art13-10

Atelier No.13, article 10

James Ledbetter :
© Rolling Stones, October 16, 1997

The slow, sad sellout of journalism school
by James Ledbetter(*)

Abstract:
American journalism schools are in the middle of a crisis that has gone on for years. They are struggling to
define their purpose. Few journalism graduates will end up with jobs having to do with reporting.

THE WALLS ARE COVERED WITH ORANGE FLIERS, PROMISING THAT TODAY is the day the Orange Brigade will arrive. A small group of young women near the door impersonates smokers puffing away on a cigarette break, puzzling over matchbook covers that promise to help them find ‘’something they've lost.’’ A bicycle enters the classroom, flowing orange ribbons, the rider ringing the bell urgently. The audience of 40 or so laughs. It feels like skit night at summer camp. But these are no campers, and this is serious business: These are graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, one of America's most prestigious journalism schools. The class has been divided into six teams, each assigned to devise a marketing strategy for a product it must pretend the world has never
seen before: the orange.Paragraph This team has chosen to target smokers. Its campaign emphasizes the vitamin C
depletion that smokers experience, touting the orange as a cheap, simple method of replacing it. Its theory is that if
you peel beneath the surface of many smokers (about 35 percent), you'll find people who care deeply about their
health: They work out, they watch their diets - and they're way tired of and way defensive about being ostracized as
unhealthy pariahs. Reward their health-seeking egos with an easy, tasty, nutritious snack and, well, you'll sell a lot
of oranges. The slogan: The Orange . . . Make It a Habit.

There's really only one question here: What the hell does this have to do with journalism?

AMERICAN JOURNALism schools are in the midst of a
years-long crisis, struggling to define their very purpose.
For about two decades, journalism was the one true calling
for those who wanted to shake the windows and rattle the
doors of the establishment. Inspired by 6o Minutes,
exploding Pintos and Watergate, tens of thousands locked to
J schools, creating a golden era of growth: Between 1967 and
1986, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in journalism
increased sixfold.

But today, with enrollment slowing and the promise of
an industry job little more than a lie, journalism educators
are foundering, brooding, unsure of how, and what, they
should teach or whether they should even exist. Not long
ago, journalism educators taught eager students the
intricate ways of the newsroom; today, some will sheepishly
admit that they're only a few weeks ahead of - or simply
behind - their students in the technology that they teach.
Once, journalism classes taught students how to investigate
misconduct within American corporations; currently, a
journalism school is just as likely to be taking money from
corporations and offering up its students to help conduct
market research. Instead of Woodward and Bernstein, the new
model is Burson and Marsteller.

In an ominous-sounding report, Winds of Change:
Challenges Confronting Journalism Education, issued last
year, veteran journalist and former San Francisco State
journalism professor Betty Medsger speaks of prevailing
forces that "could profoundly change the nature of
journalism education - could even eliminate journalism as a
distinct area of study."

Making generalizations about journalism schools is
difficult because there is no single experience in a
discipline that this year awarded 32,150 undergraduate
degrees and 3,6oo graduate degrees from 449 post-secondary
schools. More than half of those schools offer undergraduate
degrees, but two of the most highly regarded Columbia and
Berkeley - offer only master's degrees. Beyond the obvious
reporting classes, there's no predicting what else may live
under the roof with a J school: mass communications,
advertising, public relations, even film school.

There is, however, one depressing generalization that
can be made: Few journalism graduates will end up in jobs
that have anything to do with reporting or writing news
stories. Many of the students know it; last spring, I sat
with soon-to-be graduates in a dark luncheonette near New
York University, debating whether it was worth the time and
effort to send out resumes to magazines - because, as one
student said wearily, ‘’Getting a job writing is a pipe
dream.’’

The two-decade J-school explosion has left a supply of
trained journalists that far outstrips demand - perhaps more
than in any major profession in America. The journalism
profession is literally saturated: The 36,ooo degrees
offered annually represent between a quarter and a third of
all the journalism jobs in the entire country. The
implications for J-school graduates are inevitable and grim:
According to an annual survey by Lee Becker, a researcher at
the University of Georgia, only one-fifth of
journalism-school graduates take jobs at newspapers and
magazines or in radio and television. Journalism students
often choose their field for pragmatic reasons, but most of
them end up working in noncommunications fields (20 percent,
in I996, the most recent figure available) or in public
relations and advertising (12.1 percent) - or unemployed (14
percent).

