Today’s thought: Are journalism schools honest?

Posted by on . 14 comments.

Have journalism schools, and more specifically journalism professors, been honest with students about the state of journalism and the pay/benefits of the profession?

Many readers tell me they were never apprised of the realities of journalism by their professors. Isn’t it an obligation that professors be honest about the state of journalism? Or are many professors too out of touch with the professional world to know better?

I graduated in 2006, and none of my journalism classes had a discussion about the state of journalism, the massive amounts of buyouts and firings or the worsening pay/benefits of the profession.

  • http://www.newmediabytes.com/ shawn smith

    I wonder what the responsibility of professors is. Should they give career advice to everyone? Profs are brought in to teach the skills that made them successful in their careers. I don’t think too many school officials would like it if profs spread doom and gloom news that had students transferring out of the program.

    If I was still a student, I would appreciate guidance from professors, especially if the reason they are teaching now is because they were bought out.

  • http://www.lectroid.net Marc Matteo

    One of my college professors once opened a class with “Historically the three lowest paying professions are teaching, newspaper journalism and the military. As a former Naval officer and a former newspaper editor I can say I’ve been employed as all three.”

    Seemed to be pretty clear to me.

  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com pat

    Shawn,

    That’s an interesting question. Professors are there to teach skills, not be guidance counselors. But I can’t help shake the feeling that they should probably A) have a pulse on the current industry, not just when they were in it and B) be honest about what the industry is like right now.

    Marc,

    I think that kind of honesty is refreshing. I wonder if some professors don’t tell students how the industry is out of fear that students will drop the major? Is not telling students the reality of journalism a clever self preservation tactic on the part of some professors?

  • http://teachj.wordpress.com TeachJ

    I think that career guidance is a legitimate function of every college department. I think it is unethical for colleges to take kids and their parents money but not tell them how many jobs will be likely out there for future grads and what the average salary will mostly likely be.

    Journalism profs should be getting kids ready for the jobs that will exist for j-grads, such as PR, web content development, video production, etc. Traditional newspaper and TV jobs may be drying up, but j-grads can find work in related areas. But only if they take the right prep courses.

    I still recommend to all my students not to major in journalism. Minor in it, or double major. Have another career ready – a fall back.

  • http://merandawrites.com Meranda

    I for one had no delusions. I knew I was entering a competitive industry where jobs were becoming more and more scarce by the month. I also had no delusions about the amount of money I would be paid. If anything, my professors over-prepared me to the point of near paranoia that I would never find a job, and if I did, I would never be able to make a living off of it. So far I’m doing OK on both counts.

    Do I think professors should be honest with students about those realities? Absolutely, yes.

    But by the same token, it is the responsibility of the students, future journalists that they want to be, to also do their research. If they’re in college now and haven’t found their way to Poynter and Romenesko then that’s their own fault. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the realities facing the industry. They should be studying up on this business if they want to have any hope of succeeding in it.

    Complaining when you get outside the halls of academia that nobody told you it would be hard is just further proof that you don’t belong if you ask me. You should have been proactively building a resume full of reasons to hire you and pay you more while you were in school.

  • http://wmhartnett.com/ William M. Hartnett

    @Marc: Holy hyperbole on the part of you professor. Most of us aren’t breaking the bank, but the facts don’t really have the back of your naval-commanding, newspaper-editing, journalism-teaching professor. For example: My wife and I are a two-reporter household, both still (barely) under 30, each with nearly eight years of experience at our mid-major paper. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, our household income is already higher than all but 17 percent of U.S. households.

  • http://www.lectroid.net Marc Matteo

    William… you haven’t been reading much here lately have you. Either way, I assume the good professor was referring to salaries “in general”.

    I remember the time when I was about to take my annual 2 week military leave from the mid-major newspaper I worked at for Army Reserve Annual Training (hey, I’m two outa three!) and my boss, bless his heart, offered to “neglect” to mark me as gone as to offset my presumed meager military salary.

    I had to tell him that as a lowly 2nd Lieutenant I’d be making substantially more over the two weeks in the desert than I would at the paper.

    Since then, I’ve watched several mid-major dailies offer comically low salaries (30-40% of market) to both web people and IT types and not understand why they can’t attract competent people. I can only assume the same shenanigans go on in the newsroom too.

    So my experience seems to differ from yours.

