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Rethinking journalism education from the ground up

While planning Gather’s Lightning Chat of July 26, I kept trying to think what was missing in all the conversations we’ve been having about the future of journalism. Technology? Easy check. Civic media? Check. Anti-racism? Check. Depolarization? Check. Civic information systems? Check. Community building? Check. It was only watching the end of the “Toward an Antiracist Journalism Education” Lightning Chat of August 2021 that it hit me, we haven’t been talking about how we educate journalists in general, not just reporters and editors, to do all of these things we expect them to do in the future. We certainly have not been teaching those things in any cohesive and systematic way in academia.

So, I invited Diamond Hardiman, who has been working on all things that local communities need from journalists, but especially on the Media 2070 and the New Voices projects, and Sue Robinson, who has been not only one of the most prolific authors on the topic, but also the mind and coordinator behind the Journalism Educator Collective, back to continue that conversation with a little more intent on building something toward a new way of thinking about journalism education. I also invited Jennifer Brandel, who had recently summarized many of the discussions about what has been happening behind the scenes in advanced journalism think tanks in her article “What Could Happen If We Give Up Saving Journalism?” To complete the team, I invited Solutions Journalism Network’s master of community networking and author of the Free Press guide “The Moment Is Magic: 7 Tips for Journalists from Restorative-Justice Practitioners”, Allen Arthur.

The goal was simple: start from scratch. Yep. From nada. If we were to think about what this new journalist of the future would need to know to become whatever it is that we will call it, what would that person need to know to be ready for the task?

If you are getting to this now, here is a very quick recap of what has been happening in the journalism world so far:

What’s going on with journalism?

Oh, the tragedy!

In the past four decades, the commercial model of journalism has been facing a multifaceted crisis. At the same time, large investment corporations have been concentrating ownership and decimating newsrooms around the country, and the advertisement revenue model has been hit hard as news organizations now have to compete with the gigantic social media platforms and internet behemoths such as Alphabet (read Google and YouTube), Amazon, and Meta (Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook), for ad dollars or submit to their platforms’ rules.

The pandemic only made everything worse, as Teri Finneman and Ryan J. Thomas tell in their great account, which you can access through your local library and that I summarized in my chapter on community journalism in Tony Silvia’s “Journalism and the Pandemic.”

Oooh! Shiny new thingies!

Of course, as Jennifer Brandel points in her essay, when a system is dying, another one is rising. I recently noted in the Gather Slack group that it was exactly 20 years ago that I defended my senior thesis describing the promise of nonprofit journalism as a new paradigm for journalists. In that same year, the Free Press was founded in the U.S. Much of this promise started to really come to fruition in the form of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), which has grown to more than 400 members in the last 10 years.

INN is not alone. In the past two decades, we have seen many new and a few old organizations based on different transformative journalism approaches come to the forefront of the mainstream discussion about the future of journalism: LION Publishers, Solutions Journalism Network, Gather (Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon), Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, Constructive Institute (and all its counterparts in Europe), Connectas, Sembramedia and Centro Gabo in Latin America and the Caribbean, JAMLAB in Africa, and so many more organizations all around the globe that are pushing the boundaries of what journalism is or isn’t, that it could take a few hours to list them all.

Why are we still teaching old journalism?

Academia is slow to change.

Those of us in Academia know it too well. A regular curriculum may take years to form, get approved and be implemented. In a four-year program, for example, even if you could get it planned and approved in one year, the new program would only be truly in effect after the last class of the old program was taught out. That would be a bare minimum of four years, but it is much worse than that, as you will see below.

A dying industry still is the primary source of instructors and textbook authors.

Although there are many new books and online resources (see a list at the bottom of this article as a starting point) already adapting to new ways of thinking about journalism, most instructors and textbook authors came from the dying side of the industry. They know how to do the job in the way they learned under the worldviews and often perpetuate those practices because that’s how they learned it. It’s circular thinking, but it is how most of it is done in Academia. It’s not that the “old ways” don’t have value, I need to say before people start jumping to conclusions, the problem is with the values of the old ways.

Those profit-above-all values to sell ad space and commercial time slots disguised as news values we all learned in school or as apprentices in the newsrooms are just that: how to get people’s eyes on the paper/TV or ears on the radio so that the advertisers would be interested. The very best ones were still focused on the “audience” or subscribers as “clients” and not as community members. There was very little thought put into the people being portrayed in the story, how they were being portrayed and what that meant for the communities they lived in.

