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Journalist’s Trade
Melding the Competing Demands of Basic Skills and
Emerging Issues in Journalism
At Berkeley, a professor is using Weblogs as a new approach to teaching both.
By Paul Grabowicz
When the controversy over the
future of journalism education
erupted at Columbia this
summer, I thought of a meeting we
held a few months before to pick apart
the new media curriculum I direct here
at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of
Journalism. We’ve had these gatherings
for several years, periodically bringing
in editors and publishers at online
and traditional media companies, entrepreneurs
in the information and
technology industries, and others to
critique our course offerings. But at
this latest meeting, the criticism was
more sweeping: Journalism schools and
the media were failing to address a
whole range of pressing issues. Among
them:
• The war brewing over intellectual
property and copyright laws that
could shape the future of technological
innovation, the media, and
public access to information.
• The proliferation of nonprofit and
other nonmedia Web sites that were
reporting and publishing their own
news stories, posing both a challenge
and an opportunity for media
organizations.
• A batch of new technologies being
cooked up in university and private
laboratories that promised to be
every bit as disruptive to media business
models and the practice of journalism
as the Internet had been.
We were also chastised for not better
motivating our students to break
out of traditional media molds, to be
more experimental and innovative, take
more risks, launch their own ventures.
In earlier meetings of this sort, the
main message had been the need to
train students in solid reporting and
writing skills and sound journalism
ethics and practices. Why the difference
now? Maybe something had
changed out there. Perhaps it was just
a different mix of people. Whatever the
reason, I came away convinced that
journalism education somehow
needed to do a better job of both—
teaching the basics, while confronting
new issues. This seems like much the
same dilemma Columbia now faces—
training future journalists, while questioning
the role of that profession in
society.
But how can all of this be put into a
single curriculum? Should survey and
lecture courses be added to analyze
the media and society? If a school moves
in that direction, where then do professors
find time to teach solid reporting
and writing skills, while providing
ample time for students to experience
realistic assignments?
Tackling New Topics in
Journalism By Using
Weblogs
Here at Berkeley, we tried to begin
reconciling some of these competing
demands with a new course called “Creating
an Intellectual Property Weblog.”
It was an effort to address the issue of
the delicate balance between copyright
protections and the free flow of ideas.
By offering this course, our students
can join in the growing discussion about
the power of the media and entertainment
industries, a debate that has been
elevated to the Supreme Court in the
Eldred v. Ashcroft case. That lawsuit
challenges Congress’s most recent extension
of copyright terms as unconstitutional,
saying it stifles innovation to
protect the profits of giant media conglomerates.
What is also important about this
course and approach is that we are
tackling this topic by using a newer
media form—the Weblog—that challenges
many of the basic assumptions
of journalism. Weblogs allow journalists
to create simple Web pages to which
they can post short, constantly updated
commentaries on issues they are covering,
with links that direct people to
stories and background information
elsewhere on the Web.
What happens to journalistic objectivity
in a medium like this that begs for
personality, voice and opinion? What
becomes of a story narrative when a
Weblog posting is mainly a pointer,
marking the beginning of a conversation
in which other readers will construct
the rest of the story? What role
do we give those readers? Are they to
be fenced off in a “comments” section
of the Weblog or allowed to be equals
who can contribute directly to it? What
distinguishes a journalism Weblog like
ours from a Weblog published by a
private citizen acting as a “journalist?”
And who edits the damn thing? Or is it
edited at all?
In this class, we made the traditional
skills of reporting and writing central
elements of our work, requiring students
to produce original stories that
will be integrated into our Weblog. We
also teamed up with an investigative
reporting class that will slice off a piece
of the intellectual property issue to
produce a more in-depth story. Finally,
we opened up the class to students
from other departments in an attempt
to bring into our discussions and work
nonjournalistic perspectives. The class
is a mix of students from the School of
Information Management and Systems,
the law school and the computer science
department, as well as the jour-
104 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002