Newsroom-Classroom Hybrids at Universities

Student Labor and the Journalism Crisis

Gunhild Ring Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000089127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dei media e delle comunicazioni
• Index: Business

This book investigates the success of U.S. nonprofit university centers, where students work alongside investigative reporters, from a professional and educational perspective.

Drawing on a detailed investigation of four of the most prominent and renowned centers in the U.S. – the IRP Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the Stabile Center (Columbia University), the Workshop (American University), and the New England CIR (Boston University) – the newsroom role and the classroom role of university nonprofits is examined. Finding the description of a win-win situation – where overstretched newsrooms get extra resources; while students learn from the best – an oversimplification, the author explores learning outcomes, student experiences, financial benefits, and quality of the student output.

Offering an in-depth analysis of the characteristics, challenges and benefits of different forms of journalistic cooperation, this book will be a useful resource to scholars, students and practitioners of journalism, journalism education, and media practice.

Part I

Turning classrooms into newsrooms

1 The teaching hospital model

The university profits of this study are inspired by an intriguing thought. By using the resources of universities, unlocking the potential of more than 200,000 journalism and mass communication students in the U.S. alone, it has been said that journalism can be saved from its ongoing crisis (Newton, 2011).

The idea of journalism schools as “teaching hospitals” was first suggested in 2009 by Nicholas Lemann, then dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (Konieczna, 2014, p. 94; Mensing & Ryfe, 2013, p. 26). Like teaching hospitals, he argued, journalism schools could provide essential services to their communities while educating their students (Lemann, 2009). Eric Newton at the Knight Foundation soon became a key advocate of the teaching hospital model, and in a 2012 speech, he strongly encouraged journalism programs to expand their role as community content providers. “University hospitals save lives. University law clinics take cases to the Supreme Court. University news labs can reveal truths that help us right wrongs”, Newton argued (2012).

The backdrop of Lemann’s new model and Newton’s speech was the so-called journalism crisis.¹ “Given the precarious financial state of the news media, our core conviction about the role of our profession feels a bit shaky”, Lemann stated, before continuing:

[T]he education sector is just about the only part of journalism whose business model is still in excellent health. […] what can we do to help change the situation for news organizations, so that journalism schools and the profession might thrive together?

(2009)

In other words, the hope was that journalism schools would have the potential to revive the profession.

After Lemann’s speech in 2009, most agreed that the teaching hospital metaphor was new. At the same time, several saw the model itself as a continuation of the practice- and industry-oriented branch of journalism education, often named the “Missouri Method”. With extensive hands-on training as the main teaching method, the student-run newsrooms of the Missouri School of Journalism had served the local community since 1908 (Mensing & Ryfe, 2013, p. 28). Historically, the “Missouri Method” had, however, been the exception, not the rule. Now, due to the journalism crisis, more and more journalism schools started to experiment with variants of it (Francisco, Lenhoff, & Schudson, 2012, p. 2679). One of the more known examples is News21, a result of the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation forming the “Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education” in 2005 (Knight Foundation, n.d.). Overseen by campus professors, students started to produce annual national investigative projects that were distributed all across the U.S. through the cooperation with established news outlets (Folkerts, 2014, p. 288; Knight Foundation, n.d.). It was the News21 initiative that inspired Newton to give the speech, referred to in the beginning of this chapter, stating that the work capacity of more than 200,000 journalism and mass communication students could be used “to help underserved communities” (2011).

Trying to grasp its core, Konieczna (2014) describes the teaching hospital model as “students working with professional journalists, in the context of a university, to produce content for general audiences in partnership with professional media organizations” (p. 94). Following this definition, the critics seem to be right: The model is nothing more than a replica of traditional practice-oriented journalism training, often referred to as the “Missouri Method”. On studying the speeches and articles describing the model, one central aspect does, however, seem to distinguish the two: The idea of journalism schools saving the journalism profession. It is no coincidence that the idea of journalism schools as teaching hospitals was launched in 2009, at the height of the financial recession. Due to the change of context, with the profession searching everywhere for solutions to the journalism crisis, practice-oriented training was seen as an opportunity to produce endangered quality reporting. Instead of being somewhat peripheral players in the field of journalism, students suddenly became the potential saviors of a whole profession. Building upon Konieczna’s (2014) definition, this book therefore defines the teaching hospital model as “students working with professional journalists, in the context of a university, to produce content for general audiences in partnership with professional media organizations, with an overall goal of saving professional reporting”.

Becoming non-innovative newsrooms?

Despite the prophesy of savior, the teaching hospital model was soon criticized. Several pointed toward the fact that it was not unilaterally applauded within its original field of medicine. There, the model had been disapproved because of the shortcomings of intern-delivered medical care and the long working hours of students. The disjunction between the practices students learn in providing hospital care – treating extremely sick people in acute situations and the experience of most physicians in practice who normally treat healthy patients – was also perceived a weakness (Francisco et al., 2012, p. 2678).

