Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Tex, to clarify John's answer: 

Whereas the WSJ newsroom is by and large well-respected, the
editorial board's editorials typically tack hard right and
hyperbolic, and are often at odds with reality as well as factual
reporting. 

Regarding Vox: It is owned by Vox Media, which also owns New York
magazine (and all its branded website), The Verge, SB Nation, and
other outlets. It is not a non-profit.

The kick-ass explainer outlet that IS a non-profit is The
Conversation. (Disclosure: I sometimes edit stories for The
Conversation US.)

Paulina, I think the academic programs your writer is looking for
already exist in the media and communications and business
departments of many universities. 

Sure, journalism school can be good training for other kinds of
communications work, as well. I don't believe, however, that
journalism schools need to or should be training students to become
cogs in the economic machine, rather than to report on the economy.

All that said, I myself do not have a journalism degree.
  

    
> I don't have the answer, but I think it's time for journalism
>schools (specifically graduate programs) to take a hard look at the
>curriculum and start preparing their students for
>journalism-adjacent work.

J-schools and undergraduate programs have been doing literally that
for decades. Marketing and PR are program specializations at most of
the larger undergrad programs in Southern California that I’m
familiar with. Even the somewhat smaller program at San Francisco
State added entrepreneurial and social media management classes more
than a decade ago, h/t Rachele Kanigel.

Megan Bungeroth is a CUNY grad, according to her LinkedIn, so maybe
that’s why she’s unaware of what journalism programs all over Los
Angeles are up to.

I don’t think anybody teaching journalism has assumed our students
would be working exclusively for news organizations since, I don’t
know, the 1990s?
  

    
yeah i found megan's post extremely strange, not least of which is
because many of those marcomm/content jobs are also disappearing for
a whole bunch of reasons.

and 'ivory tower'? that is such a dated strange epithet, up there
with 'pointy-headed intellectual' and 'people who wear pocket
protectors'. and imho 'media theorists' are generally not found in
jschools but other places.

all of which raised questions about who this person is and why she
wrote this odd piece pushed out on LI...
  

    

it felt like outrage farming to me. So out of date.

By the way, I also was not a journalism major, something I make sure to tell
my students. I got a liberal arts degree, and am grateful for it.
  

    
Columbia is graduate students only, and we have a data journalism program,
but no PR or marketing. Students drift into those specialties nonetheless,
including social media. I have at times worried that I was part of a Ponzi
scheme preparing students for jobs that don't exist, but even now our
students do get jobs. Some are journalism-adjacent, most not.
  

    
My father was a professor of Social Work and towards the end of his
career he had similar concerns. Many of his students were
first-generation college students, going into debt for careers where
they would earn less than a barista. (Social Workers who go into
private counseling earn more, but that's not where most grads are
heading)
  

    

Looping back to newspapers: here in Massachusetts a distressing
number of local papers are now owned by conglomerates and have
essentially stopped covering local news. My town's newspaper is now
owned by Gannet - Wikipedia lists *93* Massachusetts papers of
theirs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Gannett

Our town is fortunate to have a local online paper, started by a
former Boston Globe journalist. It's very small, and sometimes a
little rough around the edges, but it's survived for over a decade
and is now a registered non-profit:

https://www.yourarlington.com/

The founder was inspired by  "We the Media" by Dan Gillmor,
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/we-the-media/0596007337/
about the rise of the citizen journalist (not to be confused with
the anthology of the same name). 

The downside, of course, is that it's equally possible to become a
new source of misinformation. 
 
  

    
yeah outrage farming --- yet concludes with 'dm me'. maybe she is
running some sort business that feeds/predates on j students?

i just found the whole thing --- odd.

agree with 'get an undergrad degree in something else' and 'jschool
like many professional programs should be a graduate degree'.

i really do wonder why craig newmark funded an undergrad journo
program at cuny...
  

    
There are solid arguments for not making journalists spend 1-2 years
in grad school when they could have picked up the skills as
undergrads, given that the average pay in the profession is still
something like $40K.

I am saying this as someone with an MJ that, thank god, I got at a
public university paying in-state tuition.
  

    

I just did a quick search, and there appear to be several
undergraduate journalism programs going at the CUNY schools already.
Paulina, do you know if Newmark funding one of those, or is it more
the expansion of the j-school itself into an undergraduate program?

When I was making my way into the profession, staff journalists
still outnumbered freelance. In my experiences talking with people
at conferences or other gatherings, many of these salaried reporters
claimed to know little and care less about the business side of the
company.

By the mid-2010s, that attitude had ebbed considerably.

It occurs to me that in terms of higher education, maybe what the
news sector could really use are business and non-profit management
programs that offer coursework on building and running a news
business! 

This is what the CUNY J-school's entrepreneurial journalism
fellowship does, essentially. BTW: There are still a couple days
left to apply for the spring cohort:
https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/j-plus/entrepreneurial-journalism-creators-pro
gram/ejcp-application/
  

    

Even though public radio newsrooms are far from immune to cutbacks
and layoffs, they are still providing vital local coverage in many
parts of the country.

I wonder if there is a path for reviving local news by consolidating
into or expanding out from existing public radio stations.

Some here may recall how in 2011, after the staff of the Gothamist
network of sites voted to unionize their owner retaliated by nearly
shutting down the sites.