Academic and professional associations are still trying to catch up with the networked organizations.

Academic and professional associations that are used to set the standards for journalism spent way too much time fighting to keep things the same and now are playing catch up with the nimbler networks of practice like the ones I mentioned above. As Brandell mentioned, when a new system is being developed, the first entrepreneurs tend to form communities of practice and coalesce into networks that are more flexible and agile than the institutions of the old paradigm. Organizations like Gather and SJN don’t need to spend fortunes thinking about how to bring thousands of academics and journalists to a physical space. They have multiple learning opportunities online, many for free; they branch out into trainers who train trainers, they partner with many organizations that want to learn the new thing to create sessions and workshops on it, etc.

Meanwhile, academic and professional associations are still trying to figure out why online offers are so much more accessible to all practitioners all around the world and with all types of disabilities and other limitations. Simply put, academic associations and a few professional ones tend to be institutions created to maintain and repeat the status quo and the system of hierarchies built within the dying media system. The new networks are built to disrupt and replace those hierarchies and the status quo and bring those who have been left out for way too long into the leadership of the new movement.

So… How do we change it?

In the Lightning Chat, we started with Jennifer Brandell explaining the concept of civic media and giving a few great examples, such as El Migrante, Outlier Media, El Tímpano, and Documenters Network.

Diamond Harding discussed the relationships that Black and Latinx communities have with journalism, which is the main topic of New Voices, raising questions of not only representation of diversity but ownership, leadership, and power relations within media systems culminating in the idea of media reparations and the Media 2070 project. She left us with the powerful question, “What if journalism was healing?”

Sue Robinson started discussing how the Journalism Educator Collective is not necessarily changing the specific skills or the civics knowledge journalists need to learn but the paradigm in which they learn it. The whole critical knowledge associated with the new paradigm, the anti-racism, the systemic critique, the structural justice and the historical problems all become ingrained into the education of journalists from the beginning. Much of it can also be found in her new book “How journalists engage.” Robinson also reminded us that we needed to do the work on ourselves before we tried it on our students and communities.

Finally, Allen Arthur, having worked on the Free Press guide “The Moment Is Magic: 7 Tips for Journalists from Restorative-Justice Practitioners,” explained that journalism school is inaccessible for most people. He mentioned that in the past, it was easier for many people to have access to newspapers and that they did a better job reaching people in prisons and in poor communities and in other places where journalism schools today are simply too expensive and inaccessible to be useful. In that way, journalism schools and other institutions can learn from those experiences and from organizations that are working with those communities to develop useful and practical programs that are responsive to people’s needs.

You can watch the rest of the discussion with our guests here.

Well, for me, nothing better than the old “Who, what, where, when, how, and why” to help us think about the new journalism education needs are.

Who

Who are the instructors, and what qualifies them? Anyone with the knowledge and experience, and ability to share those with the newcomers. For example, you don’t need an academic with a Ph.D. and 30 years working in a newspaper to teach someone how to connect with a new community without being extractive or how to balance a budget. You may need someone with more than a few years of experience and some specialized knowledge, but it is not the diploma that determines it.

Who are the new journalists and what defines them? Again, anyone who is doing the work of civic media and transformative journalism. There are many different jobs and roles there, but people who work with food need to be trained in food safety, and people who work with civic media need to be trained in community safety before doing work that can cause harm.

What

This is not an exhaustive list or a “you need to know all of it to get started” list, but an aspirational list. It is also not a four-year curriculum for undergraduates. This is a list of all the things people should learn throughout their lives from pre-K to post-graduate studies to do this work, and, more importantly, none of it needs to necessarily be taught in formal educational systems. As I always say, “you start with community, the rest will follow.”

Community — safety, history, building, relations, political/economic/social ecology, needs assessment, information needs assessment, services ecology, media ecology, civic information systems, education systems, reparative and transformative journalism, solidarity and trauma-informed interviewing, listening posts, community conversations, event planning, etc.

History

• Journalism, including “alternative” media
• Public Relations
• Media Industry
• Local, Regional, Global

Paradigm and Theory:

• Ethics: brief history of philosophical approaches and differences between the civic/social service paradigm and the commercial paradigm
• Theory: brief history of social science, focusing on specifically useful proven applied pragmatic theories.

Media Industry — media literacy, types, functions, jobs and roles, and business models, all including the historical evolution of those types, roles, functions, and models.

Finances — commercial, nonprofit, sustainability, funding development, financial management, career management

Management — Human Resources, news management, product management, project management, program management, business and nonprofit management, collaborations and partnerships management, large collaborative project management and coordination, etc.

