This article was downloaded by: [University of Pennsylvania]

On: 5 January 2009

Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 791120418]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journalism Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713393939

DOES JOURNALISM EDUCATION MATTER?

Online Publication Date: 01 February 2006

To cite this Article (2006)'DOES JOURNALISM EDUCATION MATTER?',Journalism Studies,7:1,144 156

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14616700500450442
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616700500450442

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

DEBATE

DOES JOURNALISM EDUCATION MATTER?

Introduction

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Journalism educators were shocked in 2002 when Columbia University president Lee
Bollinger called for curriculum reform of one of the most prestigious journalism programs
in the United States. His decision to suspend hiring a new dean of the Columbia School of
Journalism led to an Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
presidential panel presentation in 2004 on Does Journalism Matter? This standing roomonly passionate panel discussion is presented here. It follows a much more optimistic set
of debate essays presented in Journalism Studies Volume 2 on the future of journalism
education.

RETHINKING JOURNALISM EDUCATION

Jannette L. Dates
Jannette L. Dates reviews the issues of journalism education in her essay. She argues
that however we devise journalism curricula, it must be done to promote and elevate
the standards of journalism, the enterprise essential to democracy .
Unlike doctors and lawyers, who must follow a specific course of study to enter their
fields, journalists often enter the industry through varied routes. So, too, do journalism
educators. But, regardless of how we get here, one thing unites us: a desire to help our
students learn best how to inform and engage our readers and viewers as honestly and as
fairly as we can.
In 2002, Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, who believes graduate
journalism and mass communication (JMC) students need to be immersed in broad
aspects of the university */possibly circuitous routes of a different sort */shocked both the
academy and the industry when he announced plans to suspend the universitys search for
a new head of its graduate program in journalism. He then established a task force to
debate journalism school reform. In a memo to his colleagues, he wrote: To teach the
craft of journalism is a worthy goal, but clearly insufficient in this new world and within the
setting of a great university. The debate that he set off seemed to center around whether
journalism is a craft that should be taught or whether aspiring journalists should receive a
more well-rounded education that expands their knowledge of such areas as economics or
political theory.
President Bollinger also believed that the one-year program should be extended to
two, enabling students to focus for a longer period on more substantive issues.
Journalism is one of the most important professions in the world: It is the principal
way for us to mediate between the world of actions, the world of expertise, and the
general public, he wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review (Bollinger, 2002).
Of course he had a point. In the past several years, the world has grown increasingly
more global and more complex. Citizens of the world, regardless of where they were born
or currently reside, are struggling to understand other cultures and their relationship to
them. Wouldnt a more critical eye help journalists better explain these and other conflicts?
Journalism Studies, Vol. 7, No 1, 2006
ISSN 1461-670X print/1469-9699 online/06/010144-13
2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14616700500450442

