Should we put J-school on pause?

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In moments of profound change, it feels like we should be more able to question everything.

Alas, we are just people. We're as likely to limit our horizons as we are to expand them in the face of change. Each of us has ignored opportunities to make a different choice in at least one job, relationship, or pattern that did not work.

For at least the last two decades, there have been a surplus of signals, opportunities for change, and seismic shifts in journalism. Many of us have been pushed to re-evaluate the most basic premises of the news—questions like who is this for and why does it even matter—and tried to start over. Those of us who've tried this reinvention are preserving plenty, but we have also grown comfortable with the degree of abandonment necessary for rebuilding.

A hard truth about change is reckoning with abandonment not just when it's necessary or inevitable, but when it might in fact be optimal. To lean on a breakup metaphor here, we're talking about the difference between accepting you might not stay friends with your ex and asking them for a clean break from the start.

Earlier this month a case study on the failure of Houston Landing (not quite the post-mortem we probably deserve) showed how even the best-capitalized, well-staffed, and lauded startup newsrooms can fall into a trap of just remixing old ideas. (That case study, which costs $15, is summarized helpfully by News Fixer Cecilia Dobbs.)

We've had at least two decades of change in journalism, but our abandonment still does not feel intentional, just inevitable. The newest State of Local News report found the pace of newsroom closures across the country last year was three per week. People in each one of the 238 counties now considered news deserts still need verified and reported local information they can rely on. How we can make this happen is not an insignificant question. But how we can imagine a news and information product that's more valuable to and more likely to be preserved by communities is just as crucial.

Where should we start?

Everywhere. Fixing the news should start everywhere and has already begun in many places. Local news, especially nonprofit local news, is doing its part to reimagine how reporting can be most useful, a project supported and championed by philanthropy. Civic news advocates are doing what we can to usher in a new, more inclusive framework everyone can build around. News product folks and independent journalists (I see you, Andrew and Megan) stay experimenting. Commercial media and national news have provided plenty of product and some capitalization ideas that aren't in conflict with a broader service mission.

But what about journalism schools?

I've questioned, openly, whether journalism schools should put their degrees on pause. I'm sure that's why several people have sent me this piece by Chris Marquis calling for the abolition of business schools several times.

Marquis' take on the problem with business schools has a few parallels to unresolvable tensions in commercial media;

"I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms,"

and

"They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it."

His overarching point is that the economic incentives of an MBA program limit pro-social innovation and reinforce transactional and winner-take-all behavior of universities and the students pursuing these degrees. It's not that relevant to what's going on in J-schools.

Journalism degrees have neither the social nor economic cachet of an MBA. The re-evaluation of journalism schools would do little outside the industry. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

I'm not yet willing to go as far as Marquis and call for abolition. I've been inside journalism education for just over a year, and I admit there's a lot I don't know or understand. Even so, it is almost impossible to imagine most journalism schools can prepare students, especially undergraduates, to successfully navigate a field as rapidly transforming as news and information.

Let's question our value

I truly appreciate and respect my students. I'm sure I would feel the same way about all the journalism students at all the schools. They deserve the best. If I can't trust the field to live up to their expectations, I would really like their education to exceed them.

That journalism can and must better deliver on its promise to be of more value to more people is what motivates me professionally. I like that specific problem-solving challenge in every form, from a single reporting project to the field-level work like we try to do in News Futures.

It's that frame that I've tried to think about journalism school through. There are at least three questions I came up with when I started this work. Spoiler alert: the answer to all these questions is “yes.”

• Could a journalism education be of higher value to the same number of students?
• Could it be of high value to more students?
• Could journalism school create true value beyond its students?

Every week I teach four journalism classes to undergraduates, most of them majoring in journalism, using curricula I've designed to try to answer each of the questions above. It is both insufficient and lonely. A wider re-evaluation is necessary.

Columbia's graduate program in journalism announced earlier this month that it is actually taking a pause. The school has suspended admissions to its M.A. program for at least a year as it re-evaluates. I hope the pause is as concerned with pedagogy as economics. The school announced that despite the M.A. pause, they will begin a part-time online master's degree next year that will cost more than $40K in tuition and fees.

I'm on the foundation board for the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. My role doesn't give me much insight into the day-to-day of teaching and learning at the school, but when I have talked to students and seen them interact with each other and instructors, something does feel different. More than half of Newmark students go tuition-free. The school's goal is to be tuition-free for all its students. This does change the value proposition. Newmark students do seem more open to helping reimagine journalism for themselves and all of us. They can afford to.

None of my questions about journalism school can be divorced from bigger questions about the value of education and college. I know.

Cornell University, of all places, has published an open re-examination of the role and value of the modern American university. The more than 200-page report was published less than a week after Jane Doe filed her civil lawsuit against the school and a host of other defendants for alleged sexual assaults and the institutional response in its aftermath. The story had not yet become national news when Cornell published its report.

I found it impossible to read the university's calls for, among other things, a “human-centered, integrated learning ecosystem that cultivates sound judgment,” with anything but incredulity and frustration.

It is difficult to divorce the message from the messenger in this case, but Cornell really did question everything, from admissions to grades to tuition in this re-examination of the value of college.

I would love to see something similar from every journalism school.

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Until next week, take care of yourself and do your best to care for somebody else, too.