In a previous book, John Merrill and Ralph Lowenstein were the first journalism academics in America to predict, correctly, that newspapers and magazines as we know them would soon disappear, to be replaced by digitized products. Drawing on their long experience in journalism and journalism education, they lay out in this book their observations, suggestions and predictions - not only for the American media, but for the education of future journalists. They believe many media moguls have abused their fiduciary responsibility to maintain the financial strength and credibility of the press. They believe few university presidents understand the important relationship between journalism education and political democracy. They describe the chain of neglect that has led to press insolvency, staff unemployment and J-school misdirection. They believe print journalism will be the strongest form of journalism well into the future - although the "print" will not be on paper. It will be on what the authors call an "s-slate", silicon slate, and they believe that every individual from kindergartner to senior citizen will a personal s-slate in the future to retrieve and read books, magazines and newspapers. Merrill and Lowenstein assert that readers of the s-slate will pay for everything they read. The co-authors observe that journalism education's ties to professional journalism are more problematic than at any time in their mutual history, and that there is an unfortunate lack of self-examination about this tragic disconnect in both academe and the mass media. One remedy they suggest is the addition of a half-year to the undergraduate curriculum in which students immerse themselves in an intensive practicum involving print, radio and television. The reward at the end will be a meaningful "certification", in addition to their bachelor's degree. The co-authors also suggest that faculty should serve the media better and teach uni
VIVA JOURNALISM!
The Triumph of Print In the Media RevolutionBy John C. Merrill Ralph L. LowensteinAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 John C. Merrill and Ralph L. Lowenstein
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-4579-1Contents
Introduction (Merrill and Lowenstein)................................viiIntroduction to Part I...............................................1Chapter 1. A Child of the Media......................................3Chapter 2. The Challenge of Administration...........................9Chapter 3. Meltdown of the Mass Media................................19Chapter 4. Understanding the Internet................................27Chapter 5. Professional Training vs Liberal Arts.....................33Chapter 6. Expanding the Academic Reach..............................43Chapter 7. Outside Support for Change................................49Chapter 8. Finding Support in the Backyard...........................57Chapter 9. Evaluation as an Agent of Change..........................65Postscript I. Ralph Lowenstein Views the Future......................73Introduction to Part II..............................................83Chapter 10. Places and People........................................85Chapter 11. Training or Education?...................................99Chapter 12. Qualifications...........................................113Chapter 13. Classroom Tactics........................................119Chapter 14. Increasing Specialization................................127Chapter 15. Students and General Semantics...........................135Chapter 16. Non-Professional Professionals...........................143Chapter 17. Existential Journalism...................................149Chapter 18. Moral Guidelines.........................................157Postscript II. John Merrill Views the Future.........................163Index................................................................173
Chapter One
A Child of the Media
In my youth, our home in Danville, Virginia, always received two weekly magazines, Time and the Saturday Evening Post. In those days, all members of the family read the same magazines, so we had five readers in our household. Since my parents, two brothers and I read the same material, we had news, commentary and even short stories as common material for discussion at the dinner table. When I was about 10 years old, I wrote a poem and submitted it to the Saturday Evening Post. It was rejected. But I was hooked. From that time on, I always wanted to be a journalist (although my mother, like all Jewish mothers in those days, wanted me to be a doctor). My high school journalism teacher, Mrs. Nora Payne Hill, was also chairman of the English Department. She was a strict disciplinarian in the classroom and in the standards she set for staff members of The Chatterbox, our award-winning school newspaper. She selected me as editor in my senior year, and there has rarely been a time during the 62 years since then when I was not writing for publication or broadcasting on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
The one career I never saw in my future was teaching. But I ended up spending 40 years in academe. I laugh wryly to myself when professional journalists comment about journalism teachers, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." How do they think grading student journalism efforts is any different than editing reporter copy? I spent almost 10 years as advisor to a campus newspaper, and that meant time in the slot, figuratively if not actually. During my two years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, I wrote a weekly column for my hometown newspaper (where I had worked as a reporter before going into the service) and never missed a deadline. I was a reporter and associate editor of the Columbia University daily Spectator during my years in college, had a lengthy article on the textile union published in The Nation during my year at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and re-wrote a novel during the first full semester of my Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri (this while working as publications editor of the Missouri Freedom of Information Center from 8 to 12:30 a.m. each weekday). By the time I mailed the novel's manuscript to my publisher, World Publishing Company, on October 31, 1965, I was operating on fumes. I learned at that point that we all have eight cylinders under the hood, and utilize only five of them most of the time. I needed all eight that semester.