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

DEBATE

During the debate, President Bollinger also cited an obvious need for ethics,
preferring to see ethics integrated in all courses rather than teaching it as a course on its
own. Again, he was on target, I believe, maybe some of the writers and editors at some of
the nations most prominent newspapers who have been forced to step down recently
due to ethical lapses could have benefited from such an approach in their college years.
As Mitchell Stephens (2000) observed, some of the disciplines most cherished
practices will have to change, because more is needed than just teaching the basics. We
need to advance journalism, as well, he argues. Stephens gives examples tried at New York
University, Stanford University, University of California */Berkeley and others that allow
JMC programs to do more while still introducing students to reporting and writing. He
cites a course taught by Pamela Newkirk that mixes theory and practice, where students
studied and critiqued the problems of press coverage of an area like Harlem, New York and
were challenged within the course to do a better job themselves.
As William Woo (2002) noted, The greatest task for us, as journalism educators, is to
equip our students with a firm sense of the public trust */how it developed, what it means
to America, and how it manifests itself or is betrayed by the work that individual journalists
and news organizations do.
Woo and others argue that educators must be in the vanguard ceaselessly
advocating, nurturing and protecting such concepts so that students leave us armed
with this knowledge */in order for democracy to survive. This is monumentally important.
For journalism is not just a raft or a profession. It is the linchpin of the foundation of
democracy: an informed citizenry making informed judgments about how they will live
together.
Since our countrys beginnings, journalists have been entrusted by the public to
enlighten them with the information they need to have quality debate for making wise
decisions */from the most mundane to the most profoundly far-reaching.
There is a growing concern among many that as media owners gain more and more
control of news organizations (media convergence) there has been an increasing
drumbeat for maximizing profits for shareholders to the detriment of the news-gather
and independent reporting that is so essential to this democracy. Woo and others argue
that it is essential that Americas media owners and shareholders recognize the value of
the journalists role in serving the public interest.
In addition to concern about JMC education, for many years in articles and books,
such leaders as Jay Rosen, Roy Peter Clark, James Carey, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
have called for discussions about the roles and responsibilities of journalism in the United
States today. They ask what can be done to improve the quality of the enterprise.
In The Elements of Journalism , Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001) address issues of what
news people should know and what the public has a right to expect from the news
industry. An over-arching goal of the books chief architects was to figure out why the
public no longer trusted the press as it once had. They concluded that advancing selfgovernment is and must be the primary goal of news organizations.
Clearly, the goals of journalism and journalism education are similar: as Nancy Wahl
Nieman noted when she made the gift to establish the Nieman Foundation at Harvard
University, they are to promote and elevate the standards of journalism.

145

146

DEBATE

REFERENCES
(2002) Columbia Journalism Review November/December.
and ROSENSTIEL, TOM (2001) The Elements of Journalism. What newspeople should
know and the public should expect , New York: Crown Publishers.
STEPHENS, MITCHELL (2000) A J-School Manifesto, Columbia Journalism Review May/June.
WOO, WILLIAM (2002) The Bridge Between the Classroom and the Newsroom, Nieman Reports
Winter.
BOLLINGER, LEE
KOVACH, BILL

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Jannette L. Dates, Howard University, USA.

JOURNALISM STUDIES AND THE EDUCATION OF JOURNALISTS

Theodore L. Glasser
Theodore L. Glasser argues in his essay on why journalism matters, that journalism
studies will only make a difference if they make journalism better and help us
understand what journalism means. He argues that this begins ideally on the graduate
level after students have enough experience to do journalism.
The rise of media studies and now journalism studies, along with the beginning
of the demise of mass communication, which never attracted the studies appendage,
amounts to something more than a change in nomenclature. It represents, at least in some
quarters, a shift in thinking about how to make sense of certain institutions and their
practices; it marks a renewed interest in the humanities as an intellectual resource; it even
implies some resistance to the notion that communication provides the best or proper
framework for the study of media and journalism. Unless it devolves, unexpectedly, into
something more akin to a topic than an orientation, journalism studies promises a new
seriousness about journalism as a separate and arguably distinct domain of inquiry.
Indeed, if it succeeds in providing a fresh purpose and a compelling rationale for the study
of journalism qua journalism, journalism studies might very well succeed in repositioning
an academic enterprise that had over time succumbed to the study of presumably related
activities and, even in units that still display its name, ended up, as James Carey recently
summed up the fate of journalism on American campuses, displaced to the margin.
In the United States in the decades following World War II, journalism research
began its gradual descent into communication research. The new and expanding science
of communication brought prestige and legitimacy to the study of journalism, which had
until then languished in programs more intent on educating journalists than explicating
journalism. To trumpet their status as a social science and not merely an outpost for a
narrow vocationalism */and to acknowledge, anomalously, an increasingly large portion
of undergraduates whose career trajectory justified more attention to public relations and
advertising than journalism */schools and departments of journalism began to add
communication or mass communication to their name. In the early 1980s, the
Association for Education in Journalism, launched in 1912 as the American Association of

