Teaching the digital journalists of tomorrow

Journalists of a certain age once spent time learning the headline count values of upper- and lower-case letters -- M was a 3 count, W was a 3, I was one or a half.

They also came to understand how to use proportion wheels and pica poles. With the knowledge of those tools came the nascent sense of possessing the keys to a time-honored profession.

Those were the days of blue pencils and typewriters, editing marks, wire rooms and copy clerks -- and honest-to-God printers.

Fast-forward: In 1994, the American Society of Managing Editors published a list of the most desired qualities in new journalism hires.

Topping the list: thinking analytically, presenting information well, understanding numbers in the news, listening to readers, writing concisely, storytelling, and comprehending a multicultural society.

Tagging along: skill at desktop publishing, understanding the drop in newspaper penetration, newspaper management and marketing, and personal affairs reporting.

Yet, an analysis of E&P classified ads for 1987, 1990 and 1993, undertaken by former systems editor and University of Oregon professor John Russial, showed an increased demand for technical skills -- specifically, those related to pagination.

In his analysis, Russial summed up the predicament: "Conflicting messages about the relative importance of technical skills vs. editing skills reflect the dilemma journalism schools face in preparing students for newspaper careers."

With a growing newsroom reliance on Internet reporting and research skills, and overall newsroom emphasis on packaging and presenting stories as opposed to merely reporting and editing them, the dilemma clearly extends to the training of reporters as well as editors.

Technical skills
More than a few journalism students today have never heard of a pica pole or proportion wheel.

Instead, before they flip the mortarboard tassel from one side to the other, these rookie journalists have developed their skills with the new tools of the trade -- PCs and Macs, scanners and imagesetters, Quark XPress, Adobe Photoshop and HoTMetaL.

Pamela Pfiffner teaches these skills at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley (her day job: editor-in-chief of MacUser magazine). Many students she knows can't imagine what production would be like without these digital tools.

While the traditional journalism classes in law, ethics, reporting and journalism history remain crucial core courses in the curriculum, journalism schools and programs are responding to industry demand for technical skills with course and internship options that support the efforts of ambitious students to land newsroom jobs that are perceived to be increasingly few and far between.

Exactly how that's done, however, varies from school to school. Currently, Paul Lester, associate professor in the department of communications at Cal State, Fullerton, is heading a Poynter Institute project to survey J-school curricula to find out which technical skills journalism school students are learning, as well as how they're being taught.

"There's an increasing reflection in the academic community about exactly how journalism should be taught," said Lester, a former photojournalist. He recently wrote a textbook on visual reporting -- a text he said is "designed for a course no one's teaching yet."

The text combines reporting, writing, photography, typography, information graphics, design, audiovisual multimedia, research and computers.

"That's what we see in the industry: students need to know more, they need to be able to communicate in a variety of media," he said. "These days, the machine teaches us that we need to be generalists."

Fullerton's communication department is the fourth largest in the country. Its 2000 undergraduate communication students choose from six sequences, or majors, specializations into which they slot themselves early on: advertising, photo communications, broadcast, public relations, TV/film and journalism.

Fullerton students have access to about 100 desktop computers in five computer labs (three are Mac based, two use PCs). With that many computers, each student gets her own computer during lab class times. Computers are also available during regular open lab times so students can work on their own.

Enlargers disappeared from the Fullerton photo labs a year ago.

"We don't teach black-and-white printing any more," said Lester (http://www5.fullerton.edu/les/homeboy.HTML). "We have workstations instead," where students in the photojournalism sequence learn how to use XPress and Photoshop, operate scanners and make web presentations.

In other sequences, the technical training may include Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand as well. In most sequences, however, these courses are not required.

"We are limited to the number of major courses we can require, and we still have to deal with principles, legal issues and ethics," said Lester, "although those subjects are stressed in every course."

Creating kids
In Charleston, Ill., there aren't a lot of metro papers to provide internships for the 170 journalism students at Eastern Illinois University, said John David Reed.

But graduates of his department are in high demand.

"We have about 45 graduates per year. Fifty percent of those go into news-side jobs -- way above the national average," said Reed, professor of journalism and director of student publications. The other half go into broadcast, public relations, advertising or graduate school, he said.

Hiring editors often ask Reed, "Where do you find these kids?" His response is succinct:

"We don't find them, we create them. We teach them great work habits, help them develop their skills, and give them the opportunity for daily practice."

The best journalism taught in the country is at college newspapers, Reed said: "Students need to practice, and they just don't get enough practice in classes. It's just like music or sports."

EIU's student publications operation is a half-million-dollar-a-year business, said Reed. Pages are laid out digitally and go direct to negative, using eight PowerPCs for pagination and photo work, and older '386s for word processing. The equipment, including a press setup, is paid for through advertising and bulk subscriptions.

With 170 issues (a daily paper, a yearbook, various monthlies) per year to put out, EIU students get plenty of practice. Of the two dozen or so newsroom-bound graduates, four to six will have spent 40 to 50 hours a week working on student publications, he said. Another eight to 10 will have spent 20 to 30 hours a week, and the remainder, five to 10 hours a week.

Those putting in the fewest hours likely are already working at a "pro-level job," Reed said.

