Book review on the education site
May 1, 2009 1 Comment
I have yet another item on our class’s School Stories site. Check it out.
New article up on education site
April 29, 2009 2 Comments
My involved, labor-intensive article, “Teaching Away from the Test” just went up on my education reporting class website, School Stories. Feel free to check it out and comment.
In flight magazines
April 22, 2009 Leave a comment
Last night I had a dream where there was a pernicious rumor going around the journalism school that all of the students in the business journalism program in the 1970s worked for an in-flight magazine. What I wouldn’t do to work at an in-flight magazine these days.
New blog entry on the education blog
April 4, 2009 3 Comments
I have a new entry on our education reporting blog, here. Check it out…
Do your work or you automatically donate to George W. Bush
March 27, 2009 1 Comment
I love this hilarious technique from an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education on how academics avoid procrastination, using “stick” measures:
Ms. Brick gave the site her credit-card number and pledged to work at least 10 hours per week on her paper. When she fails to meet that weekly quota — as of mid-March, that had happened three times — the Web site sends 50 dollars from her account to the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.
Most common journalism school phrases
March 24, 2009 1 Comment
You know how the there are lists put out of the most common words and phrases of each year? Well, I’d like to do the same for journalism school. Classmates or people from other j-schools, please help me.
“What it’s about and what it’s really about”: usually the opening question from a professor teaching a magazine writing class. What it’s about refers to the more obvious–what is described in the article (e.g. some nutty lady named Lois Weisberg, a murder in California) while what it’s really about refers to that transcendental theme that your professor really wishes you could articulate a lot better than you do (e.g. how people are connected in ways different than we had long thought, the ennui of family life in California and the darkness behind the sunny surface). Guaranteed to make you feel really stupid if you give the totally wrong answer for either one.
“the elephant in the room”: For some reason, I find my friends and I saying this a lot. It comes out in particular when we talk about the glaring problems in our j-school curricula that no one mentions (e.g. they’re teaching us how to write a straight lead in Reporting and Writing 1, but the elephant in the room is that print is going under).
“a new media mindset”: Everybody knows what it isn’t, but nobody knows exactly what it is and how it will make us better journalists. Is it being able to use Google Docs? That’s pretty easy. Is it thinking Twitter is the cat’s pajamas of journalism? I hope not. Is it being an expert in Flash? Then we’re all in trouble.
Saved by the Bell the Grad School Years
March 23, 2009 Leave a comment
My friend Alicia sent me this brilliantly hilarious article from McSweeney that I had to link to here. Proves that “Saved by the Bell” fans are also pretty good with their literary theory references.
ZACK: I want to give a few to Nerdlinger; I need him to be sharp: he’s writing my application to the Fitzgerald conference in Maryland for me, in exchange for being introduced to some girls in the sculpture program at the next Graduate Council mixer.
JESSIE: Ugh, Fitzgerald. You boys and your reverence for dead white males. What chauvinist pigs.
SLATER: Oink, oink, mama. And I mean that in the most Orwellian and neo-Freudian senses.
ZACK: As Henri Bergson might say, “Time-out!” Can you two ever have a conversation without it devolving into a dispute over phallologocentrism?
This is me!
March 19, 2009 1 Comment
How do you change your life in your mid-twenties after years of living with the long unquestioned purpose that what is important is success and proving your smarts? I could have asked this question, but some other letter writer to Cary Tennis beat me to it today. Actually, I do not think it is that hard to do, once you shed your fear of failure.
Cary’s answer is that she ought to start channeling her feelings in the place of her thinking and ability to reason.
Also, since this letter writer is a recent college graduate, I think she is probably used to the reward system of school. You work hard, you do well on a paper or a test, you get a good grade from your professor. You do this under the auspices that it will set you up for success after school, but the workplace does not have the same sort of reward system, and, if you are not interested in your job, there is not an ulterior reward of at least being invested in what you’re doing. Success in the real world is often awarded more unfairly than we are used to from school, which is why going back to grad school can seem so idyllic. However, one has to in a sense obey a professor, and I don’t know if there is often a lot of room for creativity and individual self-expression in that environment. This is why I would encourage the letter writer to challenge herself by shedding the old, somewhat passive feedback system that she knows from school, the system that propels many of us to try to be liked by a teacher. The truth is, being liked is not the key to happiness or success.
