Why teach journalism if newspapers are dying?

I found this (cut and pasted below) on salon.com today. This is a question I've pondered myself as a journalism instructor -- and my students have been asking themselves why they're studying journalism in this present age of layoffs and media outlets shutting their doors.

This question became more relevant for all of us in Denver a couple of weeks ago when the almost 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News closed. I have several friends who worked there, and many of my students looked to the News for internships and dreamed of working there full time someday. Seeing it close makes them fearful their investment in a journalism education has quickly become foolish and irrelevant.

How do I answer those fears? I tell them that the market for news and for solid reporting is not dead. The old business model that many news outlets have operated under is certainly in question . . . but the need for news will never go away. Would we tell young business school students that going into banking is worthless because of what's happened to banks as of late? That would be ridiculous. Or would we tell people skilled in making cars that the need for cars is dead because of what GM is going through?

This economic crisis is challenging everyone. Every industry is having to take a hard look at itself and how it has operated. Frankly, newspapers have been ailing for a lot longer than a lot of people realize, way longer than this economic crisis has lasted. Newspapers have needed to respond to the challenge of the Internet for years -- and some have responded and responded well. But now many are being forced to figure out how they're going to change to meet the needs of a new world.

Some have closed, like the Rocky Mountain News. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is converting to an online-only format next week. Bigger dailies are feeling the most pressure to change and change quickly. I believe we'll see more and more newspapers doing some drastic things in the coming months.

But I tell my students not to give up on journalism. I actually think it's an exciting time to be entering the field. Scary, yes. Jobs are hard to get, and those who get them must be sharper and better than their peers. But the possibilities of what journalism will become are still wide open, and people like my students get to be part of creating something new. Their generation will be on the cutting edge of what journalism will be in five, 10, 15 years.

Case in point: Yesterday, a little more than two weeks after the Rocky Mountain News closed its doors, several former Rocky staffers and a few entrepreneurs announced the creation of In Denver Times, an online-only news source. Will it work? A lot of people have their doubts. The founders are looking to raise something like $3 million in capital by April 23 through people pledging to pay $60 a year to subscribe to the online publication. In today's economic climate, will people really pay that much for news, when other news sites on the Internet are "free?" It may not pan out, but this is the direction that news is heading. It will take some trial and error before someone figures out how to make this online-only thing work -- and make it profitable.

But I believe it will happen, and all of a sudden people will begin to see the possibilities . . . and journalists will realize that their job and their passion is not tied to a particular medium. It's about gathering information and telling stories. That's what this field is all about.

Here's the article from salon.com:

Why teach journalism if newspapers are dying?
I feel guilty training kids in a trade for which the market is disappearing.
By Cary Tennis (www.salon.com)

March 17, 2009 | Dear Cary,

I am a college journalism professor. When I got into this field a half dozen or so years ago, after 17 years as a journalist, I was excited to enlighten young minds and inspire them. And I have, and hope I still do.

The problem is this: I feel like I'm teaching them something that will be as useful as Sanskrit when they graduate. I am trying to get them involved in learning the latest technology as well as teaching them important writing and life skills, so they will be employable. But every morning I read stories about how huge, venerable newspapers will likely be shuttered by the end of the year, and it absolutely freaks me out.

What the heck am I doing? I feel like I'm a participant in the theater of the absurd.

I feel horribly guilty, wondering what will become of them. I'm already hearing from former students how they've been laid off and are aimlessly trying to pursue anything to survive.

I know it's tough all over, but how can I get past the guilt and continue feeling good about what I do? I still firmly believe there will be journalism -- it has to survive -- but what about all these poor kids who are caught in this awful transitional period?

Feeling Existential

Dear Existential,

Journalists find things out and tell people about it.

If you are teaching your students how to do that, you are not only doing your job, you are giving them the gift of a lifetime.

It is not your job to guarantee them stable employment.

I'm not even sure that stable employment is good for young journalists.

Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless. If they know nothing about what it is like to be powerless themselves, they may come to exercise their considerable power on behalf of the already powerful.

As to the conventions of story form and lingo that are often taught in journalism school, and as to the many artifacts and customs that make up our lore, we are tradespeople and we are proud of what we know how to do. We like our tools and our lingo. But we must be smart and nimble, and if we remain sentimentally attached to the artifacts of our trade in the face of massive technological change, then we are no better than GM.

So I do not think it is such a terrible thing that your journalism students are entering an uncertain world. It's the kind of world that is ripe for enterprising journalists. It is the kind of world that needs to be reported on and explained.

Where information is kept hasn't changed all that much. The information is still in people's heads and in official records. How to get it remains much the same.

