J-School value ...
I reported to you earlier that a majority of my journalism friends said they didn’t go to journalism school. The official tally in my very unscientific survey: Among the 15, 5 went to journalism school; 9 did not; and 2 were kind of split (one minored in journalism, the other earned a mass comm. degree). Should a would-be journalist go to J-School or not? I guess you can go either way. Paul Steiger at The Wall Street Journal explained:“I've concluded from my own experience and that of others I've encountered over the years with similar backgrounds that journalism school, while certainly a help, isn't necessary to a career in journalism. A broad education experience—
in or out of journalism school—that includes a lot of reading and writing is the most important foundation.”
Though in the minority, each of the J-School graduates recalled an important lesson from their college days.
Accuracy was the holy grail for Gina Lubrano, the Readers Representative at the San Diego Union-Tribune (my old paper). “I went to San Jose State, which has an EXCELLENT journalism department. Anyway, accuracy was emphasized every single day. At the beginning of the Spartan Daily class every day (we produced the daily paper), our advisers would go over the good and the bad in the paper. Errors were assigned a red X on a chart that was kept in the office. At the end of the year, the advisers treated us to Red X cupcakes. That was the only time anyone in the class wanted a Red X. It really was a Scarlet Letter.”
Marlene Bagley, a staff editor on the Styles Desk at The New York Times, recalled that ethics was stressed in each of her journalism classes. “(The) test came up rather quickly in the first year of my first reporting
job. I wrote a feature on a small flower and gift shop (I don't remember why, but I think there was a reason!!!), and a day after it appeared in the paper, the shop's owner sent the most beautiful gift basket full of fruit, candy, flowers, etc. Of course, I couldn't accept it, which I explained to the shop owner who seemed to both understand and appreciate my explanation. (My co-workers and I made the shop owner particularly happy, by the way, when we decided to buy the basket.)
Mae Cheng, an assistant city editor at Newsday (and president of Unity: Journalists of Color) remembers a very practical lesson: “The most important mental barrier I had to get over was the idea of getting clips, clips and more clips. By doing, I got better. But also, unlike other professions that look at your GPA, you are really judged by your work in newspapers.”
--Posted by Jon, the rookie professor, preparing for new faculty orientation
posted by Jon and/or Kamilah @ 12:08 PM
1 Comments:
Well, talk about time warping. I've been posting to kaleidoscope when I thought I had something of interest but am just discovering this post about the value of a J-education. It makes sense to me. I think too many undergraduate journalism programs - I'm tenured in my third before that it was LIU Brooklyn New York Campus (part time) and Rutgers, New Brunswick, full time - are really, really "soft" and unfocused and are led by faculty who aren't particularly interested in teaching journalism.
Here's a good example: At Hunter, where I teach in the Department of Film and Media Studies, School of Arts and Sciences, there is another department in the A&S School that teaches a compliment of J-courses - news writing, editing, others - but it doesn't call the courses j-classes; it uses other nomenclature which, for Hunter guidelines, is accepted as not conflicting with my department's conspicuous claim to a j-program.
Anyway, I got that off my chest (years later)
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