Can universities rescue ailing newspapers? More precisely, can universities sustain and support the construction and distribution of serious news and analysis of current affairs?
The question comes naturally at a time when universities are viewed as economic engines. With newspapers in severe distress for reasons both economic and technological, publishers and editors increasingly view universities as potential saviors. While foundations have money, universities have intellectual independence, moral credibility, management know-how, and a long history of tackling urgent societal crises. And many universities also run journalism schools or communication departments, which train future journalists, study journalism and media generally, and thus may seem like natural homes for the journalistic enterprise.
Few people believe any longer that serious news gathering and intelligent reflection on contemporary affairs can be commercially viable. Yet society needs informed sources, using plain language, to discuss urgent problems and opportunities. If markets won’t supply that social good, might universities? Might the academy pick up where (and when) corporate ownership of newspapers ends?
Pursuing specific missions has a long history at great universities, many of which work directly on providing solutions to urgent problems. The economic collapse of serious journalism is one such problem. Universities can and should save American journalism, in a way that also furthers their drive to create and apply new knowledge. But universities can’t achieve that by having their journalism schools and communications departments adopt and absorb serious news organizations and their best practitioners, as many have proposed.
J-schools are not what journalists in crisis need. Rigorous academic departments, whether in physics, chemistry, psychology, or economics, can provide better homes for journalism’s refugees. Rather than save newspapers or magazines as institutions, those departments would provide a home, resources, and an enhanced identity to serious writers and news gatherers who are committed to understanding important subjects at their most technical and esoteric.
The most valued journalism doesn’t just expose the news but explains it. In this “explanatory” genre of journalism, writers with a commitment to a subject—think Michael Pollan on food, John Markoff on computers, Barbara Ehrenreich on the poor—serve as “brokers” for mass audiences to a world of scholarship and specialized knowledge that might otherwise be inaccessible. Since universities possess specialized knowledge—in the brains of scholars, scientists, and students on campus—distinguished journalists can find no more bountiful home than academe.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve had a taste of how this can (and can’t) work. In 1988 I spent an academic year as a journalist in residence at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering. At the time, I was writing about technology, and my year as a journalism fellow deepened my knowledge in an array of technical subjects. I also forged connections with scholars in philosophy and history, which emboldened me to write a full-scale biography of Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s science adviser during World War II and the organizer of the Manhattan Project. My 500-page book, with hundreds of footnotes, was based on dozens of visits to historical archives. The book was reviewed in academic journals as well as the mainstream press.
My production of a dissertation-like work, however, didn’t fling open doors in academe. I lack a doctorate, and my approach to subjects remains heterodox and synthetic rather than disciplinary and formal. While I’m close friends with important scholars, I’ve never taught anything more than writing (at Stanford University) and journalism (at the University of California at Berkeley).
Values can be a problem for university-based journalists like me. Far from embracing the scientific method, journalists appear to shoot from the hip. We overgeneralize from a small number of cases. We possess no special tools; even our interviewing methods are idiosyncratic and rarely documented. Worse, journalists don’t often read, or we read the wrong texts. Academe’s commitment to patient, thorough examination of a topic often runs counter to the journalist’s rush to judgment. Finally, universities are in some sense a collection of medieval guilds. Each discipline has its set of hurdles to clear in order to achieve, to put it bluntly, a license to practice. An anthropologist is an anthropologist, ultimately, because other anthropologists have said so. The Ph.D., however rarefied an intellectual merit badge, is still just that, and serves partly as a shield against those without one.
By contrast, anyone can practice journalism. While journalism schools and journalists have promoted the ideal of journalism as a profession, the practice of journalism bears little resemblance to real professions, such as law or medicine, in which training is codified, and professional bodies license practitioners and sanction rogues. Because journalists are responsible ultimately to the whims of their employers or their own lonely consciences, they seem unsuited to university rules and regulations.