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

DEBATE

Teachers of Journalism, became the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication; a decade later its flagship journal, Journalism Quarterly , became
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly . To this day, with very few exceptions,
American research universities award PhDs in communication or mass communication, not
journalism.
Without discounting the benefits associated with the move to wed science and
communication */the US National Research Council, for example, which rates and ranks
PhD programs and which therefore confers a certain status on the disciplines it recognizes,
recently agreed, after years of lobbying, to add communication to its taxonomy of social
and behavioral sciences */Carey is basically right when he observes that the science of
communication marched into journalism education with generally unfortunate results. It
took some time and it met some resistance, but the study of communication finally
eclipsed the study of journalism in ways that rendered journalism largely unintelligible to
journalists and mostly irrelevant to the practice of journalism.
Journalism studies will succeed, then, if it can reconnect the study of journalism to
the practice of journalism, making it not only relevant to the education of journalists but
relevant as well to the education of readers, viewers and listeners who need to understand
precisely what practitioners need to understand: how to tell the difference between good
and bad journalism. To accomplish this, journalism studies will need to free itself from the
delusional quest for the kind of propositional knowledge that other professions, like law
and medicine, tout as evidence of their practitioners education and expertise; it will need
to find a middle ground between the sanitized versions of journalism which measure the
immeasurable and, at the other extreme, the disconnected and undigested anecdotes
from newsrooms of the past which substitute description for explanation; and it will need
to fashion a truly independent research agenda, focused on the quality and value of
journalism and insulated from pressure to accept the realities of current practices and
arrangements. In short, journalism studies will make a real and lasting difference to the
education of journalists and others if it can demystify journalism for the purpose of making
journalism better */and for the purpose of making us all better at understanding what
better journalism means.

The Actual Practice of Journalism

The obituaries of the two important American journalists, published on the same
day in a recent edition of the New York Times , offer a vivid reminder of what matters little
in the calculation of success in journalism: a formal education. Peter Jennings, a prominent
foreign correspondent and network television news anchor, and John H. Johnson, an
entrepreneurial and influential magazine publisher whose publications and other
enterprises made him one of the nations richest and most powerful black businessmen,
had little in common except for a credential neither possessed: a college degree. Jennings,
in fact, who attracted nearly 14 million viewers during the peak of his popularity, began his
career in broadcasting in his early 20s without the benefit of even a high school diploma.
Although journalists today stand out as better educated and more likely to have a
college degree than when Jennings and Johnson began their careers, no one confuses
that with the claim that journalists need a college education, or any formal education, in
order to succeed in journalism. Just as no one needs a degree in political science to win an
election, or a degree in business to run a profitable company, or a degree in literature to

147

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

148

DEBATE

write a great novel, or a degree in criminology to embezzle millions of dollars, no one

needs a degree in journalism */or any degree at all */to excel as a reporter or editor. What
journalists need to learn */the knowledge they must master */comes mostly from the
field, not the library. Journalism requires phronesis , the term Aristotle used to describe the
practical wisdom that comes from practice and experience, not books and lectures. To be
sure, a recognition of the value of learning-by-doing */what Donald Schon, who studies
how practitioners of all kinds come to know what they know, calls knowing-in-action */
explains why an education in journalism emphasizes internships, apprenticeships,
simulations, laboratory courses and other opportunities to learn journalism by doing
journalism. And it explains why journalism programs favor faculty who can teach by
example, who can demonstrate what others can only describe, who can inspire good work
by pointing to their own good work.
Of course, every profession tries to strike a balance between the formal, systematic
knowledge associated with theories and treatises and the informal, colloquial knowledge
acquired through the routines of practice. Atul Gawande, a Boston physician who writes
for The New Yorker about issues in medicine, makes just this point about the education of
surgeons: they need to study anatomy, obviously, but they also need to learn how to
make incisions, repair torn vessels, remove organs; and the latter takes a very long time, a
process Gawande describes as floundering followed by fragments followed by knowledge and, occasionally, moments of elegance. No one wants to be a surgeons first
patient, no matter how well the surgeon did on the anatomy exam.
In professions like journalism, however, there is nothing quite analogous to an
anatomy class. Even with the proliferation in the last couple of decades of books, journals
and other literature devoted to every conceivable topic in journalism, there exists no
specialized body of knowledge which precedes the practice of journalism like a knowledge
of anatomy precedes the practice of surgery. As disconcerting as it may be to those for
whom a professional education means providing practitioners with a foundational
knowledge */typically a codification of principles, rules and criteria which steers the
competent management of conduct */journalisms theories and treatises do not inform
practice as much as they track it.
Beyond the familiar texts and courses in journalism law, history, ethics and the now
obligatory seminar on the implications of the computerization of communication, all of
which deal with valuable but hardly foundational material, students go elsewhere on
campus for the knowledge they need to perform competently as journalists. If they intend
to cover government, they might take a course in political science; if they want to write
about the environment, they can study in the department of earth sciences; if they expect
to report on the courts, they could head over to the law school and learn about the rules
of evidence. There is something pleasantly ecumenical */interdisciplinary, in the argot of
the academy */about a curriculum that honors the relevance of just about any program or
project on campus. But it all adds up to an education for, not in, journalism.
An education in journalism begins with the actual practice of journalism; and it
begins, ideally at the graduate level, with students who have had enough experience in
journalism to understand, at least intuitively, what it means to do journalism. Just as other
performance schools, like music or art, look for students with a portfolio, journalism
schools should demand evidence of a commitment to, and more than a primitive
competence in, the craft of journalism; students need to arrive, not leave, with the basic
newsroom skills of writing, reporting and editing. An education in journalism thus