  • Mike

    It should also be noted that while teaching and military service are generally very secure occupations (you might get shot but you won’t get downsized), these days a career in journalism is anything but. Economics says that there will be a financial trade-off for job insecurity (ie you get paid more). But this isn’t the case; because economics also says that oversupply of labor will drive prices down. Maybe journalism profs need to be honest in saying that there’s too many journalism majors, and that not all of them are going to get jobs?

  • http://contentious.com Amy Gahran

    IMHO, the profs should be honest about the current state of the industry and why the traditional journalism jobs are waning, but also discuss the increasing entrepreneurial opportunities for journalists.

    - Amy Gahran

  • http://patrickbeeson.com Patrick Beeson

    The universities I attended are not trade schools. I was there to immerse myself in a particular area of study, which doesn’t necessarily translate into learning the absolute skills for job X. Rather, I did that in my internships and in the application of my school projects.

    I agree with Meranda in that the impetus of being informed about the industry and pay scale is on the students. If they can’t bring themselves to learn about the changes happening with newspapers, and the job they’re hoping to get, how can it be assumed that they will be able to perform as a journalist competently?

  • http://wmhartnett.com/ William M. Hartnett

    @Marc: Oh, I get around this and about 200 other future-of-journalism blogs a fair bit. :) And, no, I’ve never worked for McClatchy/Knight Ridder, Tribune, Gannett, MediaNews, Lee, Hearst or any media company. May the sturdy, highly diversified arms of mama Cox embrace me always. To wit: My GIS work earns me roughly the same at the paper as it would at a GIS consulting firm, and we pay the Django developers I work with competitive, market-rate salaries. Crazy, I know.

  • http://blog-o-blog.com Zac Echola

    Maybe I should post this rant at AngryJournalist, but here goes nothing.

    @Marc: I don’t know if there are too many journalism majors, rather too many Mass Comm students who think that because they wrote some crappy articles for class and almost did a good job designing an ad that they can do anything media related (the vast majority of whom are in PR and advertising and keep many of our restaurants running).

    That said, my Mass Comm 101 professor (with over 50 years TV experience) starts every year by telling everyone that they won’t get a job. Period. Leave. It’s not glamorous and you’ll drive the same crummy car for years. You people aren’t going to be anchors, you’re not going to work in a New York firm and you’re not going to like your job if you’re lucky enough to get one.

    Mass Comm is the top major at that school.

    The impetus is on the students at this point.

    Traditionally, we’ve always been paid crap. That’s not new. I want to see students that know what works and what doesn’t and why.

    The problem I mainly see (in my limited scope of speaking to many deer in the headlights at area campuses and my own miserable college experience) is that most students and professors don’t have their finger on the pulse regarding where the industry is headed (even if they’re still working in the industry).

    The Web journalism courses are laughable at best. Slap a broadcast class with a newspaper writing course and you have Web journalism? I don’t think so. Multimedia projects are good to learn, but learning Flash just isn’t our savior, people. It’s mostly a waste of time. We have to seriously discuss data.

    I’m not pessimistic about the future of our industry but I am very pessimistic about the quality of many j-schools. It’s pretty clear to me where everything is headed, yet the curriculum barely changes to keep up.

    Journalism students coming out of school shouldn’t have the EXTRA of knowing HTML. They should know it well. Period. They should know it nearly as well has they write or take pictures. No matter what your emphasis is, the Web is there. They should already have experience with the Web beyond Facebook and MySpace. They must know basic principles of audio and video at a minimum. And for god’s sake they should have at least a hint of understanding about successful Web strategies.

    Obviously, this isn’t true of every student and every professor. I’m generalizing and probably being a bit hyperbolic. But the fact of the matter remains that while the working industry goes under major changes, so too should the school systems.

  • http://bymattking.com matt king

    A year ago a professor at Northern California J-school told me he and other teaches were encouraged to gloss over the state of journalism lest the school lose students and applicants.

  • http://blog.syracuse.com/newstracker Brian Cubbison

    I think there are four broad tracks that would be useful to students. J-schools could provide them, and motivated students would put together some combination of them. In no particular order:

    Communicating: Multimedia, blogging, networking, community-building.

    Developing: Databases, maps, CMS, CSS, RSS, HTML, Flash, Django, Drupal, etc.

    Reporting: Working with sources, handling quotes, digging up records, operating at the scene.

    Entrepreneurship: Creating your own sites, publications and business models.

    As long as these don’t become “silos,” and there’s a broader introduction to these fields as students begin, I think this is a way to organize the kinds of things students will find themselves doing.