J-school students are really conservative
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.
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:55 am
[...] of Wisconsin J-school students are really conservative » This article link is from an article posted at The Journalism Iconoclast on Wednesday, August 22, [...]
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:09 am
I don’t think journalists are particularly liberal - or, more to the point, whether their politics colour their reporting - but sorry, this post is not relevant to that debate. You’re confusing political conservatism with small-c anti-change conservatism. It seems that the Northwestern students most object to marketing and business training, which could very easily be interpreted as a *liberal* position.
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:40 am
I’m not really confusing anything. Whether or not journalists are politically liberal is irrelevant. Many are clearly conservative when it comes to their jobs, which is a good way to find yourself either out of a job or to kill your industry.
Innovation is the only way an industry can survive and thrive. I can understand some of the objections to the more marketing aspects of Medill, but I can’t understand the objections to learning new journalism techniques.
I had to learn copy editing, page design, law, ethics, in addition to how to write and report. It’s not like journalism programs were just writing anyway. There is a lot more to journalism than pen and paper.
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:58 am
Absolutely - I’m with you there - but the “whole journalists are liberal thing” is another debate entirely.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
It sure is. I was just using the whole liberal/conservative thing as a launching point, and as somewhat of a joke. Trust me, there will never be a debate about the actual political beliefs of journalists on this site, but I do think a lot journalists are unhealthily unwilling to change.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
“Journalism … [is] about delivering the news that matters to people in the formats that best suit each story and that users want most”
There are two messages here, not one. This, too, is puzzling:
“It’s about the people. It was never about us.” And how does it relate to this:
“I became a journalist to inform people the best I could.”
Either you aim to ‘give’ “the people” ‘what they want’ or you aim to deliver news ‘that matters to people’, which is similar to informing “people” the best ‘you’ can. I may be old-fashioned, but my impression was that journalists belong to an ‘elite’ and, as such, know more about a lot of ’stuff’ that “the people” ignore.
There’s a great scene is a current movie called ‘Once’. It’s an Irish production and the bankroll amounted to about $200k (Aus). In one scene, ‘the guy’ (we’re not told his name) is singing, at the top of his voice, on the street, where he busks daily. ‘The girl’ approaches him, stands right in front of him, and listens. When he stops (there’s no-one else around, it’s maybe 11pm) she asks about the song (turns out she’s a pianist).
“I never sing this song during the day. In the daytime I only sing what people want.”
He needs to make a buck, after all. But it wasn’t ‘what people want’ that got the girl to walk up to him.