AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it

[Fine, Pamela B]

Kelly’s comment about failure struck a nerve. I’m not sure there’s been so much an unwillingness to accept failure but rather too much willingness to accept it. By that I mean:
-- J-schools profs are  trying new things all the time but in an “each-man-for himself” environment, there isn’t enough communication, collaboration and evaluation of what worked or didn’t work and why.
--There’s too much of an “us against them mentality” between administrators and faculty and between faculty members themselves which leads to managing to the middle, an absence of coherence and no meaningful reflection that leads to shared wisdom.  Dissent is often mistaken for disloyalty when the opposite is true.
--With no clear economic and/or audience imperatives to meet---and no real sense of competition for students or rewards at many schools—there’s often not enough incentive to get real about what it takes to truly serve students, communities and society as a whole.
Pam










On 6/28/12 8:53 AM, "Eric Newton" <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:

Dear Michael,

I really enjoyed your Chronicle piece. Thank you for sharing that. Would you like to hazard a guess as to whether “Letterhead Faculty” are more, less or equally profligate in j/mc schools v. the university in general?

You are more expert than I in suggesting solutions here. That said, at the risk of becoming part of the WalMart metaphor, I think one short term measure might be to fight fire with fire. J/MC schools could be profit centers under the budget game you describe if they taught a 21st century digital literacy class to the whole university. You would have many sections of a giant class with hundreds of students, perhaps taught by adjuncts, with a relatively uniform curriculum based in part on the news literacy class at Stony Brook being taken by 10,000 students.

It is nice that this could bring a lot of money into a school. But that’s actually not my main reason for suggesting it. I believe we are in a profoundly new digital age of communications -- and in the reinvented networked information economy, won’t those with excellent digital/media/news/civics literacy and fluency will do much better? Should not 21st Century Literacies be part of a general education requirement? Since we now have a huge proportion of the world’s available knowledge available live through increasingly mobile devices, isn’t the key to lifelong learning the ability to get the knowledge out of the cloud and into your head?

Another short term solution is to lean harder on organizations like News University. This is a kind of electronic textbook that is a gift to journalism education.

I recognize that the student loan issue is a large one. Steve and the listserve have brought that into focus for me. What answers look most promising? My experience is of little help. It would not have made any sense to me to take out a loan to get an education when my first job was going to pay $19,000.  So I took several jobs and worked my way through school. This meant going to a community college and then to a state college, and not getting a master’s until I could win a fellowship to get it on some else’s nickel.

I once suggested that a federal media corps program be developed and that student loans be forgiven for any student who stays on campus at minimum wage for a year or two after graduation to work on the j/mc school’s community news projects. That would be a buffer allowing the debt to be cleared and at the same time provide good entry level work experience that would make a person more hirable. (The “teaching newspaper” graduates at the University of Alabama have a 90 percent placement rate, for example.) Some say that makes sense, others that there’s just no way in the current budget climate we can expect the feds to offer up money so j/mc schools can become better community content providers through the “teaching hospital” model.

Eric




eja, Michael J [GSJC] [mailto:bugeja at iastate.edu]
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2012 5:47 AM
To: Eric Newton; 'ktoughill at gmail.com'; 'wendell.cochran at gmail.com'
Cc: 'editorsteve at gmail.com'; 'news-list at aejmc.net'
Subject: RE: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it

Absent from this discussion is the general sorry state of higher education charging outrageous tuition and continuously increasing costs due largely to curricular duplication and proliferation, with few administratosr willing to take on the issue because of a flawed business model. (See my recent Chronicle article about that: http://chronicle.com/article/Stamping-Out-Rubber-Stamp/131946/.) Why should the Knight Foundation, AEJMC and ACEJMC care? When journalism students graduate with $30,000 average debt, they seldom find starting salaries in the field able to afford a decent lifestyle, driving many into other professions. Those who promote “community journalism” especially take heed, as starting salaries often are in the low $20,000s. The best way to support the industry and train future researchers, apart from all the discussions here—largely mostly persuasion about what “ought to be” rather than “what is” (i.e. university policies and procedures, especially at Research I institutions locating journalism in Arts and Sciences)—is to streamline journalism curricula, banning non-majors from skills classes and sharing electives rather than maintaining traditional old media sequences; promote faculty advising, giving course releases for 25 or more students (possible only if you streamline curricula); require administrators to teach orientation with an undergraduate plan of study as core assignment; graduate students in 4 or fewer years with as little debt as possible; place 95% or more in the industry or graduate school within 6 months; fight journalism and multimedia course duplication in English, Design, Ag Extension, Communication Studies, etc.; raise external funds for scholarships and paid internships; and involve everyone—including all those promoting professional and research strategies—in recruitment and retention to give our undergraduate and graduate students a fighting chance to enter industry or go on to graduate school without the current fiscal disenfranchisement.


