Medill 2020: 411 or 911?

Editor's Note Who would have guessed that journalism curricula could be so controversial? First, there was a president at Columbia University, himself a noted First Amendment scholar, who a few years ago halted a journalism dean search, which led to the appointment of Nicholas Lemann and then a second master's degree program there, various M.A. degrees to go along with the traditional M.S. More recently and still going on is controversy about what the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is calling Medill 2020, a new curriculum that supposedly prepares students for what journalism jobs will be like in 2020. Northwestern Magazine's Fall 2006 issue told alums and others, "The realities of today's media environment require an education that incorporates elements of both [journalism and integrated marketing communications] traditions, [Dean John] Lavine says. In a world of abundant choice for consumers and fierce competition for their time, journalists need to learn how to reach their audience with compelling stories and presentation, while marketers and communication students must understand how to think and write with the clarity of journalists, according to Lavine. " The magazine continued, "Our students need to understand the experiences that motivate and inhibit media usage,' Lavine says. 'How do you involve and engage an audience? ' "Lavine's goal: Train all Medill students to create 'relevant, differentiated storytelling and messages that engage the audience. ' That's the key, Lavine says, to capturing the attention of very busy people-and to stemming the tides of circulation loss for newspapers and declining viewership for broadcasting. " The magazine also pointed out that during a fifteen-month-long strategic planning process involving the Medill faculty, "Audience understanding led the list. " After a detour to mention the need to teach technological multitasking to journalism students, Northwestern Magazine noted, "Not all alumni and students share his [Lavine's] excitement about a new curriculum that more tightly weaves the marketing and journalism programs together, Lavine acknowledges. Some have been skeptical, others upset. " That last sentence certainly was and is true. One need only quickly search the World Wide Web to find various posts by persons who are or at least claim to be Medill students, Medill alumni, and in various journalism jobs to find comments that the new curriculum ruins Medill's curriculum, dramatically damages its reputation, causes prospective students to consider not attending there, etc. Let's forget for the moment that the new curriculum, instituted this last fall, was achieved quickly, if at all, by suspending Medill's faculty governance. Also forget the various other recent controversies at Medill that, while not completely unrelated to the new curriculum, are mostly not about the new curriculum. Forget that one rationale for the new curriculum was evaluations of old curriculum by an Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) site team and apparently by others, whose conclusions/recommendations have been summarized as saying the old curriculum was broken. (ACEJMC site teams usually are not that blunt. And if North western's old curriculum, in place through Spring 2007, was broken, what would that site team say about the curricula of many other j-schools? ) Finally, also forget that no one knows what U.S. news media will be like in 2020. One criticism of Medill 2020 has been, essentially, that journalists don't and/or shouldn't take "marketing" issues into consideration when they are practicing journalism. While I certainly agree with some critics that journalists shouldn't "pander" to certain segments of the audience, to suggest that newspaper, magazine, and/or broadcast journalists don't take audiences into account is absurd. Magazines, for instance, are the original niche media product, with magazine design and content historically and still shaped by who the audience is, and the audience sorting itself between one magazine and its competitors based on what the design and content are (and, of course, to some extent on what the subscription and single copy prices are, which are factors also closely linked to audience). …