Despite Computers, Journalism Remains a Human Enterprise

Abstract

Instilling the passion through examples Despite the emergence of computeraided reporting and electronic journalism courses, journalism remains very much a human enterprise. At its heart lies person-to-person contact: reporters talking to sources, reporters spending hours a day on the telephone, reporters scribbling hurriedly in notebooks in corridors after press conferences. Are journalism educators overlooking-or unconsciously downplayingthe importance of honing basic newsgathering skills? Do journalism educators occasionally forget that their undergraduate students are just entering-or still deciding whether to enterthe profession of journalism? Do educators perhaps forget that their students need more than a steady diet of Associated Press style, constant rewrites, the occasional internship, and a crackerjack knowledge of remote computer databases? Do journalism educators encourage development of judgment beyond what newsroom situations dictate? Do educators teach undergraduates to recognizeand understand-the differing worldviews of their sources? Do journalism educators teach the difference between analytical thinking and critical thinking? I teach several undergraduate print journalism courses in a lab filled with computers wired through ethernet connections to, literally, the rest of the world. In these courses, in addition to reporting, writing, and editing skills, I introduce computer-aided communication and reporting through instruction in basic electronic mail, and Internet- and World Wide Web-based data-retrieval programs. Such knowledge and skills have become important earlier in our students' preparation to become working journalists, because industry increasingly asks educators to teach them. As the industry's demand for keyboardbased computer skills has grown, so, too, has the difficulty posed to journalism educators whose accredited programs are capped at a certain level of credit-hours. Are those elements of journalism, which are so basic to the craft, being crowded out of or compressed within curricula to the ultimate detriment of the industry as a whole? This commentary sets forth what else my students need and how I cover those needs in addition to my program's mandates. Poor fundamental skills Many journalism educators, in addition to my former newsroom colleagues, complain that entry-level journalists fresh out of college require close editing. Editors point to journalism educators as at least partially responsible. Graduating seniors do not write well, editors complain. But many, if not most, of my students begin their days as undergraduate majors with inadequate knowledge of grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, spelling and story organization. They cannot control a sentence because they do not understand its reins. Thus remedial work in language rules and usage occupies much of my basic newswriting course for first-year students. I admonish my students to use active rather than passive verbs. I advocate brevity and precision in wording. I teach that every pronoun needs a clearly identifiable antecedent, that a misplaced comma may introduce ambiguity into a sentence, and that the right word in the right place is a goal to be treasured. I would rather spend far more time coaching them in how to observe, record, and understand their material before writing the story. But until they write clearly and accurately, the nuances of newsgathering escape them. My program sets forth specific requirements my basic journalism courses must cover: spelling, grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation, racial and gender sensitivity, inverted pyramid, appropriate attribution, interviewing, beats, budget stories, local government meetings, state government and courts, government records, polls, local stories, and feature writing. But undergraduate journalism students need more than these basics. Were I to grade my students only on the rough drafts of the stories they write early in a 16-week semester, many would fare poorly. …