From: news-list-bounces at aejmc.net [mailto:news-list-bounces at aejmc.net] On Behalf Of Eric Newton
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 7:31 PM
To: 'ktoughill at gmail.com'; 'wendell.cochran at gmail.com'
Cc: 'editorsteve at gmail.com'; 'news-list at aejmc.net'
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it

Thanks, Kelly. The issues about failure, not having a good mix of people and a hardened bureaucracy also apply to foundations -- all institutions, in fact. We are working on the tax code because it doesn't fit the digital age, and neither does First Amendment law, nor does the court system in general or the functioning of most governbmental units or most tradional business models. Lots of remodeling to do.
Eric



*** pls excuse typos -- sent by wireless handheld ***


From: Kelly Toughill [mailto:ktoughill at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 06:40 PM
To: Wendell Cochran <wendell.cochran at gmail.com>
Cc: Eric Newton; Steve Ross <editorsteve at gmail.com>; news-list at aejmc.net <news-list at aejmc.net>
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it



Thanks for bringing up the fear factor Wendell. Journalism educators who aren’t scared remind me of those who believe they grasp the future of journalism; they are not to be trusted.
I am with Newton/Jarvis/Fineberg et al on the need for radical changes in journalism education, but we need to change university structures too – and that’s hard.
One problem is the tie between journalism and mass communications. Journalism is a pre-professional program akin to medicine, law, dentistry or engineering. Coupling journalism with communications is like putting a med school inside a science faculty or demanding that a law school live in a philosophy department. Other pre-professional programs have always relied on instructors with deep professional experience, whereas the standard for humanities and social sciences is scholarly research.
Another key problem is academy’s discomfort with failure.  Fail fast is the mantra for journalism today. It should be the mantra for journalism education. We need universities that encourage us to take risks in the curriculum. That is very hard in an institution that is used to teaching “the canon.” I sometimes joke with my students that a journalism degree is becoming a degree in how to figure things out.
If you accept that professional practice is essential for journalism professors, which I do, we still have a huge problem. There simply aren’t many people with deep experience in the new world order of journalism. We aren’t preparing students primarily for the New York Times any more, so professional practice no longer means 20 years at a top newspaper or network. We need instructors who can teach our students how to multitask, freelance, nurture and harvest social media and hustle, hustle, hustle. Those of us who spent our lives in traditional newsrooms can take all the multimedia courses we want at Poynter and Knight, but we need instructors who are not only conversant in the skills of new media, but the mindset as well.
At least the conversation is starting. That’s something.


On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Wendell Cochran <wendell.cochran at gmail.com> wrote:
I confess, I am lost now in knowing which thread to reply to, or who is talking to whom

But I had these thoughts;

The longer I live, the more it seems like I have lived through this before.

My first editors tried to persuade me to drop out of journalism school to become a reporter. (Perhaps they were right, but, of course I didn't listen. I got two journalism degrees.)

Now I hear faculty colleagues telling journalism students to study something else, for God's sake, anything else. In our faculty meetings we bemoan the problems and appoint another committee to thoughtfully study them and report back.

As to the general topic first raised by Eric -- he is right of course. Journalism education is about to be disrupted (actually, already has been disrupted) in a huge way, along with the rest of education, by the way. But neither journalists, nor journalism educators are frightened enough yet to react sufficiently to the threat (we have not had our E.L.E. moment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_%28film%29).

Why would I say such a ridiculous thing?

Despite the carnage, most newspapers remain profitable (also wretched), so owners continue to play at the margins with little steps they hope can keep the money rolling for just a while longer. Broadcast stations, ditto. Educators, many of whom are disconnected from the field, are protected by tenure and layers and layers of bureaucracy. The first obviates the need for change, the second discourages those who try to affect it.

And yet I remain hopeful. A couple of weeks ago, IRE had 1,200 people at its annual conference in Boston. Many were young and eager, the kind of people who won't be dissuaded. Others were, like me, old and gray but still fighting the fight. When people ask me about the future of journalism I always say we have the best and smartest people in the business, we have the best tools we have ever had and the world gets more complex every day, which means that it needs smart people maximizing their tools to help explain what is going on.