DEBATE

becomes an opportunity to refine skills, not acquire them; it fosters an appreciation for the
proposition that practice improves practice, where the ambiguity of the term practice,
to pirate a couple of sentences from a paper Jim Ettema and I wrote a couple of years ago,
nicely captures the relationship between experience, when practice means repetition
and experimentation, and performance, when practice means attainment or accomplishment. But an education in journalism also involves the study of journalism, an enterprise
that benefits students not because it provides a foundation for the practice of journalism
but because it provides a context in which to critique and improve the practice of
journalism.

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Educating Journalists, Studying Journalism

The study of journalism */journalism studies, if the shoe fits */can contribute to the
education of journalists in two important ways. First, it can interrogate the practice of
journalism for the purpose of pointing out the perils of confusing tradition with
justification, a reminder to students that there often exists, for reasons that need to
be explored, a gap between what journalism is and has been and what journalism
ought to be. Second, it can use that interrogation as an opportunity for students to
develop their own justification for how journalism ought to work and what roles it ought
to play, a set of claims that any properly educated journalist should be able to articulate
and defend.
Interrogating the practice of journalism involves questioning journalisms customs
and habits, its conventional wisdom, the common sense that gets passed down from one
generation of journalists to the next. Understood as an excavation project, it digs beneath
the cliches and platitudes that newsrooms use to ward off critics; it exposes the
contradictions, tensions and paradoxes that time rationalizes away; it demonstrates that
even journalisms most self-evident claims endure in history and not in nature.
By providing an intellectually rich perspective from which to understand why news
media exist the way they exist, why journalists work the way they work, the study of
journalism empowers students; it enables them to transform knowing-in-action
into reflection-in-action, to borrow some of Schons language, by helping them learn
to question */and learn to consider alternatives to */their standard repertoire of
expectations, images, and techniques. More than any other aspect of a journalism
education, the study of journalism improves the prospects for better journalism and better
journalists.
While the practice of journalism remains the centerpiece of any viable journalism
curriculum, the study of journalism accounts for the distinctive contribution of a university
to the education of journalists. A formal education in journalism matters and succeeds as it
engenders among students a certain quality of thinking about journalism, a state of
preparedness that manifests itself in the eloquence students exhibit when called on to
respond to questions about the value and purpose of what they do as journalists.

Theodore L. Glasser, Stanford University, USA.

149

150

DEBATE

RETHINKING JOURNALISM EDUCATION

Mitchell Stephens

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Mitchell Stephens introduces 13 principles that he contends will be needed for practical
journalism education .
A new-model journalism education is being born */right now, around us. Many of
the elements of this new model are, of course, not so new. Most of us who have been
teaching journalism have been including some of them in our classes. Indeed, for this
discussion I have borrowed elements from courses that have been taught over the years
by colleagues at New York University and elsewhere. I will insist, however, that this new
model */this new mix of elements !/ is important, necessary even, if this peculiar discipline
(too often unloved both by the profession and by other academics) is, finally, to actualize
its potential.
To make clear that we are talking practical journalism education */not some
theoretical lecture or PhD seminar */I will introduce the 13 principles I believe underlie the
new journalism education in the context of a course. It might even be an introductory
course */offered to graduate or undergraduate students. Here then: a new-model
journalism course.
The course would begin not with an exercise or fact sheet */Jennifer Jones of 23
Hayloft Lane was walking home from the supermarket when. . . */but by sending
students out to cover a real story.
.