Hence the rush to reinvent the orange. For some
schools, the teaching of traditional journalism has almost
been eclipsed. At the University of Georgia, for example,
twothirds of the communications students are now
concentrating on advertising and public relations. It is
little more than a historical accident that beginning after
World War II, many universities teamed their journalism
schools or departments with the upstart ‘’communications
studies,’’ programs that use social-science tools to analyze
the practice of mass communications. That accident
multiplied as dozens of schools added instruction in
marketing and public relations, in the 1960s and '70s; now
those fields are primed to take over the entire discipline.

Sober-minded journalism teachers find themselves asking
whether their positions have any purpose at all, whether it
makes any more sense to train people to write stories for
newspaper jobs that don't exist than it does to teach them
how to run a pony express or send Morse code.

ORANGES ARE NOT the only fruit that Medill offers.
Originally founded with the family fortunes created by the
success of the Chicago Tribune, Medill this year celebrated
its 7sth anniversary, making it one of America's oldest
journalism schools (and, along with Columbia, Berkeley and
Syracuse, one of the nation's most highly regarded). The
school is still glowing from the triumph of three
undergraduates whose 1996 classwork helped free four Chicago
men wrongly accused of murder (a Disney movie of the story
is already in the works). Medill's courses in magazine
journalism, media management and newspaper writing attract
some of the nation's best students and faculty. But inside
Fisk Hall, the cramped granite building that houses the
Medill School on Northwestern's Evanston, Ill., campus, the
largest classes and much of the buzz are at the end of the
hallway, where integrated marketing communications is
taught. The program has its own track within the journalism
school, and its students now make up more than half of all
journalism grad students enrolled there.
A term not even a decade old, integrated marketing
communications holds that marketing, public relations and
advertising should be taught and practiced as a unified
field of communication (exactly where journalism fits in is
a matter of some contention).

Traditionally, for example, advertising has been
considered a way to create mass awareness of a product or
service, and advertising messages have been tailored to
speak to that mass audience. IMC seeks to speak more
directly to an individual consumer's experience and
perception of a product or service; it maintains that all
messages must reflect or build upon that experience.
Advertising and public relations assumed that an audience
relied largely upon the magazine page or TV spot for
information, whereas IMC seeks to communicate through a wide
variety of means and to connect with all the media stimuli
that consumers receive.

Think about tuna fish: The old-school prototype was
Charlie the Tuna, a cartoon character designed to make you
comfortable with the product and - it was hoped - the brand,
but it provided no actual information about tuna. By
contrast, IMC encourages tuna buyers to think about all
aspects of the product. If polls find that consumers are
worried about dolphins caught in tuna nets, then you might
stick a big DOLPHIN SAFE label on the cans and set up a Web
site featuring interviews with tuna fishermen. The new wave
of IMC, according to one of its primary texts, is
‘’respectful, not patronizing; dialogue-seeking, not
monologuic; responsive, not formula-driven. It speaks to the
highest point of common interest, not the lowest common
denominator.’’

One of the legendary IMC success stories is the
triumphant return of paper milk cartons. In a lo-year
period, from the '70s to the '8os, the percentage of milk
bought in cartons (as opposed to plastic jugs) fell from 8o
percent to 4o percent.

The paperboard companies eschewed a traditional
approach - heavy advertising about how cartons take up less
space or are easier to store - and instead focused on milk
consumers, who are almost entirely mothers between the ages
of 25 and 44. Digging through old research, they
"discovered" the long-known fact that light
destroys some small portion of milk's vitamins and deduced
that cardboard would block light better than plastic. The
companies then hired a young female food scientist to
disseminate this message through a media tour. Once the
companies had "made news" with their science, they
followed up with an ad campaign about cardboard's
nutritional superiority. Not only did milk moms return to
cardboard, but all the emphasis on health seems to have
helped increase milk sales overall.