Somebody will figure out how to make a business out of such supply and demand. It might not be the traditional folks (for many reasons it is unlikely to be them), and when they figure it out, they will need people to do the job. We can be the ones who train them, or not, but somebody will. If we want to be in this game, we better learn how to play it.


Wendell Cochran



On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 4:36 PM, Eric Newton <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:


I’m not claiming to know what is going to work. I don’t have an answer. I would say the future is more unpredictable than ever, and it was never all that easy to predict. I bring a simple observation, either disturbing or exciting or both, that things are changing so fast nobody knows where it’s headed. People who are certain they know are the ones who worry me. I’d also observe that things in different parts of this large nation are very different from place to place. All the financial and moral microclimates make calculations evermore elusive.

Eric









From: Steve Ross [mailto:editorsteve at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 3:59 PM


To: Eric Newton
Cc: Michael Abrams; Everbach, Tracy; news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it


Eric,



I've been in this business a long time. I was doing an IPO and unwinding a Reg D in the 1980s for an educational software company. I was the CEO. I've been managing editor of Boardroom Reports.



And maybe that experience does disqualify me. But I see very, very little money for recent grads to start companies to create or distribute journalistic content. And what I see has been for the most part hard-won. I hope you are right, and I hope I'm wrong. But we live in an age where tens of thousands of small businesses have gone under for lack of even small amounts of capital. If content appears as exciting as, say, plumbing (which is to say not exciting at all, although both journalism and plumbing should be), crowdsourcing isn't going to work as well as you seem to think.... and maybe current local news organizations, IF THEY ARE WILLING TO EVOLVE will do better than you think.







On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Eric Newton <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:

Norman has raised $15 million in a few months. A few months. $15 million. What do you suppose he will have raised in five years? Or all the other crowd-funding systems? The future is being invented as we speak. Every week there are more significant media-oriented projects getting funding. The money is still flowing. The new things are coming far faster than the current people and institutions can absorb them. And they will only come faster. If the people and institutions don’t change, they will become less relevant. If you are in an apple orchard, caring about oranges could become really frustrating.





From: Steve Ross [mailto:editorsteve at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 3:09 PM


To: Eric Newton
Cc: Michael Abrams; Everbach, Tracy; news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it


Apples and oranges. We're talking about funding kids just coming out of colleges, or still in school. The model is that they work at X to keep from starving, and raise a few thousand dollars to try their idea, Y. There is a big leap from that to the successes and potential successes you note. Look, I'm on the board of an app company that has bootstrapped and is now raising $500,000 to get to the next step. We're doing it, but it has not been easy... and that's with well-known, experienced entrepreneurs in a city that actually has some nearby angels and VCs.



I'm on the board of another young media company that had a good idea and terrible business plan. We are now executing my plan and have a funding partner... it also has not been easy.



The JOBS act certainly will unlock funding from so called "non-accredited" investors who have a bit of money and are willing to speculate, but the betting is that most companies that raise money this way will need assets or a VERY well-thought-out business plan, and seasoned management. Norman hopes to fund something like 1000 companies with the $15 million -- $15000 each, on average. Quite possible. But how many will be in journalism?



Steve

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Eric Newton <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:


As far as technology goes, the latest advice from entrepreneurial experts is to start with fairly little money. That said, we have launched a rapid prototyping fund that allows for small, quick grants to be made for projects that are turned around in a couple of months.

Several leading Silicon Valley investors now believe that since the cost of entry has fallen to nearly zero and the cost of predicting the future has risen nearly to infinity, that the best thing to do as far as new tech is to get it up and running asap.

My son is in a startup that has bootstrapped up to their third iteration without any cash and is in advanced Beta. (By the way, when I graduated from college there were 10 jobs in my field, daily newspaper reporting, open in the SF Bay Area. As my son graduates, there are 7,000 jobs in his field, graphic interface design, in the Bay Area.)

A change in the law is allowing small private investments in startups. A 20-something entrepreneur named Mike Norman has created http://wefunder.com/ and in just a few months has raised $15 million in crowd-funded money for many, many, many startups.

Writers are using new crowd-funding systems like Kickstarter and Spot.Us to raise money. Two long-form science writers asked for $100k recently and got $150k. A Nieman who wanted to explore a long-form web startup in Latin America took my advice to try it and got $3,500 quite quickly.

These new approaches are encouraging and they are coming faster and faster. Those of us who seek journalism and communication education reform hope digitally focused universities can help their students participate fully in a networked world. It is being invented as we speak.

