Journalism Students Connect the Present to the Future: Are They Ready?

Abstract

The primary question that seems to be on the minds of journalists and others who work in the newspaper industry, journalism professors, journalism students, and the general public is who is going to pay for journalists and journalism, if so much advertising is moved from newspapers (their print and online versions) to other Web sites, that newspaper companies are covering a lot less news or simply fold. Various ideas are floated: citizen journalism; endowed, nonprofit newspapers; nonprofit newsgathering organizations obtaining grants and/or subscriptions; employee ownership (ESOPs); newspapers charging micropayments for each current and/or archived article; etc. All of this assumes that financial resources are the only current and future issue, and many observers conclude that human resources are especially not a problem now: so many experienced journalists have been laid off and bought out that there are and will be plenty of experienced journalists available for continuing operations of current news organizations, plus whatever hiring they and new news organizations do. But this assumes, or at least implies, that the existing corps of journalists had no faults, no flaws, no shortcomings, and that the only issue is whether there is enough money to pay them. If only that were true. This moment's most obvious example is how well (or poorly) journalists covered the world of high (and low) finance to warn us, let alone prepare us, for the mortgage market meltdown, the stock market crash, and the resulting credit crisis. In American Journalism Review (December 2008/January 2009), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill business journalism professor Chris Roush published, Unheeded Warnings: Well before this year's economic collapse, business journalists shined a spotlight on serious problems in the U.S. economy. But regulators and members of the public didn't pay much attention. Similarly, Martha M. Hamilton's article, We Learned In the Meltdown: Financial journalists saw some trees but not the forest. Now what? in Columbia Journalism Review (December 2008/January 2009) is only slightly less defensive and laudatory than his. But of course finding those newspaper and magazine articles that over the last several years correctly warned politicians and the rest of us citizens/consumers about the impending crises and crashes is like finding a needle in a haystack. Moreover, many, if not most, articles Roush and Hamilton cite were vague or tentative, using phrases such as might be overheated, may be overvalued, could be risky, etc. (The business journalists who didn't and couldn't see our current mess coming are the same type of journalist, if not the same persons, who didn't understand that no corporation [see Enron] with sound accounting and daily business principles can have a huge and continuously growing gap year after year between revenues and cash flow, because - at some point - a corporation must he able to show us the money. At the very least, a corporation's cash flow must cover its expenses and dividends.) The U.S. news media did not exactly shine in the 2008 primary and general elections either, just the latest election cycle after which journalists no doubt will flagellate themselves, promise to do better in four years, and then not perform any better in 2012. I won't go into detail here about how newspaper and magazine journalism and journalists have fallen down on the job both generally and specifically in covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; functions throughout the federal government (take your choice, from the CIA to the FDA); science and technology; health and medicine; religion; education; and so on. In short, as I have said for many years, the dirty little secret about American journalists is not that they are biased, but that they are often not very competent. (For a fine documentation of this, see What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News [2004], by Eric Alterman, a man whose doctorate is in history, not mass communication! …