The faculty recruited to teach IMC at Medill come
almost uniformly from careers in public relations and
advertising: Young & Rubicam, Hill and Knowlton. They
are the kind of suited corporate spin doctors whom reporters
and editors can often be heard cursing.

So where does journalism fit in? Some believe that
modern technology and marketing tools must be deployed to
make journalism as consumerdriven as Starbucks. Instead of
the journalist defining what's news, the consumer does.
Instead of trying to reach a mass of readers, listeners or
viewers with the same information, journalism should
concentrate on meeting the specific needs of small sets of
consumers.

The most radical version of this thinking holds that
the very notion of journalism as the product of stories that
are the product of reporters' investigating and narrative
sculpting should be jettisoned. In its place would be a
sophisticated "information exchange," a river of
facts that can be diverted to suit each consumer's needs.
Robert Entman, who teaches in the communications department
of North Carolina State, has written recently of a "new
information profession" that will throw away a
formulaic definition of news and instead "ask clients,
much smaller audiences, what information they need to make
their jobs (and lives) easier and more productive."
That means abandoning physical newspapers in favor of the
Internet or some future electronic delivery system. For
instance, according to Entman's ideas, a human-resources
exec of a Fortune 500 company might view box scores of a
baseball game or results of presidential primaries alongside
what's on her computer screen, then obtain reports on the
personnel practices of similar companies as discussed in
academic journals, and never have to confront the ‘’news’’
as interpreted by some journalistic gatekeeper.

For some journalism students, this thinking has become
axiomatic, part of an almost hostile view of how traditional
media have functioned. Kent Shacht, a 22-year old Medill IMC
graduate student, told me point-blank: ‘’Newspapers should
stop telling people what they think is news. Maybe that's
why newspapers aren't doing so well right now. They should
listen more to what people want.’’

In fact, depending on whom you talk to, it's not clear
that the apostles of IMC have much respect for what
journalists do. One Medill IMC class I visited featured as a
guest speaker Charles Ebeling, assistant vice president of
corporate communications for McDonald's. His appearance
coincided with the full-scale launch of McDonald's' Campaign
55, the early-1997promotion of the discounts that were being
offered on Big Macs.

The students did not seem to think there was anything odd
about Ebeling's visit. "I see my next job as being in
communications," one grad student said, "and that
can mean anything from magazine writing to PR to
advertising."

But even if the skills used in IMC and journalism are
similar and transferable, often the values that inform them
are not. Ebeling's speech provided an ideal example: Some in
the press - notably the Wall Street Journal - had already
gotten wind of problems with Campaign 55, and the Journal
was preparing an article for the next day's paper. (The
story noted that although some burger prices had been cut, a
customer had to buy a soda and fries to get the discount -
and a number of McDonald's franchises had raised the price
of those items just before the promotion began. Later, of
course, the entire Campaign 55 was halted after it proved to
be a nationwide flop.)

Ebeling's reaction was to denounce the press -
repeatedly, and even after he was reminded that a ROLLING
STONE reporter was in the room. "I don't know why the
Journal even cares," he snorted, adding that although
sparring with the Wall Street Journal is "part of the
fun of the business . . . the article is bullshit." He
saved special venom for Crain's Chicago Business, which he
called "a scandal sheet" whose "editor is
corrupt, and the reporters aren't much better." (To
their credit, several students I talked with later felt that
Ebeling's press-bashing was ugly and represented an outdated
approach that they found unsophisticated.)

In virtually the next breath, Ebeling emphasized a
classic IMC tenet: that local media make up a crucial - and
easily manipulated - part of any national hype campaign. For
instance, McDonald's promoted the anniversary of the Big Mac
as a news story, and Ebeling bragged about how many local
news stations picked it up. "We find that dropping off
the product to local TV stations really helped us get our
message out," Ebeling said, referring to the edible
press kits that McDonald's delivered to TV-news outlets
across the country. "When you get free Big Macs to
radio DJs, they talk about it all through drive time. Of
course, you don't buy anybody for the price of a hamburger.
Oh that you could." The students took notes.