During my teaching years at Missouri, 1968 to 1976, I was book editor of the Missourian (the School of Journalism's daily with citywide circulation) and reviewed a book each week for KBIA-FM (the university's NPRstation). A book a week is a pretty good diet. I discovered that's where the real ideas are, because a book gives one space to support those ideas in detail. For more than 25 years, I wrote and read weekly commentaries for either WUFT-FM or WRUF-AM in Gainesville, Florida, and during six of my 18 years as dean I was a daily fixture on WRUF-AM's "OJ Show." At 7 a.m. each weekday morning, I was "Radio Ralph" or "the Mayor of Henderson Heights," challenging children in the audience with a daily trivia question. We made all parents in the listening audience raise their right hand in the three-finger Boy Scout sign and repeat out loud, "I pledge, under pain of being called a bad egg, that I will not give the answer to my screaming, pleading child." My sponsor was Burger King, and each daily winner got a free adult meal. I also wrote a nationally-syndicated column called "The Media Dean."
As I look back at my early years, I realize that my life has largely been influenced by three factors: 1) a realization in high school that I had good writing skills, 2) the predicament of being a second-generation Jew in a small Southern city where almost everyone else was Christian, and 3) the unusual opportunity to serve as an American volunteer in the Israeli army during that country's War of Independence in 1948 (I was 18 years old and a sophomore at Columbia University at the time).
After completing college and receiving a master's degree from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, I was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and wound up at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, instead of Korea. I also met the girl I was going to marry. Since she was going to college in El Paso, I got a job as reporter-photographer for the El Paso Times the day after my discharge from the army. In my third year at the Times, I was asked to fill a part-time vacancy in the Department of Journalism at Texas Western College (now University of Texas at El Paso). The next year, I joined the then two-person faculty full time.
It is not a "given" that any good reporter or editor can shift into college teaching and succeed. Likewise, great editors do not automatically make great journalism deans. The late James W. Carey, who had distinguished careers at both the University of Illinois and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, once said the following:
Life in a university has its special qualities, opportunities, failings and strengths and makes unique demands. I frequently fall into a conversation with, say, an editor from Newsweek who says, "Oh, you teach up there at Columbia. That's interesting because when I retire from journalism I am going to teach." To which I reply: "That's interesting because when I retire from education I am going to edit Newsweek." He is appalled at the suggestion but he shouldn't be. Many journalists and other professionals move seamlessly into universities because they have the talents and instincts of a teacher, though they rarely acquired them in the newsroom. But they must learn the culture of universities or they will stay on campus armed only by virtue of spiritual Travellers checks. Likewise, many journalists are absolute disasters in the classroom because they can never acquire the habits of a teacher or they can never understand university life. By the same token an academic can sometimes move into the professions quite successfully, though it is very unusual and requires a quick intelligence that instantly absorbs other skills and another culture. [Remarks to the Accrediting Council, Sept. 17, 1993, The Freedom Forum]
I fell easily into the job of a teacher. I had liked reporting, editing and photography, and the job at Texas Western required all three skills. After 10 years, I decided to go to Missouri to get a Ph.D. The Missouri faculty always treated me as a fellow teacher, not as a student. I loved the place. As soon as I received the Ph.D., Tel Aviv University asked me to come over and help build a journalism department. What a great experience that was. I arrived with my family - a wife and two children - two months after the end of the Six-Day War. It was my first trip back to Israel in 19 years, and I had a chance that year to see many of my former comrades in the Israeli army's 79th Armored Battalion. I could observe how much the country had grown and prospered, and I could contrast the country's mass media with that of the United States. It was a learning experience in more ways than one. My students, both men and women, were all army veterans, since every Israeli citizen in those days went into the army for two years at the age of 18. One morning, I walked into class, and there were only women students in the seats. "Where are the boys?" I asked. "Didn't you listen to the radio last night?" one of the women asked. "There were secret codes broadcast and all the reserve units were called up." The men had rejoined their reserve units overnight and made a raid in force on a Jordanian town that day (in retaliation for a cross-border raid of Palestinian fedayeen living in Jordan). They were back in class the next morning.
