www.thefuture.com
I have a meeting with Nicholas Lemann this afternoon.
He is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
I, myself, am a graduate of the J-school at Columbia, class of ’83. I also taught there until 1993, when I was fired for dating (and later marrying… and later divorcing (but I don’t think they fired me for that)) one of my students. Â All in all, a very big mistake – but more on that another time.
Today, I am going to Columbia not to discuss marriage but rather to talk about the future of journalism and the school. Â
I responded to the school’s report on the future of journalism.
I was against it. Â
I thought it was pointless oatmeal. Â I still do. Â
Much to his credit, Dean Lemann invited me to come up to Columbia to talk about alternatives to the report. Â That’s my job this afternoon.
And here is what I am going to propose:
Columbia’s Journalism School was founded in 1912 based on a $2 million grant from Joseph Pulitzer, publish of The World. (Think of this as The New York Post, 1912 version). Â The school didn’t really get started until 1935, when Dean Carl Ackerman created the first Graduate School of Journalism. Â It was based on a mini-newsroom in which students spread out across the city of New York during the day to gather stories, then wrote them up.
Think of The Front Page.
That model of the Moot Newspaper Newsroom was the model that I encountered when I went to the school in 1983. Â We still had manual typewriters. Â We still had clip files in the library. We still had a library! Â And the students published their collected writings in a make-believe newspaper that they turned out called “The Bronx Beat”. Â
My year was an election year, and we had a make-believe TV newsroom coverage of the election. Â I can still remember my classmate Ron Suskind (who later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize himself) doing the ‘minute by minute’ analysis into a microphone that went… nowhere.
What Pulitzer constructed for himself and his newspaper was essentially a factory to create good employees for his newspaper as soon as they graduated. Â
The school trained good employees.
It still does.
This is its biggest flaw.Â
First, the shop floor that it trained its employees to work on increasingly no longer exists. Â
The ‘newspaper newsroom’ is a dinosaur, soon to be extinct.
As Pulitzer created a kind of make-believe newspaper newsroom of the 1920’s at the school to prepare the students for the ‘real working world’ of the 1920’s, so perhaps it is time for the school to create a make-believe newsroom of the 21st Century up there at Columbia. And that would something that is entirely online.
For in the future, there will be no newsrooms. Â As there will be no newspapers.
Alas, the faculty at most of these places is populated by ‘former’ employees, and so it is very very very difficult for them to dissociate themselves from their ‘glorious’ past. Â
“I remember when Dan and I” begin far too many lectures in the TV dept.
Most students would no doubt ask “Dan who?”
Secondly, the whole problem at places like Columbia centers around the ’employee mentality’.
The school was founded by a rogue businessman, Joseph Pulitzer. He was the Rupert Murdoch of his day. Â He tried to expurgate his many sins by building the school. Instead, he compounded them. He succeeded in creating a factory for ‘good employees’, but he infantalized an entire industry.
The graduates of the school long to be good employees – to work for The New York Times or The Washington Post or NBC News or CNN.
Not to build… but to work for.
Good for Joseph Pulitzer and Bill Paley. Bad for the profession.
The report on the Future of American Journalism was written by two lifetime employees. Leonard Downie Jr., spent a lifetime at The Washington Post, as an employee. He rose to be Executive Editor but he still got that weekly paycheck. Â Michael Schudson is a lifetime academic. He also has spent his life getting that printed paycheck every week.
Nice guys though they are, they are hardly the right people to ask to figure out the future of journalism. Â What they have been bred to do for a lifetime is to figure out where the next paycheck is going to come from. And that is what they came up with in their report. Pretty much devoid of any other ideas, they came up with ‘ask the goverment or some foundations to write more checks’.
Great!
Really great solution.
Well, it’s a bit like asking two members of the UAW to figure out how to save GM. The last thing they are going to come up with is cutting pay and benefits. In fact, all they’ll focus on is how to keep the pay packets and benefits intact – which is essentially what Mssrs. Downie and Schudson have come up with. Â
If Columbia is to survivie; if Journalism is to survive, it now has to cast aside its beginnings as a trade school of good employees. Â
It has to grow up and embrace the business of journalism. And I don’t mean one course for students on ‘The Business of Journalism’, I mean a complete rethinking of what the profession means.
And that is not easy.
The alternative however, is apparently, begging for a few foundation grants.
And that is no future.
8 Comments
Richard Gross, Columbia J93 June 14, 2011
Though business is now a legitimate concern of the contemporary journalist, I do not agree that journalism should operate on a “business model.” Business is just one component. Nor do I agree that the future of journalism is exclusively online – not as long as there is a Middle East, a China and an on/off switch to the Internet.
Eric Blumer January 03, 2010
Michael,
This new job opening… might interest you?
http://www.universityjobs.com/jobs/jobdetail.php?jobid=1031646
Pingback: Rosenblum Comes to Stony Brook University « Journalism 24/7
Rachelle November 04, 2009
Do you use (or have you seen) the iGoogle home page. It’s my morning “newspaper” online. Rss feeds for my favorite blogs, news from BBC, weather, horoscope, and joke of the day. I get to choose what companies headlines I want to appear … and I have no black ash on my fingers after reading it. ;o)
Michael Rosenblum November 03, 2009
I think that a person should be aware of where information is coming from. The notion of ‘objectivity’ is and I think alway has been something of a sham. Mercenary journalism is, I think, no crime, so long as the person getting paid is the person wo actually does the work. It’s capitalism at its finest and the way it is supposed to work- a competitive marketplace that rewards the successful. Stand by tomorrow for a more detail explanation of how I think this could work. I wanna it past Nick Lemann this afternoon and see how it flies.
DH November 03, 2009
Ok I’ll bite !
Just what do you mean by the business of journalism?
Just what business model would work in a world tilted toward accumalation of wealth and power?
Every person /institution/country has a bias to perpetuation
of self.
When the world was a much bigger?,smaller? place a person could
sometimes see a much different aspect of the what the majority wanted everybody to see, hear, READ.
In nearly every Industry and Government agency I have worked in with there is a bias of perpetuating perspectives of those institutions.
How is Journalism which to my understanding has worked and guarded its own for nonbias perspectives going to incorporate capitalist perspectives motives and still claim nonbias?
Case in point Michael Moore’s Movie, “Capitalism a Love Story” with the fact that he is becoming a Successful Capitalist by Knocking the the very system that rewards him!!
Solution? I don’t See One. I see mercenary journalism.
From now on a person will alway’s have to be aware where the information/journalism is coming from and situations that person is in to benefit/not benefit from that bias.
It’s why I took your TC class! and others I suspect!
Michael Rosenblum November 03, 2009
I think they probably have to gut the faculty and start clean. Sorry to say.
digger November 03, 2009
So they should stop teaching what they know because it has no relevance or utility.
Difficult to argue with that.
But then what? Start teaching something they know nothing about and barely understand?
Early retirement might be more realistic.