I Went to J-School and All I Got Was This Lousy Metaphorical Epiphany
Before I started teaching journalism at Sacramento State University in January 2013, I spent a few weeks cramming on theory. I perused a lot of websites about media. I isolated and dutifully bookmarked the voices I thought might have impact or value for me as an instructor. Most sites didn’t make the cut. Not because they were bad or irrelevant, but because they spent more time on close reads of “the media” — business, theory, practice, ethics, gossip, etc. —than on the ways journalists are educated. Trade reporting is fine, but I had other questions, like: How can a professional journalist/editor repurpose his/her experience to carve out a constructive space in the university’s weeds of sophistry and bureaucracy? How can professional journalists — with their skepticism and bullshit detectors cranked to “high” — legitimately go into a classroom of aspiring journalists and say, “No, no — do it this way”?
I’m not talking about objectively obvious transgressions — a spectrum that runs from inaccuracies and misspelled names through misquotes and misrepresentation to fabrication and plagiarism. No one is questioning the self-evident need to enforce the highest standards of ethics and honesty. But aspiring journalists don’t need a program — let alone a whole school — for that. They know. If they don’t, then you can’t just piledrive The Journalism Wisdom into them. You can maybe say it once — stipulate it in the class syllabus — and then move on to the actual journalism instruction. Then what? That’s the real question.
Today, I’m starting to wind down my fourth year in the classroom at Sac State, where I work as the faculty adviser to the student-run State Hornet news organization. (I also teach lower-division news writing, upper-division news editing, and magazine writing.) By now I think I get most of what I’m supposed to be doing, at least in a clumsy metaphorical sense: It’s like we’re all walking down a street where a bunch of maintenance crews are hard at work in the sewer. A student is walking in the direction of an open manhole. The student is distracted by one thing or another. The crew is oblivious. Gesturing, I say to the student, “Hey, watch out for that open manhole.” The student usually hears me but may or may not register what’s actually being said until it’s too late, and s/he has tumbled down the manhole. I go to the manhole and offer to help the student climb out. A few of the student’s peers sometimes try to help. Some students practically leap out, revolted by what they’ve experienced down there. Others are perfectly fine down there, declining aid either through spite or pride or stolid self-determination.
Metaphors notwithstanding, the point is that I’ve come to see my job as guiding students around the open manholes in their paths as they conceive, execute and distribute journalism. They always fall, of course, which is fantastic and highly recommended, because that’s when we get to the good stuff in journalism education — specifically, the practical understanding of what works and what doesn’t, at least for the students at hand. And if they find want to stay behind or do something else or go in another direction, we need to understand that’s fine, too.
It’s not fine to wring our hands and coax and talk down and wait around for them. Journalism programs must resolve to nurture and produce journalists — people who know they’re journalists, eager to sort out all the messy, sometimes contradictory standards and imperatives that distinction implies. Journalism programs shouldn’t resolve to confuse who and what a journalist is or muse about the relevance of standards from era to era, or even day to day.
That confusion came to mind reading… this, from Jeff Jarvis, who is, of course, always too easy a target but nevertheless walked right into the very conspicuously open manhole of using the demise of Gawker to consider the Really Deep J-School Question: “WTF is journalism now? After Gawker. On the internet. In the age of Trump.”
Then Jarvis wrote this:
I had the honor of spending last week with our impressive incoming class at the CUNY J-school, trying to help them put journalism — their coming months of classes and their careers thereafter — in the context of history, business, and our role in society. I asked them each to begin by defining journalism. We discussed many thoughtful insights, including the idea that journalism exists to “cultivate an educated, empathetic, and engaged society.” We also discussed one definition that might as well have been Nick’s in his remembrance: that it is the journalist’s job to disrupt the status quo and bring down powerful institutions or people. That is certainly a common view in the profession.
On the one hand, I get it. I went to J-school, and I found similar BS sessions with the faculty a very comfortable and agreeable warm-up to the imminent work at hand. Who doesn’t love foreplay, especially at these prices, amirite.
On the other hand, journalism and its contemporary context aren’t mysteries to be unraveled or decoded. This is not really that complicated. Peter Thiel’s grudge or the Trump campaign or Hillary Clinton’s 264-day press-conference dry spell or the rest of journalism’s Obstruction A-list are all reactions to the organic processes of journalists doing their jobs. The job is always the same: Determining facts and packaging them for an audience. However you do this is WTF journalism is today. The only thing that changes is the technology and means of packaging. Any J-school brahmin that suggests or asserts otherwise is ripping you off. “WTF is journalism now?” — its disingenuous pretext, its condescending vernacular — muddles journalism’s fundamental demand of its practitioners, the understanding that precedes even the facts: At some point, you’ve just gotta go to work.
The media-critical industrial complex doesn’t spend much time talking about this dynamic — the need for journalism students to actually do journalism as a means of defining it. It’s not even like we have no idea what an audience wants. Publishers and journalists have oceans of analytics data that can help them make reasonably educated guesses. One particularly safe strategy that seems like a vicious new journalism supervirus to purists is to give an audience selectively chosen “facts” that satisfy an ideological craving, but even that strategy hardly innovates upon basic Yellow Journalism. Alternatively, hyperlocal news of the variety we attempt to practice at Sac State has found a terrific reception among communities underserved by conventional metro and national news operations. Either way, there are few new manholes to circumvent in journalism, and I’m pretty certain that none of the old ones have achieved sentience and moved into our paths.
Anyway, I’ve always thought — even before I taught at one — that journalism school can be as good a place as any for aspiring journalists to do this work. And with classes here in Sacramento just a few days away, it seemed like a good time to get some other ideas out there about J-school. So here’s DU JOUR. Corny title for a J-school publication on Medium? Absolutely. But lord knows I can walk into open manholes, too. If you’re reading this and think it’s worth getting me out — and/or heading forward together — then let’s talk.
