Let’s put to rest this whole journalists are liberal thing.
Just read this article about Medill’s new dean and you’ll understand. The students at Northwestern are in an upheaval because their new dean John Lavine is changing the curriculum to meet the changing demands of journalism. I mean he even is bringing in fancy stuff like online journalism.
Kids these days hate the Web. What is Lavine thinking?!?
I mean how dare he! He is attempting to give them the skills that employers want and students will need in the future. Yet, most j-school students have an incredible resistance to change.
Hence, they are clearly conservative. Take this anecdote from the article:
It was a bare-knuckled accusation that seemed suited more for a blue-collar saloon in the bungalow belt than the ivied Evanston campus of Northwestern University. “You lied to me!” the graduate student angrily told John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism. “I came here to learn to be a writer,” the student said, explaining that he had chosen Northwestern—and forked over more than $40,000 in annual tuition—because he wanted to hone a flair for writing that would land him at a publication like The New York Times. “But you’re having us do all this video stuff. I didn’t come here for that.”
If this is the future of journalism, we better start praying. I’ll say it one more time.
Journalism isn’t about you delivering what you deem to be news in the formats you deem to be worthy. It’s about delivering the news that matters to people in the formats that best suit each story and that users want most.
It’s about the people. It was never about us.
I became a journalist to inform people the best I could. Call me old fashioned.
