key to survival
A posting on b-roll.net and a conversation at lunch yesterday with Kevin Klose, former President of NPR and new Dean of the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland gave me food for thought.
The posting links to an article by William F. Woo, a visiting professor at Stanford University. Prof. Woo relates the story of the founding of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University (of which I am both a grad ’83 and a former faculty member). Prof. Woo notes (in capsulate form, you can read it yourself) that journalism schools fail because they fail to properly instill the sense of ‘public mission’.
Woo states at the closing graph:
As I wrote in The Nieman Reports, “A press that is hostage to its investors is no more a free press than one that is hostage to government. Surely, great universities, and even lesser ones, can understand this.†Joseph Pulitzer would have.
Personally, I could not disagree more.
Journalism schools fail, (and journalism itself fails) because it has a very Ivory Tower removed ‘purity’ to it, which has cut it off from any measure of success in the real world. And this is a tragedy.
When I was at Columbia Journalism School we were rigorously drilled in the immutable wall between business and journalism. This ‘wall’ reappeared at all the journalistic institutions at which I worked, from CBS News to The New York Times. Business was ‘bad’, while journalism was ideally ‘pure’.
Joseph Pulitzer would vomit.
It was first and foremost his intense business acumen that allowed him to make enough money from the journalism business to build the J-School at Columbia in the first place.
It is the very fact of journalism schools cutting themselves off from embracing the reality of the business of journalism that accounts for greater disasters down the line. Journalists don’t think like business people. They live in the clouds.
Craig Newmark, the founder of multi-billion dollar newspaper destroying Craig’s List lived only a few miles from the offices of The San Francisco Chonicle, a fine newspaper. Craig lived in a ratty old apartment when he founded Craigslist. It should have been the San Francisco Chronicle that founded and nurtured Craigslist, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t because the editor of the paper,a fine ‘journalist’ was so preoccupied with reporting news stories from San Francisco that he lost sight of why people were buying the paper in the first place.
The New York Times was once offered the chance to buy Google for $1 million. They passed. They passed because in their mind ‘news’ was about reporting stories.
While stories are important, they represent only a small portion of why people buy bought papers. They bought them to see the ads from Bloomingdales, to see what was playing at the movies, to find a used car for sale and much more. News, great.. but maybe 20%, if that.
In the past decade we have seen an explosion in the online world, much of it centered around news and journalism. What is Facebook, after all, but a kind of hyperlocal news. The New York Times should own Facebook. The Chron should own Craigslist. They don’t.
They don’t because the people who work there, and who ultimately run those institutions were taught early on that ‘business’ was dirty and corrupted ‘journalism’.
Tragic.
Tragic that they were not taught a more holistic kind of journalism.
Law Schools never did this. Law schools never inflicted the ‘purity’ of the law on their students. They taught their grads to deal in the real world as well as the theoretical. Their training encompasses Constitution Theory but also real down in the dirt M&A. When the economy exploded in the 70s, the lawyers were there to fill the gaps and create very wealthy institutions.
When the information revolution occurred in the 90s, Journalism grads kept their hands clean and their pockets empty and so today find themselves marginalized if not exterminated.
There are small pockets of change. Very small. Jeff Jarvis runs a program at CUNY called Entrpreneurial Journalism. He even awards cash grants as seed money for journalism related business ideas. That should be the model of all journalism schools across the country. Kudos to CUNY, Jeff and Dean Steve Shephard.
Shephard, by the way, came from Business Week, which is in such economic straits that the magazine is reportedly up for sale for $1. Ironic, that a publication who since 1926 has been making a living handing out business advice failed miserably to take its own.
Pulitzer, (who was nicknamed ‘Joey the Jew’ at his first newspaper job) was first and foremost a businessman. he understood where the newspaper business was headed in the 1880s. The bought the New York World from Jay Gould for $346,000 when the paper was losing $40,000 a year. He immediately changed the nature of the paper, filling it with scandal and sensationalism, not to mention first color comics. He understood the changing nature of the business he was in.
If only he had endowed Columbia with the mandate to do that, we would all be in better shape.
