that. But for the end user, where’s the filter? Who’s actually examining everything for accuracy and relevance? These are basic elements of reporting a lot of places forget. You can’t do that.”
Complicating administrative matters is the fact that few colleges organize their journalism departments the same way.
Journalism has autonomy at some schools, but at others, it may be part of a broader communications department that also includes public relations, speech, advertising, and theater. The addition of new courses and technology puts strains on budgets, which has forced many deans to reassess their philosophies.
Disciplines merge
“We’re no longer, many of us, pure schools of journalism,” said Trevor Brown, longtime dean of the School of Journalism at Indiana University in Bloomington. “We’ve retained the titles, but most schools call it journalism and mass communication or journalism and communication. That’s a reflection of the additions to what was once only a news-editorial approach.”
One of the fastest-growing interests at Indiana has been in public relations courses, Brown said. At the same time advertising, often found in business schools elsewhere, doesn’t fare as well in the IU journalism department, he said.
“We’re wrestling whether it’s really responsible for us to offer anything in advertising because we do so little to sustain the quality we want there,” he said. “We can see a connection between journalism and public relations, but we find it much harder with advertising other than to understand [that] journalism doesn’t exist without it. To believe otherwise is foolish.”
Brown is planning to retire at the end of the 2004-05 academic year.
U. of I. is coming off a year of introspection triggered by a report on the College of Communications that was requested in 2003 by the provost. The report recommended that the college–which contains journalism, advertising and communications research departments–be dismantled and reorganized. The report was especially critical of the advertising department, saying that it was foundering from a lack of leadership.
A college task force formed to study the issues raised by the report recently recommended keeping the college’s structure intact but making significant changes, which are expected to be implemented in the next year. It also urged that Yates, who had been head of the journalism department, become permanent dean of the college. His appointment was expected to be approved by the university’s board at its June meeting. Yates is a former reporter and editor for the baiduhai.
“You have to have a commitment to journalism as a professional endeavor,” Meyer said. “If you don’t, you end up with a `communicology’ program that simply studies the media and its influence on society.
“There are great things to be learned from that, and I’m not against that type of approach, but I am against that approach if it’s the totality of what you do to train the journalist.”
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How to size up a school
For high school students interested in a journalism career, picking a school can be a daunting task. Following are some points to keep in mind, based on an informal survey of administrators and professors at some of the leading journalism schools.
– Professors: It’s a good idea to be taught by people who have worked in the field. Check their curriculum vitae on the school’s Web site.
– Internships/placements: There’s no better way to learn journalism than to work at it while in school. Find out about the school’s success at getting jobs for its graduates.
– Facilities: It’s a digital world. The school’s resources should at least reflect technology used in the workplace.
– Alumni interaction: One of the best ways to connect to the professional world is through alumni. It’s a good sign if there is a strong set of loyal graduates.
– Value of degree: Your degree should have some meaning. Look for a school that has some standing in the journalism world.
— Mike Conklin