I was recruited back to the Missouri faculty in 1968, then came to the University of Florida as dean in 1976. In this book, I largely recount the experiences of my 18 years in the deanship. I liked the job. Much in my life had prepared me for this moment. I taught my first class of students when I was 15 years old: three 6-year-olds at Sunday school in our little Orthodox synagogue in Danville. I had a whole troop of boys to help lead and teach when I was an Eagle Scout and junior assistant scoutmaster in Troop 54 at the First Baptist Church in Danville. (One of my duties: herding them into church services once a year on Boy Scout Sunday and leading them in singing "Onward Christian Soldiers.") And I had been chairman of the News-Editorial Department at Missouri during my last year there.
At Florida, I had the belief that something we then called the electronic newspaper was just over the horizon, and I wanted Florida to be the first to get into experimentation with it, so we could lead, not follow, the newspaper industry. The challenge was to convince the faculty that something they had never seen or experienced was going to change the life of our college. With a few exceptions, our faculty responded positively. The university administration believed in us, and came through with seed money, and we did become the first school of journalism to experiment with what was later to be called the Internet newspaper. I had a chance to help design not one, but two buildings. I had an opportunity to help found a new National Public Radio station. Our Ph.D. program was started on my watch.
By strange happenstance, I was also better prepared than most deans to do something about the woeful lack of minorities in my college and in journalism education as a whole. In June 1953 I was transferred from the 101st Airborne Division at Camp Brekenridge, Kentucky, (where I had done basic infantry training, then stayed on as cadre for five more months) to the 261st Signal Company at Fort Bliss, Texas. My passive task was to integrate the last all-black unit in the United States Army. Black soldiers were being shipped out; white soldiers were being shipped in. Coming from the totally segregated city of my youth, I found myself with black roommates and black friends. In 1963, while a faculty member at Texas Western College, I worked with a small group of Christians and Jews to encourage the El Paso City Council to initiate and pass a city-wide anti-discrimination audience. Up until that time, black citizens and soldiers from nearby Ft. Bliss could not stay in hotel rooms, go to movie theaters or dine in the city's restaurants. Our campaign was successful, and El Paso was the first city in the South to pass such an ordinance - a full year before the federal civil rights act of the Johnson administration in 1964. I learned that a few well-intentioned persons could make a difference, could move the earth a few inches off its axis without Archimedes' fulcrum.
As dean at Florida, I was able to raise the money from mass media and foundations to begin a successful minority scholarship program. We were able to triple minority enrollment at the college within a few years, and achieve a "critical mass" of minority students that made our college attractive to minority high school students interested in a career in communications. This experience helped me produce a handbook for the Knight Foundation that showed other journalism deans throughout the nation how to do the same thing.
