Journalism is still not for the faint of heart

Abstract

In the last issue, following up on the Carnegie Corporation of New York's report, Journalism's Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation, I emphasized that the intellectual and educational demands of a competent journalist just keep growing. For more detail on this, I would urge you to carefully read the articles published in various issues of Nieman Reports over the past eight years or so about education reporting, health and medical reporting, science and environment reporting, and so on. Veterans on every beat emphasize the need for specialized training and long experience to cover those beats, even to the point of many claiming that their own beat requires more experience and education than most or all others. As I wrote in summer, many journalism programs are responding to this need with specialized reporting courses and other initiatives, but that relatively few print and broadcast journalism students are showing much interest in them. Since then, I have been on an educators' panel at a journalists' convention at which a professor at a major research university in one of the country's largest cities confessed that a total of only four undergraduate and graduate students had enrolled in a recently offered science journalism course. (In fact, as I noted, one often wonders how interested many of them are in journalism at all, above and beyond majoring in, and planning to work in, it.) But Journalism's Crisis of Confidence report had another, more subtle, warning in it: that a print or broadcast journalist covering anything other than a war, perhaps now more than any time since a lawyer shot Denver Post proprietors Frederick G. Bonfils and Harry Tammen in 1900, requires varying degrees of courage, patience, tolerance, and ego, or at least a lot of self-confidence. Deborah Howell, Washington Post ombudsman and former Washington bureau chief for Newhouse News Service, is paraphrased in the Carnegie Corporation report as saying, being unafraid is very important, and then quoted, The volume of sheer rudeness is enormous....It affects reporters and editors who switch on the computer in the morning and there are 500 e-mails waiting. That's literally what happens to me. Trying to keep your head when people are screaming at you is not anything anybody teaches you in journalism school or anywhere else. Howell is right that characteristics such as courage, patience, tolerance, and self-confidence cannot be taught in journalism schools, although some students may increasingly demonstrate one or more of those characteristics when they graduate than when they were admitted through some combination of maturation, socialization, and experiences. Logically, that many, probably most, journalists need both some guts and some ability to roll with the punches suggests that students who are not well-suited to be journalists could be, perhaps should be, counseled out of the major and out of the profession. (I'm reminded of an article in the March 1998 American Journalism Review, which said about journalism students at the conservative Christian Regent University, after they've gone through the curriculum, many emerge more convinced than ever that journalism is no place for Christians-but on their own, since Regent professors do not preach that.) In fact, I have pointed out to my students that if we know, or at least if we knew, which personal characteristics tended to make a good journalist and which ones tended to make a poor journalist, shouldn't students with the latter ones be counseled out of the major and away from the profession? (Even on the issue of what I would call literacy, there was a time-not so long ago-when high school students who were excellent writers were counseled to look into journalism, while high school students who were poor writers were counseled to avoid journalism or other professions that required especially good writing skills. …