Update Ends A Lament for J-Education

For the past ten years, I have distributed to journalism instructors a monthly screed-Update-in which I attempted to restore the argumentation that once marked our enterprise, to bolster the spirits of the print veterans, and to temper the enthusiasms of the technophiles among us. I wrote that I missed the articles and letters to the editor that once made our publications scintillate. (When did you last see a letter in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly?)I said that some of the issues we discussed years ago remain: Are we admitting too many of the unqualified to our programs? Are the burgeoning public relations, advertising, and technology courses squeezing out the reporting-writing-editing sequence? Have we become the tools of our tools? Do the research articles that have proliferated in our publications address significant matters? Can we say we are graduating educated students when so many instructors are appalled by their students' ignorance? Are we providing students with the background knowledge without which a news story lacks significance and utility? I made clear where I stood on these issues, and my stance led to rebuttals and attacks. I was called a Luddite, and my suggestion that programs eliminate catch-up writing courses was termed elitist. I said that journalism educators cannot ignore the necessity of instruction in technology but that too much technological emphasis could tilt a program away from emphasizing the journalist's mission, defined by Joseph Pulitzer as "an anxiety to render public service."Students should be weaned from their attachment to their hardware by being reminded of the reporters' credo: GOYA/KOD (Get OffYour Ass/Knock on Doors) or, not to offend, CTS (Climb the Stairs). They may be in touch with the latest online resources, but do they know the triumphs of the muckrakers, the impact of The New York Times v. Sullivan? I wondered whether colleagues were demonstrating to students that journalism is a calling, a moral enterprise. Journalism is the story of how we live now, the human consequences of public policies-the struggle of the single mother to afford nutritious meals for her children, the ruined lives of uranium miners, and the family living in crime-infested public housing.I disagreed with the prevailing notion among instructors that reporters embark on their coverage as blank slates. I wrote that students be told early on that the journalist does not embark on an assignment as an open book to be inscribed by the event or the source. Reporting is not a passive enterprise. It begins with the journalist's tentative story ideas, hypotheses that guide the reporter's questions and observations. The reporting reality confirms or rebuts the reporter's assumptions. If rebutted, other hypotheses are rapidly put in play.I wrote that feelings, emotions, and intuition are valuable in devising these hypotheses and that because journalism is at its core a moral enterprise students should be encouraged to develop a set of ethical imperatives that guide their journalism.Journalism instructors responded that I was encouraging subjective journalism. They have support in a comment by Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times, who wrote that "we do not go into a story with a preconceived notion."2 But the sociologist Irving Kristol wrote, "A person doesn't know what he has seen unless the person knows what he is looking for."3Good journalism consists of setting reporting material in context, which means that journalism educators must see to it that their students have the background knowledge that is essential to informed journalism.Background is built by wide reading and liberal arts courses. I listed books and periodicals that students were to read, and I described a required core curriculum for journalism majors. Students wrote a weekly Periodical Report based on magazines (Harper's, Atlantic, New Yorker, Commonweal, Commentary, and National Review among them). …