AN INTELLIAgent person who's never met a lawyer
nonetheless has a rough idea of what is taught in law
school: You learn about the Constitution, about cases, about
state laws - and then they make you pass the bar exam.
Medical school is even easier to imagine: You've got to
learn about bones and nerves and veins and organs, and how
to fix them - and then you get a state license.

But journalists - do they even go to journalism school?
Should they? What are they taught there? And if Americans
hold such a low opinion of what journalists do, is it the
fault of journalism schools?

The stubbornly cacophonous roots of American journalism
have never allowed for a consensus - in the newsroom or the
academy - about the answers to these simple questions. There
were thousands of practicing journalists in the United
States before there were ever college-level journalism
schools (the first programs date from the early part of the
20th century). To this day, the profession has no uniform
opinion about what kind of background it requires. Among the
elite media - the big national newspapers, networktelevision
news, top magazines - many have no formal journalistic
training; neither Tom Brokaw nor famed Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee ever went to J school. Between and 1995,
only 4I percent of the journalists awarded the Pulitzer
Prize studied journalism at either the graduate or
undergraduate level.

Those in the journalistic stratosphere who did generally
attended one of about a dozen elite, and relatively small, J
schools. The other 400 or so schools - especially the
massive state schools such as the University of Texas and
the University of Florida - are to a great extent training
grounds for smaller newspapers and local television and
radio stations.

Those who teach IMC and who advocate a generalized
communications curriculum argue that they are simply
preparing students for the jobs that are available. From
there, it's easy for many to conclude that
journalismcommunications school is little more than a trade
school. At one time, many professors would have scoffed at
that definition, and others would have expressed shame over
it, but today's educators are increasingly unapologetic.
Cynthia Clark, an assistant professor at Boston University,
makes the case unabashedly. "Universities are in the
business of training people to get jobs," she says.
"That's what our consumers ti.e., students] are paying
for. I think education is a business. And if we are a
business, what is our goal? It's not just simply to educate
people to get them to think in new ways but to improve their
ability to be successful in society."

Journalism educators with a more traditional approach
argue that the presumed fundamental skills of journalism
good writing, critical thinking, thoughtful storytelling -
are becoming increasingly devalued, both in the marketplace
and in the academy. They believe that J-school training for
undergraduates must retain large doses of liberal-arts
training and that a customized "communications"
future chucks the babies out with the soiled bath water of
industrialera journalism. In 1995, as faculty of the
University of Arizona convened to discuss merging their J
school into a new ‘’information school,’’ one committee
member unknowingly summed up a prevailing J-school attitude
by remarking: ‘’Writing? We won't teach writing in this new
school. Writing is remedial.’’

THE 779-FOOT BROADcasting tower of KOMU-TV, the NBC
affiliate for mid-Missouri, dominates the landscape for
farther than the eye can see. It is the tallest structure in
the hundreds of miles between Kansas City, Mo., and St.
Louis. The tower seems a bit out of place, because this is
essentially farm country and the structure stands on the
edge of a cow pasture. On any given day, depending on the
direction of the wind, you can smell manure from the KOMU
studio parking lot.

Remote though it may be, the station is one of the main
attractions for students at the University of Missouri
journalism school. An anachronism virtually unheard of in
the age of media conglomerates, the university owns the
broadcast license to this commercial station. The broadcast
students in Missouri's medium-size journalism department -
6oo undergraduates, 115 graduate students - thus have a
chance to work in the very TV jobs to which many of them
aspire. Needless to say, this is a major draw. "That's
the big difference here," boasts Robert Logan, the
school's associate dean.

Tanya White, a junior from a Kansas City suburb, confirms
that the hands-on TV-production experience was definitely an
attraction - along with what she calls the school's
"extremely inexpensive" tuition of $1,Soo per
semester for in-state students. In many ways, White is a
prototypal journalism student. For starters, she is white.
The racial makeup of journalism schools, like that of the
journalism profession, is a pale mirror of multiracial
America. Only a few state schools have noticeable Latino or
AmericanIndian enrollments; blacks are virtually
nonexistent.