Eric






From: Steve Ross [mailto:editorsteve at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 2:21 PM
To: Eric Newton
Cc: Michael Abrams; Everbach, Tracy; news-list at aejmc.net


Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it


Eric,



I know you are sincere, and Knight has funded some interesting stuff, but any business large enough to support even one person usually needs some capital to get started. I've advised students (and corporations) on fundraising, and I'm on the investment committee of a green investment fund. I've started businesses myself and have been a successful freelance, but it isn't easy. The kids are graduating deeply in debt as well.



And in-depth reporting usually requires more than one person.



So far I see occasional successes, but ONLY where the kids get family support.



Steve



On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Eric Newton <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:

All of my suggestions would allow students to more easily become their own bosses. The current system requires students to take mostly liberal arts classes. This doesn’t encourage them to become the kinds of journalist-entrepreneurs and journalist-technologists who are reinventing news.

Being briefly involved in this list-serve has been an eye-opening experience.

Eric




From: Michael Abrams [mailto:meabrams at earthlink.net]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:29 AM
To: Eric Newton; 'Everbach, Tracy'; 'Steve Ross'


Cc: news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it


Yessir, some rethinking has to be done. The real solution lies in less collaboration and cooperation. If journalism education is to be anything more than a lapdog for industry, it must not link itself to the fortunes of those who are busy destroying public faith in mass communication. Ask your barber what he thinks of the local paper. Reform journalism education? J ed must teach students to create their own institutions. It must aim for a higher goal than trying to advise or work with or provide cannon fodder for penny-pinching Newhouse or scrofulous Murdock. Contaminated by greed and corruption, eager to exploit, itching to cater to hatred and ignorance; shallow, pusillanimous, fatuous and sanctimonious, and in most cities often plain lazy, irrelevant and full of errors, the media seldom display the courage and character one might expect of such a vital enterprise. Then, switch on your radio. In so many American communities, it’s either sports or right wing flunkies, country music or the smug righteousness of public radio, played to music.  Thank goodness for CD and ipod.  More Cooperation? More Collaboration? More Engagement? How do you spell ‘calamity?’ IMHO, we’re better off teaching ethics and sticking to the chess of refereed academic research that the pros say they just can’t understand.






On 6/26/12 2:28 PM, "Eric Newton" <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:
For j-schools, I’ve suggested quite a few things: hiring and promoting more professionals, adopting a teaching hospital model, adding innovation, teaching more open collaborative models and becoming community content providers who don’t just inform but engage communities.

For research, we’ve suggested readability measures, citation studies, new editors, a research project on the usefulness of research, and researchers partnering with professionals doing community content experiments within universities. The last one is my favorite.

Eric






From: Everbach, Tracy [mailto:everbach at unt.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 10:40 AM
To: Eric Newton; 'Steve Ross'
Cc: news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: RE: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it


Hello everyone, I think we have talked (emailed?) this issue to death. Unless someone has a tangible solution, can we please stop the macho posturing?



Thanks,



Tracy Everbach, Ph.D.
Associate professor
214-995-8464 <tel:214-995-8464> -cell
Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism
University of North Texas
1155 Union Circle #311460
Denton, TX  76203-5017

________________________________

From: news-list-bounces at aejmc.net [news-list-bounces at aejmc.net] on behalf of Eric Newton [newton at knightfoundation.org]
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 9:35 AM
To: 'Steve Ross'
Cc: news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it

Steve,

Yes, you are correct in the detail comment: there were good and helpful suggestions about how to make research more useful until it degenerated into what I mentioned. I provided a headline.

About a debate, there’s no problem finding people to argue that journalism education needs huge reforms.  Jarvis, Finberg, Ceppos and Newton all have written recently. The issue is that the people who want to defend the status quo. Who will speak in public?

Eric




From: Steve Ross [mailto:editorsteve at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 10:29 AM
To: Eric Newton
Cc: news-list at aejmc.net
Subject: Re: AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division This list serve isn't cutting it

Eric,



Whom would you choose for the debate?



Also, there are professional journalists on this list. I love to teach, but I am back mainly to being a professional journalist, and have been since 2005. There are also former professionals on the list. It is not "merely" professors talking to professors."



Steve

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Eric Newton <newton at knightfoundation.org> wrote:

Professors talking to professors about how journalists don’t understand... Not the best way to advance the issue. How about a public debate? Let’s see how many of your points hold up to counterargument.

Eric Newton




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