Reporting — Investigative techniques: data, archives, documents, public records, law literacy and legal investigative techniques, interviewing techniques for different purposes and goals, fact-checking, source development and maintenance, business and financial literacy and investigative techniques, programming and coding (automation, access, security, etc.).

Production — planning, outlining and storyboarding, writing and scriptwriting, audio production, visual production, audiovisual production, interactive production, multilevel and multiplatform multimedia production, editing writing and scripts, editing audio, editing visuals, editing audiovisuals, editing multimedia products, editing multilevel and multiplatform products and projects.

Delivery systems — public relations (event planning, media placement, social media, strategic planning, etc.),

Where

The beauty of decoupling this from a formal education system is that it also detaches it from hierarchical and colonizer institutions and spaces. The place where you learn to serve your community is the place where you serve your community. You need to learn any of the topics above, and you can make a case that you will be better served to learn it within the context of where you will apply the knowledge, as Paulo Freire defended so many times. In that way, the internet is a beautiful thing as it can bring a lot of knowledge from afar, while allowing it to be contextualized and adapted to the local reality.

As I mentioned above, the new networks have already figured it out by using programs such as the trainers of trainers and similar tactics to spread and organize knowledge within local contexts.

When

Now. I’m not kidding, but yes, now and at any time. All of the topics above, whether you are preparing a simple knowledge base or applied-skill training, can and should be taught and shared throughout people’s lives. Communication, especially civic information, is one of the most essential features for improving the quality of life in communities. A child as young as three years old can learn about community, signage, culture, people and places with respect and interest. They can even learn how to collect data in fun and creative ways. So, it’s never too early to start.

As someone who has taught people double and even triple my age, I also know for sure that it is never too late to start. Retirees are actually one of the best groups of people to do journalism. They have the knowledge and know-how, they have time and, often curiosity and they want to get paid and be useful to their communities. They tend to be great teachers.

How

This is the hardest and easiest part at the same time. The hardest because, as most of us know, someone needs to be paid to start doing this and get the ball going for everyone else. Funding is always an issue and, right now, the truth is that most funding agencies and foundations are still lost in the old ways that never work. However, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I have been in talks, and I have heard of other people who have been in similar talks to funders, trying to convince them to stop giving money to the large corporations that never fix anything and keep making things worse and start, for a change, putting that money in the hands of organizations that have been way more effective in promoting good change. So, there’s hope on this front.

While those funding people work on that, we, practice people, can get busy getting something to show to them. I am working on a few initiatives of my own and in collaboration with other people who have started their own. The goal is to move this fringe movement to rethink journalism education into a mainstream practice of enacting this new education program. You want in? You can contact me, you can contact Sue Robinson with the Journalism Educators Collective, you can contact any of the organizations I mentioned here, or you can start something of your own doing and let us know what it is and how we can help.

Why

Because we can, because we are doing it, and because it is so much better than keep doing the wrong thing. Join the movement and help us build this community.

Where to find more materials to support your learning/teaching:

• Everything we discussed in this Lighting Chat.

Books:

• Alfredo Casares. La hora del periodismo constructivo: El poder transformador de la información orientada al futuro y a las soluciones. Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra S. A. (EUNSA), 2021.
• Andrea Wenzel: Community-centered journalism: Engaging people, exploring solutions, and building trust. Urbana.IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
• Candice Callison and Mary Lynn Young. Reckoning: Journalism’s limits and possibilities. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Duncan McCue’s Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Karen McIntyre Hopkinson and Nicole Smith Dahmen: Reporting beyond the problem: From civic journalism to solutions journalism. Peter Lang, 2021.
• Sue Robinson: How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identities, and Care. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Web resources, guides and tools:

• The Roadmap for Local News
• Reporting in Indigenous Communities
• Solutions Journalism Network Learning Lab

More… a lot more:

• https://letsgather.in/resources/

Bernardo H. Motta, an Associate Professor of Journalism, is the Founding Director and Editor-in-Chief of the transformative journalism program Communities of Hope at Roger Williams University. Motta was featured in 2021 as one of the top 10 notable journalism educators by Crain’s NewsPro Magazine in the same year he became a Solutions Journalism Network LEDE Fellow, and is one of the judges and board members for the 2023 Columbia Journalism School’s The John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism. Previously, he was the director of the Neighborhood News Bureau at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Motta was the guest curator for Gather’s Slack community in July 2023.