At the larger schools, the ratio of women to men among
enrolled students is often a striking z-to-I; visiting
classrooms more or less at random, one finds that it is not
uncommon for individual classes to have six or seven females
for every male. This situation is especially peculiar since,
at least at the top of the profession, media remains a
male-dominated industry: Only a handful of women have ever
been editor in chief at a major American newspaper or top
executive at a network news organization.

That gender gap does not dim White's enthusiasm for TV
news. Once a week, Missouri broadcast students like White
put in a Iz-hour shift at KOMU and will typically be
assigned to report and tape one story for that evening's
newscast. This being central Missouri, the stories are
necessarily small: One of White's pieces this year dealt
with how the town of Fayette (pop.: 3,ooo; 45 miles from
campus) was handling the recent introduction of its first
gis emergency system. "What I really like are people
stories," she says. "Especially in the outlying
areas, people are really glad to see us.

People are glad to see their local newscast, though the
same can't be said for other media. During the last decade,
Americans have developed a distinct attitude about the
national news media: They don't like it. Two major polls
taken earlier this year found that about half of the
American public - something like go million adults - doesn't
trust what it sees and hears in the press, including about
two-thirds who say that they expect press reporting on
political and social issues to be biased.

Intriguingly, though, as Americans express mounting
disdain for national media outlets like the Washington Post
and the New York Times, polls show that the media figures
they trust the most are local television anchors. That may
be because viewers almost always see these anchors laughing,
and they rarely convey unpleasant news without promising
something better coming after the next commercial. And at a
time when Susan Molinari gives up a seat in the House of
Representatives - in the middle of an elected term - to take
a job at CBS, why shouldn't Tanya White want to be on
television?

The large state schools in the Midwest and the South are
happy to help her, and every year they churn out Tanya
Whites by the thousands. Ironically, that may make it hard
for most of them to fulfill their dreams. The Indianabased
Society of Professional Journalists recently convened a
group to study the training and prospects of
broadcast-journalism grads. The oversupply of undereducated
J-school grads was apparently enough of a problem that NBC's
Jane Pauley lent her name to and subsidized what became
known as the Jane Pauley Task Force. Its results, reported
last fall, were grim: The task force estimated that there
are to broadcast degrees awarded annually for every hire
made in television.

That means that most of the teenagers who enter college
with a burning desire to be on TV won't be. The task force
found that six to eight months after graduation, only 28.5
percent of broadcast graduates had found work in
broadcasting. (Supply and demand works its painful logic:
Those who do get jobs start at an average salary of about
$16,ooo - the lowest of any field that requires college
training.)

And it's far from clear that other employers are going to
be drawn to the skills that students get from broadcast
training. On the Saturday afternoon that I spent watching
the student team of KOMU put together its evening newscast,
the emphasis - as with most local TV news - was on cutting
everything to fit between commercials. A single-engine plane
had crashed the night before, killing two passengers and
critically injuring the third. The student reporter and news
director - both undergraduates - had found out the cause of
the crash and the identities of the victims after recording
their spot but withheld the information rather than redo the
report. For all the considerable effort that the news
director put in, the most important function she served that
evening was to yell into the anchors' earpieces that the
broadcast was going long and they shouldn't fill time with
happy chat (which they did, anyway). At the end of the day,
one of the student reporters told me: "What's great
about working at the station is that we're really doing it;
this is the real thing," but then confessed, "What
makes it depressing is that four days a week in our classes,
we examine how superficial and crappy chat-TV news is, and
then one day a week we come out here and do the exact same
thing."

MY GUESS IS THAT IF you asked the 234 people starting
here this week about their career goals, not one would
mention public relations," says Tom Goldstein, newly
appointed dean of Columbia University's journalism school,
at the start of this fall's semester. In journalism
education, Columbia is the ultimate old school. As with the
West Coast J-school stalwart Berkeley, there are no courses
at Columbia with the term public relations in their titles;
students choose strictly from a serious-sounding menu of
classes: Finding a Writing Voice, the Social Impact of Mass
Media and Covering Health-Care Policies. Not entirely
coincidentally, Goldstein was Berkeley's J-school dean for
eight years before taking over this year as dean of the
Columbia School of Journalism.