But the severity of the crisis in journalism forces a rethinking of the merits of a journalist-scholar marriage. There are some hard realities to face. To start with, universities can’t support a soup-to-nuts newspaper business, from printing press to advertiser support to distribution. At best, universities can support the development of journalists; the journalists themselves would still have to find paths to their audiences.
One marriage of journalism and scholarship was announced in September: a partnership between KQED, the San Francisco public broadcaster, and the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The nonprofit editorial partnership is being underwritten at a cost of $5-million by the philanthropist Warren Hellman.
The KQED-university marriage has some obvious hurdles. Because universities aren’t used to embracing partisan politics (and are, in fact, forbidden to do so), newspapers’ tradition of advocacy could probably not endure. Journalists have also played a longstanding watchdog function. Especially in the political realm, they have tried (or at least pretended) to hold power to account. That is another longstanding news-media function that universities would seem unlikely to practice. As it turns out, citizen activists, exercising their own right to public information, are as effective as, if not better than, journalists are in monitoring public power.
In the mission of serious journalism, what remains is the important function of explanation, analysis, and evaluation. In recent decades, excellent journalism has increasingly been defined by the “explanatory” rather than the “investigative” label (or, for that matter, by the act of “bearing witness” to events, a role now taken up increasingly by anyone with a cellphone camera and a Web connection). At the same time, major news organizations remain unmatched in their power to document and expose. For example, by obtaining an unclassified copy of a secret Pentagon assessment of the war in Afghanistan, The Washington Post recently altered the national debate over whether to escalate or draw down American troops there.
News-media consumers need help in making sense of the world, especially of technical or complex issues, such as security, the financial crisis, health-care reform, global warming, renewable energy, and diet and disease. Providing accurate, timely, and sophisticated explanations is now the real meat of journalism—and the outcome most at risk from the economic contraction of the field. Universities, because they are the foremost repositories of expertise, are the ideal place for explanatory journalists to take refuge.
For journalism schools, the collapse of journalism employment represents a legitimate crisis. Yet the answer is not to transform themselves from occupational schools into publishers. Serious journalists aren’t going to be helped by closer contact with professors of journalism, many of whom hold doctoral degrees and have rarely practiced journalism themselves. J-schools emphasize craft over content, giving aspiring journalists an outmoded model. J-schools should instead steer students into specialties; a future science journalist should study science. Even if we agree that journalistic skills can be taught in academe—and that’s a big if—those skills have been upended by the Web. In any case, the urgent issue is how universities can sustain serious working journalists—not train the next generation, but save the current one.
What do these serious journalists need? Fundamentally, they need knowledge. They need membership in a community of smart, curious people committed to a subject area and a set of urgent problems. And they need an audience—surprisingly, the very same audience that serious scholars and scientists also want, made up of the informed public, policy makers, and peers.
At their best, serious journalists broker between communities. They may sometimes create knowledge in ways that parallel the creation of anthropological, sociological, and economic knowledge. Journalistic case studies, for instance, often are valuable in their own right. But more significantly, the best journalists can complement scholars by bringing reports on new research, concepts, and projects to a wider audience. In short, journalists can jump the boundaries that sometimes keep knowledge in and the curious out.
Journalists in the physics department, or in engineering, history, or economics, need not be just subsidized. They can contribute not only by serving as brokers between specialized communities of knowledge and the wider society, but also by teaching faculty members and students to communicate more effectively and by doing research of their own.
Embedding journalists in academe will require adjustments on both sides. Academics will have to suspend their prejudice that even the best journalists are little more than inspired amateurs. They will have to test the hypothesis that as journalists gain expertise, the public’s capacity for understanding complex problems will grow.
For journalists, the necessary changes in mentality will perhaps be more difficult. While their zeal for the explanatory is rising, many remain skeptical of the benefits of formal intellectual training. Some are also uncomfortable with fully identifying sources and providing a road map so that others can replicate their work.
For journalists to thrive in academe, they must raise their commitment to explaining how the world works and how things might work differently. For professors to treat journalists as peers will require a more generous concept of the university’s engagement with society. The task is difficult, but the potential benefits are great.
