“They're in for a Rude Awakening”

Abstract

That's what a recent graduate of a Big 12 journalism school recently told me about graduates coming out of journalism programs these days-about their need to know about media management and economics. I think those of us who teach media management and/or media economics, and those of us who do not teach it but think they important for students to know, have been somewhat remiss in not pressing our case. And, like my Big 12 alumnus friend, I think the need for young journalists to know about and understand it is more important than ever. Media economics both allowing and forcing changes in media technologies, and media technologies both allowing and forcing changes in media economics. And a major reason why traditional news media, entertainment media, and other media companies threatened by new technologies is because of a great deal of bad management, especially but not only in the newspaper and broadcast television industries. Finally, if, how, and how well they responding also is due to the quality of management. I don't know about enrollments in media management courses at many other universities, although from what I hear, others in the same boat: when I teach Newspaper & Magazine Management at Point Park University, with its more than 550 undergraduate and graduate JM and sometimes have a passable grasp of ratings, shares, audited circulations, CPMs, and/or other quantitative information about mass communication, might realize that it is media management and media economics that will determine their fates, in addition to public needs and wants, professional standards and practices, and (at least with regard to all electronic media) government regulation or lack thereof. The most common reason I hear from print journalism students about why they don't take the course is that they don't think they will ever be in management, and some go so far as to say they don't want to be in management. (That today's young people claim to be nonmaterialistic might have something to do with this, but there many reasons to work in management besides having a higher salary.) If I had the opportunity to talk to each student who could take my Newspaper & Magazine Management course but doesn't, my first point would be that many newspaper editors, newspaper publishers, magazine editors, and magazine publishers (not to mention people in middle management) also at some point-perhaps for a long time-said and thought the same thing. (We all know this is true in academia, too: think about how many department chairs and deans long thought they would never be there.) I would add that some of them won't know whether they like being in media management, or if they're any good at it, until after they have done it, but that is getting even more speculative than making an are prediction to a student about ending up in management. But let's take the student at her word: that she doesn't want to go into media management, and thinks the odds slim that she'll ever be there in any case. Over the years, I've made a number of other arguments to print journalism students about why they should know something about media management and economics. …