If Even Journalism Professors Don’t Know What Journalism Is, Then All Really Is Lost

Abstract

At the AEJMC convention in Chicago in August, was at one of the gastronomically disastrous social events sponsored by a university or two when a tenured associate professor from one of the fastest growing and most improved U.S. journalism schools told me that now that everyone has a camera in his or her telephone, and stationery video cameras also seem ubiquitous, there is, or soon will be, little need for U.S. journalists.I double-checked to make sure that had heard what thought had heard, and then promptly issued my blunt rebuke.This would have been just a passing moment, but I'm afraid that if one U.S. journalism/mass communication professor thinks that way, the chances that he is the only one are quite slim. And if he is not the only one, hope that this will not be a trend, or as the case may be, stating such a position after obviously have done no thinking.Near the end of the movie Absence of Malice, Megan (Sally Field), the disgraced former newspaper reporter, says to Gallagher (Paul Newman), the former liquor wholesaler who had the misfortune to know too many mobsters, I know you think what do for a living is nothing. But it really isn't nothing. just did it badly. This represents, think, one of the central dilemmas facing U.S. journalism professors: students increasingly think, and are often told by pundits, politicians, and others, that journalists don't really do anything at all, or at least not anything that an average person can't do. And it has become increasingly difficult for journalism professors to point their students to examples of daily journalism that is practiced the way that it should be: Remind your print students that leads should be thirty-five words or fewer, and that morning's New York Times has numerous leads that run fifty or sixty words. Explain to your students how and why news stories should have multiple sources, then turn on any TV news show or again turn to the New York Times and find numerous one-source stories (and others with only one named source).But as licensing boards maintain the highest standards for physicians, whether or not they are always practiced every day by every physician, and state supreme courts or bar associations (varying by state) maintain the standards for both knowledge and ethics for lawyers, so must journalism professors-in the proper absence of such government or quasi-government hurdles-maintain the standards, be the gatekeepers, the theorists, and the critics, of what journalism should (must?) be and not accept the lowest common denominator of who has a phone camera at a car wreck, or who watched the city council meeting on cable TV through the wonders of the municipal government's one fixed camera.Fortunately for all of us, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote their Elements of Journalism (in an expanded/updated edition since 2007) in an organic way: by discussing best practices of U.S. journalism with hundreds of U.S. journalists. In other words, their book represents best practices by practitioners, not only a random professor/ textbook author's personal preferences, and therefore represents what at least some of the best U.S. journalists do, or at least try to do. And if you haven't read Elements of Journalism, it might be a revelation. hope that if you teach print, online, broadcast, and/or photojournalism, you will realize that it can be the journalism bible that it became for me and many of my students: a companion for all of those reporting/ writing textbooks that seem to assume that everyone knows what journalism is, and why it is important-and, thus, that all the reporting/writing textbook needs to do is to tell students how to do it. (Memo to textbook authors: do not assume anything!)The first three chapters of Kovach and Rosenstiel are as excellent as any other, but for the purposes of distinguishing exactly how journalism is most obviously different from an amateur taking a camera phone photo, or writing a blog posting after watching the city council meeting on television, the key points start in chapter 4 and continue through the book's remainder. …