Monday, July 28th, 2008
‘Should journalism degrees still prepare students for a news industry that doesn’t want them?’
Paul Bradshaw invited me on Twitter to answer this question on Seesmic recently, and Paul reported on the responses on his blog. He asked the question in light of a punishing wave of redundancies, many in US newspapers, and hiring freezes and programme cuts in the UK. The blog Papercuts lists 6358 job cuts in US newspapers already in 2008.
Here’s the full conversation:
One of my comments:
So many journalists think ‘If I’m a good writer, that’s all I need’. That’s bullshit. There is an arrogance among journalists about the craft of writing. Journalism students will need more than the ability to craft a good sentence.
not only caught Paul’s attention, but also “twenty-something regional newspaper journalist” Joanna Geary (what’s your new shiny title Joanna?) and my colleague Roy Greenslade. I’m not entirely sure why that hit such a nerve. (The particular comment is in a separate video on YouTube.)
One comment that caught my eye was that of David Cohn:
Partly because news organisations have a culture similar to the military, there’s a chain of command and no leeway to make your own decisions. Journalism schools are equally structured.
That’s interesting, and I think it’s one of the cultural conflicts that I’m seeing as news organisations integrate their digital departments. For my first online journalism job in 1996, I was an army of one. The news director admitted she could manage everyone’s time in the newsroom down to the second except me. My next jobs at Advance Internet (MLive.com) and the BBC, I was either part of a small team or working in a foreign bureau, far from the command centre. It’s a challenge as we move from these flat, often extremely collaborative, environments to these military environments with a lot hierarchy and rank. In some ways, it’s a sign of the success of the digital departments that they are being brought into the core of the business, but hopefully, the departments can be integrated without losing the collaborative spirit.
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July 29th, 2008 at 2:22 am
Kevin. Your observation about going from a team of one or a few, far from the command center, to more hierarchical environments reminds me of an old Chinese saying concerning freedom in relation to distance from authority: The sky is high and the emperor is far away. In my experience, those small-group environments, with relatively little supervision from above, are the best for creativity. I think that’s why a lot of the most creative work in U.S. papers come from their sports departments, since the newsroom brass tend to just leave them along.
August 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Hi Kevin, thanks for the mention.
My new “just out the wrapper” job title is Development Editor - I introduced myself as such for the first time yesterday. Still getting used to it.
I think what was interesting about your comment was that it embodied the shift in focus that I think needs to happen with regards to the production of journalism.
I also worked for a small production company before working at a newspaper and remember having much more leeway to adapt and be flexible in that environment.
I remember being shocked arriving in a news organisation and learning that there was a whole separate department that would have to set up my email/internet/telephone, rather than me doing it myself. Suddenly a lot of my freedom to innovate and develop things was taken away by a structure that meant I had to make requests and get permission to do things.
Fortunately that is no longer the case. The traditional heirarchies seem to be breaking down.
That is not to criticise the existing structures. They were extremely effective for single-platform news organisations with fixed publishing times.
But as these organisations move to a more fluid, multi-platform structure it seems odd to me that they would continue to impose a way of working developed in another time and environment.