The gravelly-voiced Goldstein has been on all sides of
the communications business: He was a reporter for the New
York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsday and the
Associated Press; he published several books; he taught J
school. Goldstein's personal mission statement is not about
getting people jobs or training them in the latest
technology. "We teach people how to gather information
fairly, quickly, innovatively - and we teach them ways to
present it clearly and ethically," he says somewhat
stiffly. "We imbue in students some of the great
intangibles: news judgment, values and ethics, and the idea
that truth is the ultimate goal." Of course, a few
might stray from the path. "There may be some who take
jobs where they can get them, who want to make a living and
support a family," Goldstein says, acknowledging that
he himself spent two years as a press secretary to former
New York Mayor Ed Koch.

Ask Goldstein about whether integrated marketing
communications threatens the soul of journalism school and
you get a shrug. "Advertising and public relations are
very popular and have been for a long time," he says
(and he's right - they have been a top choice for J
schoolers for more than two decades). He does not
necessarily believe that journalism is facing a jobs crisis,
arguing that the methodology of job-placement studies
"is not refined enough." And even if there are no
jobs in the future, Goldstein stands that conclusion on its
head, arguing that it makes journalism school all the more
vital: ‘’We're going back to a free-lance culture. That's
how it's going to be in the new media. You will get work
based on your expertise or your knowledge of a geographical
area. I tell people, `If you want to make a career, go to
Africa or Latin America. The big media aren't going to pay
to cover these places regularly anymore, but if you know the
language, know the culture and know how to tell a story,
someone will pay you to cover them.' It makes journalism
school more important.’’

Goldstein has counterparts all over the country. In
Brant Houston's University of Missouri class Reporting
Public Affairs, seven women and one man are clustered around
him for a hands-on lecture. Each student is reporting an
ongoing investigative story, and Houston, like a demanding
metro editor at a city daily, is pressing each for the
latest details. One student is investigating why a local
town's workmen's-compensation expenses shot up by $2.5
million in a single year, then went back down again. A state
financial official is dodging her calls and not responding
to her faxes. The 43-year-old Houston, executive director of
Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., bares a slightly
impish grin and says, ‘’Don't call her at home yet - she
hasn't dissed you that bad yet.’’ His advice: Take a day and
spread out a number of calls - the woman's office, her boss,
the public-relations person - and then just go sit outside
her office until she comes out. Another student has reached
a dead end on a story about juvenile crime: She can document
a definite increase in juvenile crime, but someone from the
state insists that it's a natural rise, given the population
increase.

Houston stands up. "OK," he says,
"what's a simple calculation you can use to find out
whether they're telling the truth?" The students are
silent until Houston answers his own question: per capita.
After nods and groans from his reporters, Houston walks to
the chalkboard and shows them how to divide the crime
statistics by the population numbers to come up with a
comparison figure: ‘’Are they giving you bags of horse
manure? They could be right, but you should test it. This is
math you need to exist as a reporter in the 21st century.’’

During the course of an hour, Houston uses questions
they have about their stories to demonstrate the virtues of
medians over averages; the difference between a corporation
and a limited partnership; what kind of information is
available from an assessor's office vs. probate court; the
uses and limits of the Freedom of Information Act; how to
use a driver's-license database. Houston even offers some
unofficial techniques for throwing off an interview subject
who's too polished at answering questions: You can use the
Columbo approach - let them think they're smarter than you -
or, in a pinch, try repeatedly calling someone by the wrong
name.

Basic training, nearly obvious - yet also desperately
needed. Go through the archives of any newspaper or TV
station - even some of the most prestigious - and you can
find astounding examples of bad math, inept comparisons,
statistical tomfoolery. In a 1996 survey, nearly 6o percent
of broadcast-news directors said that none of the
entry-level journalism graduates they encountered was
adequately prepared to understand statistical material such
as budgets.

And if they're not learning statistical literacy in
school, the vast majority of journalists will not learn it
on the job the way many once did - in today's downsized
newsroom. ‘’The average newspaper or broadcast station does
not have the time, resources or expertise to train new
arrivals,’’ says Michael Berlin, a professor at Boston
University. ‘’If you operate on the formula that they'll
learn on the job, that's a formula for crappy journalists.’’