Not long afterwards, WNYC-New York Public Radio, KPCC and WAMU
acquired Gothamist, LAist and DCist, respectively. Since then WNYC
has been building Gothamist into a really good local news outlet,
both independently and in collaboration with the radio newsroom.
(NYC and the metro area have many gaps in local news coverage,
surprising as that may sound.)

Around the same time, when then-Gov. Chris Christie announced that
he was selling off New Jersey Network (state-funded public TV and
radio - which de facto Christie despised), WNYC took over the NJN
northern NJ radio stations and now includes regular NJ news, public
affairs and statehouse coverage in its local news coverage.

I highly recommend the WNYC podcast "Dead End: A New Jersey Murder
Mystery," especially if you've noticed that George Norcross has been
back in the news recently. (Hint: It's not just about true crime.)

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dead-end

WNET, NYC's PBS flagship station, took over NJN's tv stations, and
puts on a sober daily NJ news show. 

Meanwhile, a really great NYC culture and public affairs show,
Metrofocus, vanished from WNET at the end of November with maybe 24
hours notice.
  

    
I'm wondering about Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the
US, publisher of USA Today and owner of a very large number of local
publications. I think there's an assumption that local news was
diminished for those properties when Gannett acquired them, but that
hasn't been the case for Austin. The Austin American-Statesman still
has very good local coverage, enough so that we keep pay 100/month
for the physical paper. (My wife reads it, I don't - but she's
constantly showing me the coverage.) The current editor, Manny
Garcia, won the 2022 Editor of the Year Award from the National
Press Foundation - he had previously worked with Pro Publica and
Texas Tribune.

So is Gannett destroying local coverage? Or keeping it alive?
  

    
They ruined the ones around here.

I’m having a brief fantasy of forming a nonprofit to make templates
that citizen journalists could use to get their local web- and
email-based news sites up and running.  The underlying structural
requirements are pretty much the same, adding and subtracting
sections and a few features, but the tech can be a big barrier.

( actually, thinking someone must have already done this, in
Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla or similar?) 
  

    
Gannett has only owned the American-Statesman for six years, give it
time.

(It may also be somewhat protected by its “flagship” status in the
chain.)
  

    
Despite my affiliation, I can't argue that students need a graduate degree
in journalism. An undergrad degree, especially at a school with a lively
student newspaper, preferably a daily, and an internship or two will serve
as well.

It's one of the confounding things about journalism in general: no licensure
and not even an agreed-upon educational pathway. You can have a grad degree.
You can have an undergrad degree.  You can have no journalism degree at all
but have been an editor at the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News and
tap into the network of similarly privileged folks at the NYT or WashPost or
NPR. You can be a freelance and segue into a staff job or, more likely, the
reverse.
It's both liberating and frustrating that there's no One True Path.
  

    
craig's initial donations to cuny

https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/2018/06/now-craig-newmark-graduate-school-jour
nalism-city-university-new-york/

and another this year:

https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/2024/01/10-million-gift-sets-craig-newmark-gra
duate-school-of-journalism-on-path-to-free-tuition/

left out of this discussion (perhaps too tangential) is the parallel
death of magazines...
  

    
For those who don't know, Gannett is a media holding company (itself
owned by a private equity firm) that owns newspapers in more than a
hundred (hundreds?) U.S. markets, including many state and regional
newspapers such as the Austin American-Statesman, as well as local
papers.

It was formed via the purchase or merger of a number of newspaper
chains, including the publisher that originated the name Gannett.
  

    

I was attending my fellowship when Newmark made his initial
endowment donation and got the school named after him. Not a
terribly welcome move with some students at the time (the renaming),
but clearly his involvement in solidifying the school's financial
future is a hugely positive thing.

(At a reception I attended back then, he mentioned that he also
wanted to fund something that would help NYC's pigeons. I suggested
he check out the Wild Bird Fund, and hope he did.)
  

    
I remember taking a tour of the Gannett paper in Rochester when I
was in grade school.  It was very Front Page - linotype machines,
presses the size of buildings, and workers with little hats made out
of newsprint.  At the time, that was their HQ city.
  

    
I read two articles about the press this morning. The NYTimes
reported 

>>The New York Times Company added 300,000 paid digital subscribers
in the fourth quarter of 2023, the company said on Wednesday,
helping to push annual revenue for digital subscriptions above $1
billion for the first time.

and in another story

>>Over Tacos and Beer, Journalists Mourn Their Lost Jobs
Hundreds of newsroom staff have been laid off in the last month. On
Friday, they gathered to commiserate at the National Press Club.


So I guess the Times is winning. And happy to let us know it. 
  

    
appears to be a winner take all situation...
  

    
good piece here that came across my feed today - 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/kara-swisher-burn-book-excerpt-silicon
-valley-media.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

the subhead is:
Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media

I was at Yahoo working on Bing during the period she discusses.  I
get a big kick out of people who address ChatBot as "Bing, answer me
this"
  

    
thanx for posting this. kara always felt like a silval apologist ---
but this is very welcome.
  

    
Unfortunately behind a paywall. This might work, at least for users
of Apple News: <https://apple.news/AlJlCMPumSJSq3rZIXDJz4Q>
  

    
I saw it because it was my first (of two) free articles per month at
New York Magazine.

"silval apologist"....took me a few seconds to decode.  I live in a
forest.