Leave it to your students to create new modes for the buying and selling of this information. Their generation will do this. I feel confident about that.

Teach them how to find out what is true and what is hidden, and how to say it so others can understand what it means and why it is important. Then you will have done your job and given them the gift of a lifetime.

Window to another world

Yesterday I had the joy of opening my students' eyes to a new world -- for the second time this semester. We took a "field trip" to the Colorado State Capitol to see a legislative hearing and talk to a lobbyist. We're going back on Wednesday for a legislative tour. Then we'll go back again next week for a meeting with the speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives.

I teach college students who have been exposed to a lot of political ideas, but their knowledge of how politics actually happen is limited to sound bites on TV. By and large, they're more in tune with what's going on nationally, and they have little clue that what happens at the state and local levels actually has more of an impact on their daily lives than anything in Washington. They are all journalism students, and part of my job is to introduce them to the "real stuff" they'll be covering as journalists.

The course I'm teaching is called Contemporary Issues. The course description is vague, and it's been passed around a lot from instructor to instructor through the years. I wanted to teach it, in part, for the challenge of taking something undefined and not only giving it legs to stand on, but making it cool and memorable. I chose to look in-depth at two topics: Religion and politics. Why those two? Because they evoke passion, commitment and controversy. And if journalists don't know how to cover these, they don't know how to cover anything.

For the first part of the semester, we looked at issues of faith and spirituality. I have some expertise in this area because I covered faith issues for seven years. I brought in guest speakers who had some sort of faith story to tell -- a Vietnamese Catholic priest who escaped from Vietnam in the early 1980s, a friend whose brother died in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. citizens until 9/11 (the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland), a representative from a church on campus that feeds the homeless on a daily basis, a woman involved in a fatal shooting at a church.

Too often the media cover faith and religion only during a crisis. (Case in point: How many of us knew much about Islam before 9/11?) I brought these people into my class to show my students that faith happens every day, not just during "big" events. Many of my students have little if no faith background at all, and they were amazed at the stories they heard. They had emotional connections to the guest speakers' stories. Their eyes were opened to things they'd never considered before -- certainly things they're usually not asked to think about for a college class.

Their eyes were opened again yesterday for our first trip to the Colorado State Capitol, which is mere blocks from our campus. I learned from asking them to look up some information related to politics and government that their knowledge of the political process goes about as deep as their knowledge of faith and religion. I'm no expert, either, but I was surprised to find out that I need to go back and cover things they should have learned in middle school social studies -- things like what's in the U.S. Constitution, why there are only two senators from each state and what legislators actually do.

My students aren't alone, however. Much of the adult population in the United States has little knowledge of appreciation of the political process in this country. I know the reasons are varied, and much of it boils down to a distrust in government. It's understandable. So we tune out, criticize, draw sweeping conclusions and forfeit our right to be involved. We depend on political ads to make decisions about what and who we vote for . . . or we don't vote at all because we've decided the system is "screwed up" and our vote doesn't matter anyway.

But our perceptions aren't always right, and frankly, I think we give up too easily. We've become what I call "opinionators," willing to spout off our complaints and what we think, only to those who don't have any part in changing anything. Instead of becoming part of the process, we embrace negativity and pessimism and feel justified in it.

Yesterday I and my students attended a legislative hearing for a bill that involved the college where I teach. The hearing wasn't long, and nothing surprising happened during it. What did surprise me, though, was to find out that average, everyday citizens rarely show up or speak at hearings like that, even though they have every right to. Since I nor my students have ever attended a hearing at the State Capitol, we had no idea that our presence there was . . . unique. The lobbyist we talked to later said, "Did you see the legislators' eyes light up when they realized you were there? They're not used to seeing citizens. Usually people don't care. Government happens because of those who show up."

And who shows up? The reporters are there to cover what happens. The lobbyists are there to defend their clients' interests.

And that's about it.

I'd venture to guess most people don't even know that anyone has the right to attend a legislative hearing -- or a court hearing for that matter. That's what it means to have an open government -- you can show up and be heard and have more of an influence than you think you'll ever have, not just for yourself, but for your neighbor and your community. Yes, you elect people to represent you, but there's also a place for you. It's what our forefathers and mothers more than 200 years ago sacrificed to give us. And many of us, sadly, are too self-involved to care.

I walked away yesterday with a meaningful reminder that we live in a great country. Our political system has its problems. I've complained about it like all of us have. But I shudder to think of what it would be like to live in a system where decisions are made behind closed doors, where there is no consideration for the well-being of the people, where average, everyday citizens cannot just "show up," listen in and speak.

My students weren't the only ones whose eyes were opened yesterday. Mine were, too.