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Journalism Education
nalism school. In addition, we brought
in guest lecturers from the legal profession
and the Weblog community.
As I write this, we are barely halfway
through the semester, so it is far too
early to know if the class will be a
success. But it has been one of the most
intriguing and stimulating courses I’ve
ever been involved in. And it might
point to some ways out of the quandary
Columbia and journalism education
are now in.
This course, or others like it, might
help to address the big-picture issues
about the future of journalism and do
so within the framework of reporting
and writing. Such courses can thus
serve double duty—allowing students
to explore ideas and issues, while also
working on improving their technical
skills.
This approach offers other benefits,
as well.
• By making classes more interdisciplinary,
by bringing in instructors
and, probably more importantly, students
from other academic departments,
we can gain fresh perspectives
and insights.
• By having online, digital media be
more a part of normal coursework
at a journalism school, rather than a
separate program, the interactive,
multimedia and democratic nature
of these new media makes students
think harder about exactly what it
means to be a journalist.
Other schools have already experimented
in this area. Northwestern
University journalism students designed
prototypes of news and information
packages for digital tablets. At
the University of Southern California,
the journalism and engineering schools
have partnered to devise ways of presenting
news in immersive 3-D environments.
Columbia itself was a pioneer
in working with students to use
the 360-degree “omnicamera” to cover
public gatherings and other news
events.
Approaches like these take traditional
journalism and apply it to new
media forms. As students continue the
important task of learning to become
better reporters and writers, they also
are forced to come to grips with what
journalism is—as well as with what it
could and should be. ■
Paul Grabowicz spent most of his
journalism career as an investigative
reporter at newspapers, principally
The Oakland Tribune. At U.C.
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism
he is new media program
director. He co-teaches “Creating an
Intellectual Property Weblog” with
John Battelle, founding managing
editor of Wired magazine and
former publisher of The Industry
Standard. The class Web page is at:
www.journalism.berkeley.edu/
program/newmediaclasses/weblogs/
grabs@uclink.berkeley.edu
The Bridge Between the Classroom and Journalism
The purpose of journalism education can’t be addressed without determining why
journalists do what they do.
By William F. Woo
Last summer, I talked with journalism
students in Hong Kong and
six Chinese cities—Beijing,
Shenyang, Chongqing, Shanghai,
Guangzhou and Shantou. They reminded
me a good deal of the ones I
see at home. They are bright, idealistic
and not particularly well informed
about the world. Wherever I went, they
wanted to know about the differences
between journalism education in their
country and the United States.
Obviously there are many, but I preferred
to think of an important similarity,
which is purpose. “What is the
purpose of a journalism education?” I
asked them. Quickly, we’d find that
this question could not be answered
without addressing a larger one: What
is the purpose of journalism?
If you cannot answer that with some
confidence, you can neither practice
journalism with any direction nor teach
it with any conviction. And you probably
cannot study it, either, without
ending up with a confusing mess of
theories, rules and anecdotal craft wisdom.
So we would start, these Chinese
students and I, from an examination of
first principles, which is always an excellent
place to begin any inquiry.
As it happened, the purpose of journalism
and journalism education was
much on my mind. Shortly before I left
for China, the highly publicized search
for a new dean of the Columbia Journalism
School was suspended. The
school’s president, Lee C. Bollinger,
declared that “To teach the craft of
journalism is a worthy goal but clearly
insufficient in this new world and within
the setting of a great university.”
Journalism and the Public
Trust
Moreover, I had been reflecting on a
course that Jay Harris, the former publisher
of the San Jose Mercury News,
and I had taught a year ago at the
Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley. We
called the course “Journalism and the
Public Trust.” In it were the seeds of an
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 105