Principle Number 1 : Journalism is nonfiction; instructors should use real assignments.

This first assignment should not be ridiculously simple */student reaction to the
heat wave, say, or to lines for advisement. If undergraduates can be handed a book by
Nabokov in a literature course or a text by Nietzsche in a philosophy course, they can be
assigned to cover a complicated issue */the cost of air-conditioning college classrooms,
the reasons for the shortage of registration advisors */in a journalism course, even an
introductory journalism course.
.

Principle Number 2 : Journalism education has been too basic; it has been insufficiently
intellectually challenging.

Perhaps the students should not be told what style to employ in this first
assignment. The instructor could still point out factual errors and note lapses in syntax,
clarity or logic in the various foolish, weird, traditional or interesting stories they produce.
But, by looking openly and generously at the different styles and approaches the students
have employed, the instructor could also begin a consideration of the strengths and
weaknesses of various story forms. This discussion would then continue throughout the
semester. Along with practicing the inverted pyramid and anecdotal leads, all the students
in the class might be asked to have a go at a first-person story, an essay and a vignette.
Along with experiencing the power of Olympian objectivity, the students might be given
an occasion to deploy some analysis or opinion. (Were this a broadcast course students
might hazard a bit of cinema verite and fast-cut editing as well as the traditional narration/
two-sound-bites/one-stand-up package.

DEBATE
.

Principle Number 3 : Journalism courses should be places to try out different styles and
approaches */styles that are currently being used in other countries or that have been
used at other times in this country, not just the styles that have been insisted upon by
journalists in the United States in the last half of the 20th century.

And students should be encouraged to come up with new styles and approaches.
Journalism courses should not just prepare students for the profession by imitating the
profession. Is the quality of journalism currently so high that our only responsibility is to
preserve it by replicating it? Journalism courses should, instead, be places where new
ideas */ideas that might improve the quality of journalism */are born and tested.

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Principle Number 4 : Journalism students, like students in drama schools or architecture

schools, should be encouraged to experiment.

Future assignments in this new-model course might focus on specific subject

matters: local poverty, for one example, or immigration */serious subjects, more serious
than what usually passes for news in most of our news organs today. In some magazinewriting classes students are asked to come up with, along with a story idea, the name of a
publication that might publish that idea. If there is no publication that might print it, the
student cannot write it. That is done from the best of motives; still it is a crime. The
profession is limited by certain, often commercial pressures; journalism schools should not
be. In an effort to avoid losing even more of their audience, those who practice journalism
sometimes seem to be losing themselves in celebrities, sensation and silliness; those who
teach journalism should reject this strategy. While they are in a university, students should
have the opportunity to report and write on matters of substance and significance.
.

Principle Number 5 : Universities should provide a home for the stories that should be
reported, not just the stories that might get published.

Students in this course might take some weeks, or even the entire semester, to
investigate some such serious topic */in depth.
.

Principle Number 6 : Prospective journalists should be taught to obtain more searching

perspectives on the topics they are covering.

To help students reach those deeper understandings experts from elsewhere in the
university might be invited into the classroom. If a focus of the class is reporting on issues
related to immigration, a sociology professor who has researched such issues might be
invited to conduct a seminar on them.
.

Principle Number 7 : Since journalism inevitably finds itself discussing issues studied by
other disciplines in the university, journalism education should be more interdisciplinary.

And experimentation in choice of subject should also be encouraged. Journalists

everywhere are concerned about the loss of the youth audience. We have those youths in
our classes, but we too rarely invite them to suggest new topics for news coverage */
topics they and their age cohort might find more compelling. Might they be interested in
exploring, to choose an example suggested by Carl Sessions Stepp, news relating to
romance or spirituality (defined broadly)?

