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$6 Million to Build Journalism School Fortresses?

Key excerpt from essay below:

The last thing that journalism schools need is more of the fortress mentality, where their students think: “I am a professional and therefore I can practice journalism and you are not a professional and therefore you cannot do journalism.”

Mark Glaser at PBS’s MediaShift asked me for some comments for a story he posted today on the Knight and Carnegie foundation funded News21 project. This $6 million project is hosted by the journalism schools at Columbia, Berkeley, University of Southern California and Northwestern plus the school of government at Harvard with their respective deans Nicholas Lemann, Orville Schell, Geoffrey Cowan, Loren Ghiglione and Alex Jones doing the agenda setting.

Here is the full message I sent to Glaser:

To understand the five deans’ worldview I went right to their manifesto. Although it is a forceful document, it is too journalism school/profession centered. Indeed, in the approximately 900-word document, the words profession or professional are used 25 times. When the word public is used it is most often used in a context that reads like this “delivering news to the public.” As if we the people were some passive body to whom information should be passed by the professionals.

I don’t buy it. The journalism schools should be providing training not just for the would-be journalists, but for the would-be audiences too, who, as we know, are also would-be content producers. Rather than building a professional school that by its nature is exclusive, as in excluding others, why not find ways to make it more inclusive, as in including others. The last thing that journalism schools need is more of the fortress mentality, where their students think: “I am a professional and therefore I can practice journalism and you are not a professional and therefore you cannot do journalism.”

It is not that the folks at the Knight and Carnegie foundations don’t realize this. They do. On the one hand, they are giving $6 million to deans who want professional journalism schools and, on the other hand, Knight gave $1 million to the J-Lab at the University of Maryland so bottom-up folks can incubate grassroots news experiments. Berkeley and Harvard, albeit the law school at Harvard, are affiliated with Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media.

So if Knight and Carnegie are helping grassroots organizations in the community, why aren’t these J-schools the incubators for student initiated grassroots endeavors be they journalism majors, art history majors or any other major? What an opportunity to further encourage truly motivated students and expose them to the best practices as well as the theoretical, ethical and legal underpinnings of responsible journalism.

No one has given me $6 million dollars, not yet, but I want to set up a center here at Kennesaw State University where students can get a Citizen Media Certificate no matter what their major. I want future teachers to be smarter about media, I want future criminologists to be smarter about media, I want everyone on campus to be smarter about the media.

These five deans shouldn’t be writing manifestos that encourage professional fortresses, but rather should be creating communities in which professionals and lay people alike can learn. That would be a $6 million idea and might actually be the fodder for a real manifesto for change.


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One Response to “$6 Million to Build Journalism School Fortresses?”

  1. tish grier Says:

    Len…from what I’ve been observing, it seems that the fortress-building is a knee-jerk response to all of the exploding business models. There’s always siege mentality when things are being upended.

    In my comment to Glaser’s post, I thought that the j-schools should be looking at the citizens and asking not just what is this group of people doing going out there and disrupting the sanctified state of journalism, but also asking why they want to. Sure, the simple answer is ‘because journalism has failed’ but there’s alot more to it than that. It’s also about the citizens wanting very much to be part of a larger conversation going on in and across media. We have a citizenry that grew up with the ubiquity of tv, radio and newspapers and anyone who isn’t brain-dead from celebrity worship is going to want to be part of this media-thing in some way.

    Unfortunately, I have only seen small groups of people interested in changing the siege mentality–and most of them, unlike yourself, aren’t teaching in j-schools.

    I think you should go for it and apply for a grant. see what happens :-)

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