J-Thinker

I had a bit of a "duh" moment reading Derek Willis' excellent post on the persistent gap between what journalism schools teach and what their students need to learn. (The discussion starts here with Katie Zhu.) Willis says a lot of good and right things, and I hope to say more in a future post. But this penetrated my thick skull:

I don’t read many academic journals, nor do I attend AEJMC – go ahead, Google it – or other journalism education conferences, and I don’t know many professionals who do. Far worse is the fact that I would find it hard to read those papers anyway, since most of them are unavailable online without a subscription of some kind. Sure, we’ve been ignorant of scholarship. But I’m not sure that scholars have done what is truly necessary to improve the relationship between trade and education.

We academics are rightly pleased with the research we do and wish it were better known outside academia, BUT we tend to forget how much it costs in subscription fees to stay current with the research if you're not at a university yourself. A conscientious editor trying to ensure she stays current would have to spend thousands of dollars each year to subscribe to at least a half-dozen refereed journals.It's hard to justify that budget line when you're laying people off every few months. Yes, that's short-term thinking, but it's how struggling industries operate. We need a lot more impetus coming from the gown side of the equation.

New York magazine interviews Robert Silvers, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, about how it all started 50 years ago. It's a long, fascinating read; this little bit bears on recent debates here. The NYT Book Review had gone stagnant, and then a newspaper strike put it on hiatus for more than three months, so some editors at Harper's decided to start their own. They called on some writers they knew to provide the content:

The first issue appeared dated February 1, 1963. It has been called the best first issue of a magazine ever published. Looking at these names glittering on the cover, it’s astonishing how many, from W. H. Auden to Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy to Norman Mailer to William Styron, John Berryman to Robert Lowell to Robert Penn Warren, and on and on, are still recognizable.
I remember Jason called his friend Wystan Auden. Lizzie called Fred Dupee—Lizzie and Barbara both. Lizzie called Mary McCarthy, and so did I. Barbara called Gore Vidal. I called Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Norman Mailer. In the next two days I talked with Jonathan Miller, who wrote on Updike, and then with Philip Rahv, and Dwight MacDonald, who wrote on Arthur Schlesinger.

What did you say?
I said, we’re starting a new book review, and would they write on the book I was sending? They had three weeks. There was no question of payment. No one asked about it. Sometimes they said, “I’d rather do another book.” They all just assumed a new book review was needed.

Read the whole thing.

Image courtesy flickr. user mstewartphotography under a CC license

Journalists and academics both need to check our numbers, both those we come up with and those we get from news releases. Josh Benton flags the opening graf of this study announcement:

COLUMBIA, Mo. ­— Obesity rates have increased dramatically in the last few decades. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African Americans make up more than 60 percent of the overweight and obese population, while only 13 percent of the total population.

As Benton points out, if every black American were overweight, that would mean the U.S. overweight rate was no more than 22 percent. In fact it’s more like 67 percent, or about 211 million of us.

Some better numbers from the government here. In short, black Americans are about 12.6 percent of the population, or 38.9 million, and about 75 percent are overweight. 38.9 million x .75 = 29.2 million overweight. 29.2 / 211 = 13.8 percent. So black Americans are 13.8 percent of the U.S. overweight population.

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How, exactly, should news organizations approach the changing times? The media sociologist Herbert Gans has some suggestions. One graf jumped out at me (emphasis mine):

Journalists also have to consider how American politics has changed since modern journalism first formulated the conventions and norms for covering politics. Part of that discussion must include the criteria of newsworthiness that now apply and should apply, both to politics in general and to the problems of U.S. democracy specifically.

One big hurdle for traditional news organizations in the 21st century has been overcoming the habits of mind formed when the world was a different place. Longtime journalists tell one another that the way they’ve always done things is the way it shouldbe done, and seeing the old ways as just a set of conventions they are free to re-examine is anathema to some. Gans has spent his career studying these conventions, so his perspective as a well-informed outsider is valuable.

The suggestions themselves — re-examine the relationship between journalism and democracy, extend political coverage to important nongovermental groups and movements, call politicians on their BS when appropriate, do more analysis — are not new, but taken together they make plenty of sense.