151

152

DEBATE
.

Principle Number 8 : Journalism courses should attempt to broaden the focus, as well as
the style, of journalism.

And students should read books and articles on the subjects, traditional or
experimental, about which they are writing. They should also read books and articles
about journalism. They should also read examples */including book-length examples */of
journalism.

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Principle Number 9 : Journalism students, even in practical courses, should read more.

In literature courses students read the best work that has ever been written */
Austen and Tolstoy, not the latest beach thriller. In art or film courses they see the best
work. But our students too often are exposed only to the merely workmanlike. Journalism
education should reclaim its canon: the great works of nonfiction writing and
documentary film. If students are writing about poverty, they should be reading Charles
Dickens journalism on the subject or watching the great CBS documentary Harvest of
Shame.
.

Principle Number 10 : Journalism courses should expose students to the best work that
has been done in journalism; these courses should inspire as well as instruct.

And a journalism course */even a practical, introductory journalism course */should

include a critique of journalism. If the subject is immigration, why not read about and
discuss how the news media do or do not succeed in illuminating the lives of immigrants.
.

Principle Number 11 : Critique and practice can be combined in journalism courses.

If this is primarily a print course, students might still sometimes be given a chance to
take along a camera or recorder. If it is a broadcast course, they might occasionally be
asked to return with a print story. And digital publication, along with the use of digital
reporting tools, should always be encouraged. A journalism course */particularly an
introductory course */should give students a taste of different media and an opportunity
to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different media.
.

Principle Number 12 : Journalism courses, like contemporary journalists, should learn to

move more easily among different media.

These media */particularly the newer ones */should not be treated as if they are
finished, established forms. The techniques of television journalism are still changing */the
cutting gets ever faster, computer graphics add new layers of meaning. And if television
still seems to be finding itself, where does that leave the Internet? Certainly, it is absurd to
pretend we already know */at this early stage in its history */how a blog should be
written, how a video story for the Web should be constructed. Surely we have much to
learn. Suddenly, for example, we have forms of communication that, for the first time in
history, can literally make words move. How might that help us tell our stories?
.

Principle Number 13 : Students should be encouraged to experiment with the journalistic

potential of new, and even not so new, technologies.

Could students handle the freedom, the challenges, imposed by such new-model
journalism courses? I believe it is a mistake to underestimate them. Could instructors

DEBATE

handle the challenges of teaching outside of rigid forms and familiar routines? Lets not
underestimate ourselves. Would there be jobs for students who have been encouraged to
experiment? Dont underestimate the hunger in the profession for fresh ideas. Could we
do all this and still manage to insist upon accuracy and the difference between stated
and maintained? Why not? Might the adoption of such principles help move journalism
education from the rear guard of the profession */merely defending old standards */to
the avant garde , the place where law schools and medical schools have managed to
position themselves? I hope so.

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

Mitchell Stephens, New York University, New York, USA.

EDUCATING REPORTERS, WRITERS, AND CRITICS

G. Stuart Adam
G. Stuart Adam argues for an increased connection between the applied field of
journalism and the intellectual culture of the university. Adam defines journalists as
professionals who are employed to create journalistic texts in the public media. He
provides four axes for a program in journalism .
The shape of the curriculum and the broad purposes of university programs in
journalism have been on the agenda of journalism educators at least since Joseph Pulitzer
made his inaugural reflections on the subject in The North American Review in May 1904. I
think Pulitzer got it more or less right in that essay, but my general view is that the method
he promoted didnt quite take hold.
So I was sanguine about the reforms called for by Lee Bollinger, the President of
Columbia University, in 2002 when he suspended the search for a dean and struck a task
force to propose reforms in Columbias curriculum. President Bollinger brought fresh light
to the subject. In a sense, President Bollinger sought what Pulitzer was seeking. He sought
to forge a strong relationship between the principal disciplines of the university and
journalism.
It is important to note President Bollinger did not call for a so-called academization
of journalism studies by proclaiming a special fondness for research-based mass
communication studies. Nor did he express a desire to place such a field in the foreground
of a reformed curriculum. In my view, he was concerned with the manner in which */and
the extent to which */the languages of university disciplines and thought can shape the
creation of journalistic texts. I endorsed his initiatives at the time he announced them and
continue to hope that they succeed. Of all the applied fields, journalism can least afford to
allow distance to grow between it and the intellectual culture of the university.
The ideal university program in journalism develops along four basic axes: (1) a spine
comprising reporting and writing courses with studio offshoots in visual communication
and broadcasting; (2) media studies */this is the place for research-based knowledge */
comprising such subjects as journalism history, law, ethics, and media and society; (3)
general studies in arts and sciences; and (4) specialization in a single companion subject
such as politics, economics, law, science, or fine arts and culture.