I used to believe there was a set of steps that successful people do and that I should try to figure them out and copy them. These steps were at their core based around trying to impress people. Before going to j-school, for instance, I bought the hype that I needed to learn how to blogvideoeditflashprogram, etc. , because that is what everyone was saying I would need to get a job after school I realized, though, that it is frustrating, after awhile, to only listen to what people think you are supposed to be doing. It amounts to not trusting yourself and your own whims. Plus, there is a danger that in our search to prove ourselves to others by following their advice and looking at their paths, as we naturally and inevitably will always do, we can lose…our selves.
So more power to that letter writer for figuring this out about herself now, at a very fortunate age to do so.
Unstable employment might not be a bad thing for young journos
March 17, 2009 3 Comments
Don’t worry that today’s young journalists cannot expect steady employment, counsels my favorite advice columnist ever, Cary Tennis, to a journalism professor who feels guilty trying to encourage his students about a dying industry. In fact, journalists are better off not expecting job security right away. It seems like a kind of sadistic response at first, but I understand where Cary is coming from:
I’m not even sure that stable employment is good for young journalists.
Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless. If they know nothing about what it is like to be powerless themselves, they may come to exercise their considerable power on behalf of the already powerful.
Cary has a point, actually, a rather good point. Journalists are ideally not spending time enjoying junkets and rubbing elbows with the insiders who already have the big mouthpieces to forward their agenda. The ease of advancing a message is infinitely greater for those in powerful positions, which, as Cary says, is probably best understood when one is not powerful him or herself.
This got me thinking whether journalism students, especially those at elite programs, expect too much too soon: a stable job, prestige, even a living wage! I have a theory that these high-achieving young people like myself expect a lot is because their peers who went into finance, consulting, or law after college were put on an instant path to wealth and prestige. In college, these people were on a recruitment mill: sent straight from the offices of career services to the towers of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. We also grew up at a time when many journalists were more famous than the people who they reported on, so the appeal of being Anderson Cooper or Tim Russert might have drawn some of the celebrity worshiper types to the field.
This sort of anxiety bred by peer success need not haunt us anymore. With all of the lucrative drudge careers like investment banker looking a whole lot less promising, it is a great time to get into a career one has some passion for. Of course, journalists should try to earn a decent living from what they do, when they do good work, but this is why, perhaps it could be good to be among the less powerful: we learn to appreciate the struggles of other people who are not earning a living wage for the jobs they do.
Is Columbia having an existential crisis, or is it just changing?
March 13, 2009 2 Comments
Columbia School of Journalism is experiencing an identity crisis, spurred by an internal feud between “new media” people and “old media” people, according to a blog entry from New York Magazine. As they often do, the comments to this article both clarify and snarkify the situation. A more nuanced view that I get, though is that Columbia is experiencing the same uncertainty that the entire industry is, and at least from my experience, the so-called “dinosaurs” on the faculty have been trying to learn new technology along with the rest of us. However, these folks are first and foremost at the school to teach us writing and reporting, and if anything, I personally think the attention has shifted away from how to do this really well in favor of perceived market demands for young people who will work on the websites of well-known publications like the Atlantic or the New York Times.
The debate that surrounds the future of the news industry is characterized by the sort of anxiety that leads people to make sweeping assertions about pretty complex problems. Some of those assertions are just lazy, like the comment that the New York Times is a “sluggish piece of machinery,” which, given that the Times has one of the most visually appealing, depth-driven multimedia sites, can be written off.
What I am interested in though is why people, in trying to understand the industry, feel the need to position the “dinosaurs” against the “innovators” and side with the latter. I can only think that it is an effort to cast about for a Great White Hope format of journalism that will save us from the demands of the old one–exhaustive reporting, fact checking, knowing a beat, editing–because the 24-hour news cycle does not jibe with the imperative to provide well-reported and written articles.
Thinking that if only the dinosaurs “got it,” that new media (which is so many different things) is the future, and not only that, but figuring out how to make money off of it and do good reporting is a childish hope. It is wrapped up in the wish that someone else will solve a problem that we all have to deal with. Journalists and media owners figure this stuff out, not some invisible arbiter of the journalist success universe. Our problem is we don’t think people will pay for what we do, and in some ways that is true, in part because organizations, desperate for content, put out a glut of writing that they cannot ask people to pay for, because there is a glut everywhere else. Then, young people eagerly do the free or cheap stuff for the experience and resume points. Even worse, websites make less money than print, and they involve more time. It is certainly not an easy situation, and it is not served by easy, blame the old people-style assertions.
