Journalism Studies and the Education of Journalists
Theodore L. Glasser
The rise of “media studies” and now “journalism studies,” along with the
beginning of the demise of “mass communication,” which never attracted the
“studies” appendage, amounts to something more than a change in nomenclature.
It represents, at least in some quarters, a shift in thinking about how to
make sense of certain institutions and their practices; it marks a renewed
interest in the humanities as an intellectual resource; it even implies some
resistance to the notion that “communication” provides the best or proper framework
for the study of media and journalism. Unless it devolves, unexpectedly, into
something more akin to a topic than an orientation, journalism studies promises
a new seriousness about journalism as a separate and arguably distinct domain
of inquiry. Indeed, if it succeeds in providing a fresh purpose and a compelling
rationale for the study of journalism qua journalism, journalism studies might
very well succeed in repositioning an academic enterprise that had over time
succumbed to the study of presumably related activities and, even in units
that still display its name, ended up, as James Carey recently summed up the
fate of journalism on American campuses, “displaced to the margin.”
In the United States in the decades following World War II, journalism research began its gradual descent into communication research. The new and expanding science of communication brought prestige and legitimacy to the study of journalism, which had until then languished in programs more intent on educating journalists than explicating journalism. To trumpet their status as a social science and not merely an outpost for a narrow vocationalism – and to acknowledge, anomalously, an increasingly large portion of undergraduates whose career trajectory justified more attention to public relations and advertising than journalism – schools and departments of journalism began to add “communication” or “mass communication” to their name. In the early 1980s, the Association for Education in Journalism, launched in 1912 as the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, became the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; a decade later its flagship journal, Journalism Quarterly, became Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. To this day, with very few exceptions, American research universities award Ph.D.s in communication or mass communication, not journalism.
Without discounting the benefits associated with the move to wed science and communication – the U. S. National Research Council, for example, which rates and ranks Ph.D. programs and which therefore confers a certain status on the disciplines it recognizes, recently agreed, after years of lobbying, to add communication to its taxonomy of social and behavioral sciences – Carey is basically right when he observes that the science of communication “marched into journalism education with generally unfortunate results.” It took some time and it met some resistance, but the study of communication finally eclipsed the study of journalism in ways that rendered journalism largely unintelligible to journalists and mostly irrelevant to the practice of journalism.
Journalism studies will succeed, then, if it can reconnect the study of journalism to the practice of journalism, making it not only relevant to the education of journalists but relevant as well to the education of readers, viewers and listeners who need to understand precisely what practitioners need to understand: how to tell the difference between good and bad journalism. To accomplish this, journalism studies will need to free itself from the delusional quest for the kind of propositional knowledge that other professions, like law and medicine, tout as evidence of their practitioners’ education and expertise; it will need to find a middle ground between the sanitized versions of journalism which measure the immeasurable and, at the other extreme, the disconnected and undigested anecdotes from newsrooms of the past which substitute description for explanation; and it will need to fashion a truly independent research agenda, focused on the quality and value of journalism and insulated from pressure to accept the “realities” of current practices and arrangements. In short, journalism studies will make a real and lasting difference to the education of journalists and others if it can demystify journalism for the purpose of making journalism better – and for the purpose of making us all better at understanding what better journalism means.
The Actual Practice of Journalism
The obituaries of the two important American journalists, published on the same day in a recent edition of the New York Times, offer a vivid reminder of what matters little in the calculation of success in journalism: a formal education. Peter Jennings, a prominent foreign correspondent and network television news anchor, and John H. Johnson, an entrepreneurial and influential magazine publisher whose publications and other enterprises “made him one of the nation’s richest and most powerful black businessmen,” had little in common except for a credential neither possessed: a college degree. Jennings, in fact, who attracted nearly 14 million viewers during the peak of his popularity, began his career in broadcasting in his early 20s without the benefit of even a high school diploma.
Although journalists today stand out as better educated and more likely to have a college degree than when Jennings and Johnson began their careers, no one confuses that with the claim that journalists need a college education, or any formal education, in order to succeed in journalism. Just as no one needs a degree in political science to win an election, or a degree in business to run a profitable company, or a degree in literature to write a great novel, or a degree in criminology to embezzle millions of dollars, no one needs a degree in journalism – or any degree at all – to excel as a reporter or editor. What journalists need to learn – the knowledge they must master – comes mostly from the field, not the library. Journalism requires phronesis, the term Aristotle used to describe the practical wisdom that comes from practice and experience, not books and lectures. To be sure, a recognition of the value of learning-by-doing – what Donald Schön, who studies how practitioners of all kinds come to know what they know, calls “knowing-in-action”– explains why an education in journalism emphasizes internships, apprenticeships, simulations, “laboratory” courses and other opportunities to learn journalism by doing journalism. And it explains why journalism programs favor faculty who can teach by example, who can demonstrate what others can only describe, who can inspire good work by pointing to their own good work.