153

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

154

DEBATE

These axes bring a fundamental structure into being. But much depends on how
that structure is organized and expressed. Furthermore, much depends on the principal
meaning curriculum builders attach to the concepts of journalism and journalist. For the
record, I see journalism in the first instance less as a form of media and more as a form of
expression in the sense that novels and poems are forms of expression. Education in this
form, regardless of secondary goals and outcomes, involves steps that promote its
mastery. For the same record and for the purposes of curriculum building, I see journalists
as professionals who are employed to create journalistic texts in the public media. It
follows that a curriculum in journalism should promote teaching in the range of activities
that mark the life of a working journalist.
My own experience with this subject was the product of administrative responsibility. I started thinking about it as a young professor in the late 1960s when I chaired a
committee that upgraded the journalism degree at Carleton University in Ottawa to what
in Canada we call an honours degree. I continued to reflect on the subject in the early
1970s when, as a newly appointed director of the school, I assumed continuing
responsibility for curricular development. I began by writing memos to my colleagues
on what I thought individual syllabuses in journalism should look like, how they should
cover the territory of professional practices, and how they should be located in a
comprehensive curriculum that involved academic courses both in journalism and other
university disciplines. These administrative memos led in due course to more formal and
published reflections (including Adam, 1968, 1989a, 1989b, 2001, 2004).
When I look back, I can see that I built my approach by providing a detailed answer
to an obvious and fundamental question. I asked what should a curriculum in journalism
studies in a university aim to do? The answer flowed naturally after I owned up to the fact
that it has been asked in a university setting. The university setting pointed to a field of
opportunity and obligation that is substantially different from a technical institute where
the same question might be asked and technology and infrastructure (rather than human
expression) are central concepts. The study of journalism in a university, by contrast,
should involve learning to apply the knowledge formalized in the university to the events
of the here and now.
In addition, I concluded that the concept of journalist */unmodified and
unembellished */was insufficiently rich to guide curriculum building. So I decided it
should be divided into bits. I argued that the curriculum should be aimed not simply at the
formation of journalists, but more precisely to the formation of reporters, writers, and
critics. In this view, the reporter in the journalist is concerned with the identification of
news and the discovery of facts that support the accounts of it. The writer in the journalist
seeks to create intelligible */at best, elegant, literate, and faithful */texts. The critic in the
journalist judges the significance of things and, by a number of devices, adds layers of
meaning and interpretation to their description. It follows that a curriculum in journalism
should promote the formation of a person who is at once an expert at identifying news
and a master of reporting methods, who can write (as Hemingway said) well and truly and
assume responsibility for broader representational tasks, and who is sufficiently educated
and thoughtful to judge the significance of things and to give them meaning.
By breaking apart the concept of a journalist into these constitutive categories it
seemed possible to construct a professional curriculum that could be articulated
successfully to the universitys intellectual culture.