I suppose I could be called a "hands-on" dean, always ready to give visitors a tour through our modern facilities, always interested in the programming content of our broadcasting properties, of which I was the nominal supervisor in charge. We were one of the few PBS stations in the country producing an early-evening, half-hour local news program five days a week, year round. Our two radio stations and one TV station indulged my ego for performing on air. I learned how to raise private money in the halcyon years when newspapers and some broadcasting stations actually had budgets for grants to educational institutions. Above all, I had a harmonious, cooperative faculty of 65 persons and a supportive university administration - the dual blessing that most deans believe they will find only in Heaven. In addition, I had a non-faculty staff of 60 that included many electronic technicians and engineers who could help steer us into the digital age. I loved my job, and I hope that comes through in this book.
Chapter Two
The Challenge of Administration
All I had ever wanted to be was a good teacher and a good researcher. In 20 years of university teaching, I never had any ambition to become an administrator. That was something that other people did. At the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, where I was already a full professor, I walked into a faculty meeting one day in 1975 and walked out having been elected chair of the News-Editorial Department.
The duties were minimal, mostly restricted to scheduling classes and heading recruitment of new faculty for the department. I continued to teach all my same classes. Then, a year later, came a letter one day from the University of Florida, informing me that I had been recommended for the deanship of its journalism school, and asking me to apply. Why would anyone want to be a dean? 1) More money. 2) The challenge of guiding a school in a new direction. 3) The opportunity to be the boss. In that order, for me. My wife and I had a daughter in college and a son who would be off to college in the fall. We could use the extra money. I thought journalism schools could lead the industry into a new era - a digital era. I was 46 years old. If not now, when? I was selected by Florida.
Here I was. I had no extensive experience in administration, after 20 years of teaching, and I was going to head one of the largest schools of journalism in the nation, including duties of supervising a public television station and two commercial radio stations, all part of the college structure. Fast forward 18 years. I retired as one of the longest-serving deans in the history of the university and in the history of journalism education. I had been one of the principal founders of a new National Public Radio station and a new, low-power educational TV station. All our students in journalism, photojournalism, public relations, advertising and telecommunication, including five professional broadcasting stations, were sharing a powerful college computer network, and our college had moved ahead of much of the industry in development of the Internet newspaper. During the latter part of those 18 years, my college was ranked in every academic and professional survey as belonging among the top ten - mostly the top three - schools in every field that it taught.
Of course, a good faculty and staff did the yeoman's work in creating that reputation, but good leadership at all levels was critical. Football teams do not become undefeated without good coaches. Corporations do not become profitable without good presidents. In academe, the faculty always believes credit for success goes to the faculty, and blame for defeat goes to the dean.
I made a number of mistakes along the way, and I wish I could relive the years in which I made those mistakes. But as Harry Truman once said, "The person who has never made a mistake should don a pair of wings and fly the hell out of here." Along the way, I learned to love college administration. One of the downsides of administration is that you lose the close connection with students that comes from classroom contact. My name is on more than 6,000 diplomas, but I remember only a relatively-few faces - usually the best of those multiple thousands, and a few of the worst. Another downside is the lack of time for scholarly research and the association with good minds on the faculty in the pursuit of research. The upside is that you can use your years of experience as a teacher or professional to raise the standards higher in both research and teaching. That should be the central purpose of any college administrator, and the main result on which any administrator should be judged.
But experience in education is one thing. Experience as an administrator is another. Academe is one of the few fields where people with absolutely no administrative experience are suddenly thrust into positions of leadership. I believe, with such a system, the chances for success are somewhat lower than one would find in industry, where persons who eventually become top administrators start on lower rungs of the ladder (quite often immediately after graduation with a B.A. or master's degree) and gradually move higher. A person who has been a brilliant researcher or great classroom teacher will not automatically succeed as an administrator. When I began work on my Ph.D., there was one university that would have been on everyone's list as one of the top five journalism schools in the country. It had taken dozens of years for that university to win that position. A person with a national reputation in research was then named dean. Within three years, the university's reputation was destroyed. The new dean was fired. Forty years later, the school has never regained its old reputation. .
(Continues...)
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