BRENT BAKER, DEAN OF BOSTON University's large College
of Communication, is a fervent apostle of media technology.
When a reporter comes to visit him in his office, Baker
doesn't flood him with brochures; he opens a laptop to make
a presentation. A former military communications officer
with a haircut and no-nonsense demeanor to match, Baker
makes the case that multimedia-technology skills add value
to a journalism degree. Without them, his screen shows, a
journalism grad will start at a salary between $IB,ooo and
$22,ooo; with them, a grad can start at $35,ooo to $65,ooo.
(The listed source for Baker's figure is simply a May 1995
‘’Graduates Sample,’’ which might not be precise enough to
pass muster in the math department.)

The technology emphasis trickles down to the
communications faculty. One of Cynthia Clark's undergraduate
classes, Principles and Practices of Public Relations, spent
a morning dissecting the pros and cons of two Web sites:
Nantucket Nectars'- a site that the students universally
declared useless - and the Gap's, which many of the students
cooed over. As Clark filled in the site's contest/marketing
survey, students fought over who would get the pair of
khakis offered as a survey premium. In the midst of this
shopping as schooling, one student unabashedly whipped out a
mail-order catalog and began flipping through its pages -
and why not?

Clark completed the session by assigning her students
some weekend homework: Visit the Nynex Web site and list
what you think its top three public-relations goals are. The
choice of site was not entirely accidental. Clark is also
coordinating a BU project whereby Nynex, recently bought by
Bell Atlantic, provides computer and communications
equipment for schools in poor neighborhoods in the Boston
area. The initial grant is for $15,000, but BU projects that
Bell Atlantic could eventually give $100,000 to administer
and train teachers and students to handle the technology.

Dean Baker is proud of the arrangement, one of several
"strategic partnerships" that the school has made
with corporations. Since Professor Clark specializes in
theories of community relations as good corporate public
relations, she openly acknowledges that she is helping Bell
Atlantic to shift its image away from that of an unfeeling
utility monopoly to one of a caring corporate citizen. Other
BU partnerships have been made with Barnes & Noble
($250,ooo) and Wendy's (%zo,ooo). Not so long ago, these
were the kinds of organizations that journalism teachers
would encourage their students to investigate; today, BU
tells its students to do their fieldwork and public
relations. Baker boasts of the learning opportunities that
such experiences afford students and insists, ‘’You cannot
keep up to date unless you have strategic partnerships.’’

Occasionally one runs across students with ethical
qualms about the new corporate coziness. Over dinner, two BU
grad students gossiped with me about one of their highly
regarded professors, who grills his class for feedback on
Web sites that have hired him as a consultant. They were
uneasy about their classroom being used as a focus group.
‘’You don't want to be a guinea pig,’’ says Daphna Straus, a
Swarthmore College graduate.

For the most part, though, the students - many of whom
have aborted decent careers to shell out thousands for
journalism school - are so focused on getting a job in the
communications field that they hardly have time to think
about how or why the classroom is being transformed into a
marketingresearch lab.

At Medill, the integrated marketing communications
students behave as if they're already professional
marketers. Well before graduation, each student has business
cards printed up with the school's logo and an e-mail [Cont.
on 99] address. During seminars, students place carved
nameplates in front of their notebooks, making the classroom
feel like an oversize corporate boardroom. And that's what
it aspires to be: In one of Adjunct Professor Thomas Harris'
classes, Marketing Public Relations Management, the students
are hawking something more concrete than oranges. Their
semesterlong project is to help Chrysler market minivans.
Harris' students have split into six teams, each of which
must come up with a comprehensive plan to sell minivans to
people their own age. Fundamentally, this involves lengthy
interviews with their peers to determine the problems that
keep them from buying minivans - too middleaged, too big,
too dorky - and tailoring campaigns that play off those
images.