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

DEBATE

For example, such a conceptualization can be seen as a basis on which to build and
stratify the reporting and writing program. An introductory course stresses news and basic
methods of reporting and writing. A second course or tier strengthens students literary
and investigative capacities. A third tier seeks to specialize students in a single field such as
politics, economics, fine arts, or science where skills of analysis and qualities of a critic are
sharpened. But what of the rest of the curriculum? The basic frame calls not only for a
writing and reporting program, but also for media studies, liberal arts, and specialized
study.
Journalism law and ethics courses promote prudence and professional morality.
Courses in journalism history and media and society promote a wider understanding of
the cultural, economic, political, and social settings within which journalism occurs and the
debates that mark its evolution and role in a modern democratic society. Together such
subjects constitute the media studies portion of a curriculum formalized and administered
within the journalism school or department in the name of its deeply professional goals.
These subjects promote the development of reflective practitioners. But there remains the
vast territory of the university to which journalism undergraduates (and even graduate
students) should be directed as they pursue their journalism degrees. In my view, their
choices should be narrowed in this domain to ensure that they receive what I would call a
literary and civic education.
The literary part of general study in a university involves minimally the formal study
of the poetry and fiction */not only for their own sake, but also as inspirational models of
expression. Journalism is a literary field and the education of journalism students should
seek to connect them to the society of writers, which in due course they will join. The civic
part of general studies calls for an immersion in the study of the basic institutions and
processes of modern democratic society with special emphasis on the institutions of
governance. The basics are communicated in such courses as law, political theory, and
sociology. These disciplines describe a world that circumscribes the practice of journalism.
More fundamentally, they shape the languages in which that worlds events are noted and
described.
The final axis of this ideal curriculum involves specialization in a single discipline. In
the best of circumstances the specialization in a single discipline should support a finalyear course in writing and reporting. The subjects of this reporting course */and the
university discipline */could include one of politics, economics, law, sociology, fine arts or
culture. The idea at work here is to sharpen a student journalists knowledge and to
strengthen his or her judgment of the significance and meaning of events in a single
domain or beat. In my view it is desirable that students of journalism be joint majors and
that their capstone courses should blend the dividends of the two majors.
To summarize my thoughts on this subject, permit me quote from an essay on this
subject that I wrote for the Australian Journalism Review :
. . . the curriculum is . . . conceived in a University, not against or in spite of it. Its aim must
be an immersion in an intellectual culture . . . as well as an immersion in professional
practices. It makes no sense to make journalism a distinctive path within the University
unless, at the same time, the path it carves involves the intellectual (and even moral)
development of students. For the purposes of constructing a journalism program in a
university, it is best to think of [journalism] not only as the product of reporting, but
comprising in a broad [and] decisive sense the application of disciplinary knowledge to
the interpretation of events in the here and now. Moreover, the curriculum as a whole

155

156

DEBATE
should be designed [to promote] the formation of individuals skilled in the languages of
public life. (Adam, 2004, p. 12)

It follows that:

Downloaded By: [University of Pennsylvania] At: 16:30 5 January 2009

. . . the coordinates of a good education comprise, like the practice of journalism, a

fundamental concern with news, and a corresponding concern with complex methods of
knowing, representation, and analysis . . . [A]n education for journalism should promote a
thoughtful understanding of news judgment, a solid grounding in methods of evidencegathering and fact assessment, a strong capacity for literary and/or visual forms of
representation, and the ability to apply the forms of understanding born in the academy
to the problems of the here and now. Put differently, a university program in journalism
should be constructed to prepare students for work as reporters, writers, and critics.
(Adam, 2004, p. 13)

REFERENCES
(1968) The New Curriculum at Carleton, Nieman Reports XXIII, p. 3.
(1989a) Journalism and the University: reporters, writers, and critics, in: Jaeger
Kathleen (Ed.), The Idea of a University, Kings College, 1789 !/1989 , Halifax, NS: Kings
College University, pp. 58 !/70.
ADAM, G. STUART (1989b) Journalism Practice and Journalism Knowledge: the problems of
curriculum and research in university schools of journalism, Canadian Journal of
Communication 14, pp. 70 !/80.
ADAM, G. STUART (2001) The Education of Journalists, Journalism: theory, practice, criticism 2(3),
pp. 315 !/39.
ADAM, G. STUART (2004) The Events at Columbia, The Design of Journalism Programs in
Universities, and the Sources and Nature of Professional Knowledge, Australian
Journalism Review Summer.
ADAM, G. STUART
ADAM, G. STUART

G. Stuart Adam, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.