Within the field of journalism, several academics claimed that the industry orientation of the teaching hospital model could threaten the autonomy of journalism education. Gasher (2015) puts it like this:

Training news workers in an era of shrinking newsrooms and growing technological dependence means serving industry’s immediate needs, which too often include quick story turnaround, single sourcing, newsroom-based reporting, brand journalism, and native advertising; this produces Jacks and Jills of all platforms, masters of none. We need to draw a distinction between the learning environment of the classroom and the production environment of the newsroom.

(p. 106)

According to Gasher, the new phenomenon represented “a tug of war”, where the increasingly corporate, concentrated, and commercial news industry attempted to appropriate journalism as a commercial enterprise serving markets rather than publics. If autonomy was lost, the “hallmarks of academe” – namely the professional tradition of critical philosophical reflection – would vanish, some stated (Reese & Cohen, 2000, p. 221). Others argued that journalism schools had to maintain an independent perspective on the profession and the world in order to remain loyal critics of the journalism profession (Bollinger, 2003; Josephi, 2009, p. 50).

In addition to the claims of autonomy loss, several critics also argued that the teaching hospital model was hindering innovation. This was somewhat surprising, as a close relationship to the news industry traditionally had been seen as a way of promoting innovation (see discussion below). The cause of the criticism was that journalism schools inspired by the practice-oriented model often hired professional reporters as teachers. In addition to delivering skills and mentoring, these reporters were to socialize students into the “expectations, norms and traditions expected of them when they arrive at their first jobs” (Mensing, 2010, p. 515). This could be problematic, some argued, as the reporters not always were adequately updated on the latest developments (Mensing, 2010, p. 515). “Why would anyone think that hiring someone from a decaying news organization, steeped in old ways of doing things, is an effective way to create the journalists and news organizations for the future?” Picard (2015) asks, before continuing: “Few former journalists who have spent the past twenty or thirty years working for a large firm have the outlook, attitudes, and skills needed now” (p. 8). To survive and succeed, journalism education must be much more aggressive in seeking change, the argument went. If not, journalism programs would disappear along with the existing news industry (Mensing, 2010; Mensing & Ryfe, 2013; Picard, 2015).

Two traditional disputes revisited

Within journalism education, the above debates of theory versus practice and innovation versus autonomy have a long tradition.

Starting with the theory versus practice-dispute, the ongoing discussion between academic and professional, the role of teaching and research, and corporate influence over academia is said to be as old as journalism itself (Folkerts, 2014, p. 228; Reese, 1999, p. 70). Being a profession with a practical aim, anchored in the printing trade and the world of intellectuals, both the academy and the press have contributed to the forming of the journalistic knowledge base (Folkerts, 2014, p. 228; Reese, 1999, p. 70). Today, Jean Folkerts (2014) argues, the tension is represented by two main views upon journalism education: (1) that the main purpose of educating journalists is to improve the quality of journalism; and (2) that the main purpose of training journalism students is to make them function efficiently in a media environment (p. 227). As a result, journalism education is said to be located “in the uneasy spot between practical and academic studies” (Josephi, 2009, p. 45).

In the U.S., the duality of journalistic knowledge became particularly apparent when the initial university journalism programs were established during the first decades of the 1900s. While the University of Wisconsin integrated journalism within the liberal arts, the previously mentioned University of Missouri emphasized hands-on training in a “real-world” environment (Folkerts, 2014; Reese, 1999; Wahl-Jorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2009). The predominant approach eventually became a mix of the two, emphasizing broad education with some specialized training in journalism (Sloan, 1990, p. 10). In 1924, the American Association of Teachers in Journalism (AATJ) did, for instance, declare that an appropriate journalism curriculum should be “sufficiently broad in the scope to familiarize the future journalist with the important fields of knowledge, and sufficiently practical to show the application of the knowledge to the practice of journalism” (Folkerts, 2014, p. 238; Sloan, 1990, p. 10). The statement did however not say anything about how far the courses should embrace the emerging discipline of social science, how much they should focus on traditional academics, or how much they should focus on practical applications (Folkerts, 2014, p. 238). As a result, the discussion over theory and practice, and the role of teaching and research, continued.

Today, more than 80 years later, the weighting between practical skills and theoretical knowledge is still vigorously discussed. Most central journalism scholars have positioned themselves on the idealist side, arguing that the main purpose of educating journalists is to improve the quality of journalism. Picard (2015) does, for instance, state that higher education is about helping students understand “the past, how people and societies work, what forces affect the human condition, how to deal with the inevitable changes they will encounter in their lives, and how to find their own paths to success” (p. 7). Higher education isn’t about ensuring employment, he argues, but about shaping and sharpening students’ abilities to think – giving them skills they can use in a variety of activities in future years (p. 7).

Transferring the ideals to the curriculum, Gasher (2015) argues that neglecting the topics typically informing news coverage – like history, geography, politics, the justice system, science, and the arts – will compromise the students’ store of basic knowledge. Without basic knowledge, the students’ ability to do proper research and ask informed and challenging questions will be weakened, he warns. This will in turn make future reporters increasingly reliant on expert sources, as they lack the critical skills to evaluate the information provided (p. 106). Along with schola...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: a win-win situation?
• Part I Turning classrooms into newsrooms
• Part II The centers as newsrooms
• Part III The centers as classrooms
• Recommendations for future hybrid projects
• Interviewees
• Index