Student pubs has three faculty advisers who hold joint appointments in the journalism department (a separate entity, administratively and budgetarily) but students learn their technical skills from one another, said Glenn Robinson, general manager of student publications.

Freshmen and sophomores learn from the student staff who have moved up. They also implement some of the design skills they've picked up in journalism classes, and learn to put a fully paginated paper up on the Web using Adobe Acrobat (see http://www.booth.eiu.edu/ for the archive).

Back across the country, at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, technical training comes from practicing industry professionals, said Doug Foster, director of school affairs.

Among those professionals are John Markoff of the New York Times, who teaches new media and digital technology courses. Paul Grabowitz, a reporter at the nearby Oakland Tribune, offers computer-assisted reporting; David Weir, executive producer of Hot Wired, deals with on-line publishing; Tom Gowecki, editor of PC World Online, teaches about new media publishing, and former student Pfiffner covers desktop publishing.

Foster said the school's coursework does not focus on specific technical skills so much as how to apply journalism skills in a variety of media: for example, what works on-line versus on the printed page, and how those things are different.

While the school recognizes the importance of accounting for job opportunities by preparing students with the requisite skill set, said Foster, it also seeks to ensure that students will find satisfying and journalistically important jobs.

Like other schools, UCB seeks to tailor its courses to what the faculty expects students will confront once they've departed the ivy-covered walls. Those expectations are developed in conjunction with the professional faculty and a network of friends, as well as former students turned practicing professionals.

Pfiffner was a Berkeley student in the late '80s -- just about the time, she said, when the Mac was starting to pick up steam.

"I was intrigued by the tools, and the whole time I was in school, I kept pushing the faculty to do more technology," she said. When former faculty member Tom Goldstein became dean, he remembered Pfiffner's enthusiasm and hired her to teach other students.

Now she teaches two semesters of desktop publishing every year, where students get firsthand experience with Quark XPress and Photoshop.

Pfiffner agreed with Fullerton's Lester that students need to have versatile skill sets. Predictably, she joins Lester, Robinson and Reed in arguing that students need both traditional journalism socialization -- in ethical practice, reporting and legal issues -- and technical skills, and that teaching these things can be successfully combined.

By way of example, she talked about students new to digital imaging who want to "fix the color of the sky" because they think it would look better. "Computers make things so easy that they want to cram a photo into a hole until it fits rather than size it. I have to tell them that just because they have the tool, it doesn't make it cool."

Students need to learn traditional design and production skills -- and ethical limitations on them -- on nontraditional tools, she said.

As at the other schools we talked with, technical training is not required of journalism students. Pfiffner doesn't expect that to change, in part because of a tradition of thinking in journalism schools that draws a clear line between "the ink-stained wretch in the backshop" and journalists who come to journalism school to be taught "all great things."

Pfiffner, however, said she has always seen printing and production as inextricably entwined with words.

Teaching a production perspective is unusual for many journalism schools, said Pfiffner, but she has found that students experience enormous satisfaction and an age-old thrill when the words that have been dancing in their heads take shape on a printed page.

"They're smart and savvy," she said, "and begin thinking in terms of packages and placement."

Beyond that, however, teaching technical skills gives students additional skill sets, she said, that may end up giving them an edge in the job market, and later on, in the newsroom. Student editors from the writing part of the curriculum have no notion of production -- either the background or the environment.

"Our job," said Pfiffner, "is to work with them and bring them into that world." If they seek entry into the newsroom via the copy desk, she explained, or end up at a smaller paper, they may have to be able to retouch photos -- not as a professional photo retoucher, but well enough to get the job done.

Schools that require students to produce a newspaper are way ahead of those that don't, in Pfiffner's opinion. Production and technical skills, she said, "need to be fully integrated" with the rest of the curriculum.

Many schools, she believes, are trying to get a stronger cohesiveness and track. Some of this may happen coincident to the increased demand for new media and web design/production skills.

"The real world of publishing is about repurposing content," she said.

Practitioners and academics
Although the debate is not a new one, journalism educators are concerned about how to best meet the needs of students who will seek jobs in an industry increasingly concerned with profit and bottom lines.

They are searching for the best balance between teaching skills -- technical and otherwise -- and still maintaining the socialization practices that make a journalist a journalist and not a printer.

While Lester is busy with the Poynter Institute project, other journalists are tackling the problem differently. For example, in a recent posting to the Online-Newspapers listserv, Eric Meyer, a visiting lecturer on the journalism faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, invited readers to go to Chicago in July for a one-day, hands-on seminar on how journalism instructors can best teach the on-line journalists of tomorrow:

"The working concept is to have detailed discussions of content, design, storytelling, team-building, etc., coupled with minimal technical training and finally culminating in the production by day's end of a prototype web site that would serve as a resource, reporting on the challenges and techniques that journalism students and faculty members need to consider regarding on-line publishing."

"If this succeeds," Meyer's posting continued, "it could become the opening act in the type of vibrant dialog between practitioners and academics that all too often is sadly lacking in journalism education.

"And for it to succeed, I need your help."

As Reed said, "Journalism is a service-based profession: Each of us relies on other journalists to learn, and it is up to us to pass it on. We must provide service to one another, and be responsible to the public."

-- LCC

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.