Of course, every profession tries to strike a balance between the formal, systematic knowledge associated with theories and treatises and the informal, colloquial knowledge acquired through the routines of practice. Atul Gawande, a Boston physician who writes for The New Yorker about issues in medicine, makes just this point about the education of surgeons: They need to study anatomy, obviously, but they also need to learn how to make incisions, repair torn vessels, remove organs; and the latter takes a very long time, a process Gawande describes as “floundering followed by fragments followed by knowledge and, occasionally, moments of elegance.” No one wants to be a surgeon’s first patient, no matter how well the surgeon did on the anatomy exam.
In professions like journalism, however, there is nothing quite analogous to an anatomy class. Even with the proliferation in the last couple of decades of books, journals and other literature devoted to every conceivable topic in journalism, there exists no specialized body of knowledge which precedes the practice of journalism like a knowledge of anatomy precedes the practice of surgery. As disconcerting as it may be to those for whom a professional education means providing practitioners with a foundational knowledge – typically a codification of principles, rules and criteria which steers the competent management of conduct – journalism’s theories and treatises do not inform practice as much as they track it.
Beyond the familiar texts and courses in journalism law, history, ethics and the now obligatory seminar on the implications of the computerization of communication, all of which deal with valuable but hardly foundational material, students go elsewhere on campus for the knowledge they need to perform competently as journalists. If they intend to cover government, they might take a course in political science; if they want to write about the environment, they can study in the department of earth sciences; if they expect to report on the courts, they could head over to the law school and learn about the rules of evidence. There is something pleasantly ecumenical – “interdisciplinary,” in the argot of the academy – about a curriculum that honors the relevance of just about any program or project on campus. But it all adds up to an education for, not in, journalism.
An education in journalism begins with the actual practice of journalism; and it begins, ideally at the graduate level, with students who have had enough experience in journalism to understand, at least intuitively, what it means to do journalism. Just as other performance schools, like music or art, look for students with a portfolio, journalism schools should demand evidence of a commitment to, and more than a primitive competence in, the craft of journalism; students need to arrive, not leave, with the basic newsroom skills of writing, reporting and editing. An education in journalism thus becomes an opportunity to refine skills, not acquire them; it fosters an appreciation for the proposition that “practice improves practice,” where the ambiguity of the term “practice,” to pirate a couple of sentences from a paper Jim Ettema and I wrote a couple of years ago, nicely captures the relationship between experience, when practice means repetition and experimentation, and performance, when practice means attainment or accomplishment. But an education in journalism also involves the study of journalism, an enterprise that benefits students not because it provides a foundation for the practice of journalism but because it provides a context in which to critique and improve the practice of journalism.
Educating Journalists, Studying Journalism
The study of journalism – journalism studies, if the shoe fits – can contribute to the education of journalists in two important ways. First, it can interrogate the practice of journalism for the purpose of pointing out the perils of confusing tradition with justification, a reminder to students that there often exists, for reasons that need to be explored, a gap between what journalism is and has been and what journalism ought to be. Second, it can use that interrogation as an opportunity for students to develop their own justification for how journalism ought to work and what roles it ought to play, a set of claims that any properly educated journalist should be able to articulate and defend.
Interrogating the practice of journalism involves questioning journalism’s customs and habits, its conventional wisdom, the common sense that gets passed down from one generation of journalists to the next. Understood as an excavation project, it digs beneath the cliches and platitudes that newsrooms use to ward off critics; it exposes the contradictions, tensions and paradoxes that time rationalizes away; it demonstrates that even journalism’s most self-evident claims endure in history and not in nature. By providing an intellectually rich perspective from which to understand why news media exist the way they exist, why journalists work the way they work, the study of journalism empowers students; it enables them to transform “knowing-in-action” into “reflection-in-action,” to borrow some of Schön’s language, by helping them learn to question – and learn to consider alternatives to – their standard “repertoire of expectations, images, and techniques.” More than any other aspect of a journalism education, the study of journalism improves the prospects for better journalism and better journalists.
While the practice of journalism remains the centerpiece of any viable journalism curriculum, the study of journalism accounts for the distinctive contribution of a university to the education of journalists. A formal education in journalism matters and succeeds as it engenders among students a certain quality of thinking about journalism, a state of preparedness that manifests itself in the eloquence students exhibit when called on to respond to questions about the value and purpose of what they do as journalists.
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Theodore L. Glasser directs the Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford
University. In 2002-2003 he served as president of the Association for Education
in Journalism and Mass Communication.