Chrysler takes these students' work very seriously.
It's easy for the company to find them, since Professor
Harris is the former president of Golin/ Harris, the car
maker's longtime ad firm. The students must sign
confidentiality agreements that allow them access to
Chrysler's private, internal research; they also receive a
budget of approximately $1,ooo to make their campaigns as
slick as possible.

The students love it. They know the field well enough
to know that they are getting a level of training that is
unavailable at just about any other graduate school. At the
very least, even if Chrysler ends up using none of the
student material, it has gained invaluable insight into the
twentysomething mind-set - at bargain-basement prices.
Harris says he's conducted some version of this gradstudent
marketing for nine years, with other companies, including
Lands' End, Ford Motor Co. and Miller Brewing Co.

WHAT MAKES THE J SCHOOL ESPEcially vulnerable to
shifting trends such as integrated marketing communications
is that it has never fit neatly into any slot. Medical and
law schools are indispensable to their professions, while
liberal-arts and social-science graduate programs are vital
to the continued functioning of the academy. Journalism
schools are a half-breed, commanding levels of respect that
would embarrass Rodney Dangerfield. When campus recruiters
from professional news organizations were surveyed recently,
only 3 percent said they strongly agreed that journalism
educators are on the cutting edge of journalism issues, and
the same number said that their organizations often rely on
journalism professors for advice about newsroom issues.
Similarly, Everette Dennis, formerly a senior vice president
of the Freedom Forum, discussing the perception of
journalism schools within universities, once wrote that he
knew of only two journalismschool deans this century who had
become university presidents. J-school deans, he wrote,
‘’are pariahs in not one but two sectors of society.’’

With J-school prestige so low, private media
organizations understandably have fewer incentives to fund
them. At one time, wealthy publishers (beginning with Joseph
Pulitzer at Columbia) saw journalism schools both as a way
to enhance their own prestige and as a taxdeductible method
of training a future work force. As enrollments and
faculties grew, some journalism schools in the 1970s and
1980's found themselves in the unlikely role of moneymakers
for their parent universities. More recently, however,
publishing magnates have turned away from the university
model. In part, this is because they found that with the
computerization of the newsroom and production process, the
people needing technical training the most were not the new
recruits but older journalists already in the newsroom.
Thus, the '8os and 'gos have seen the rise of think tanks
and ‘’media-studies centers,’’ where midcareer journalists
soak up the latest thinking and methods.

The archetype for these is Florida's Poynter Institute
- founded in I975 by the owner of the St. Petersburg Times
where hundreds of print and broadcast journalists a year
learn specialized research and reporting techniques. Another
prominent center is the Freedom Forum (founded in I935 as
the Gannett Foundation). Originally, the Freedom Forum's
Media Studies Center was located on the Columbia campus, on
Manhattan's Upper West Side. Visiting journalists carped
about how "inconvenient" it was to take a subway
so close to Harlem; after years of feuding with Columbia's J
school, the Media Studies Center finally moved to midtown
Manhattan, closer to the city's sky-scraping powerhouses.

That symbolic move - away from the traditional
university, toward corporate America - is precisely what
many critics say will happen to journalism schools if the
integrated-marketing curricula take hold. "This is
completely the wrong direction to go," says Robert
McChesney, professor of communications at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison. ‘’It basically acknowledges that
corporate commercial control over the media has effectively
killed off journalism, and rather than stand and fight,
[these departments] merely surrender and go with the flow.
It adds important legitimacy, moreover, to this corruption
of journalism by accepting advertising, PR and corporate
bullshit as similar and equal enterprises.’’

In McChesney's 1997 book, Corporate Media and the
Threat to Democracy, he argues that the principal function
of professional J schools was to assure that "the news
would not be influenced by owners and advertisers or the
biases of journalists themselves." McChesney forcefully
argues that journalism is not solely a commercial enterprise
but is, more important, a public service.

IT IS INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT IN today's J school to
find a sense that there must be a critical distance - a true
public interest - between the message and the media. At one
end of a hallway, marketers are learning to tie up
publicrelations material in snazzy, up-to-date packages, to
be unwrapped by the future TV crews being trained at the
other end of the hall. The coziness with corporate
communications is likely to produce a conception of public
service that is strikingly different from that held by
traditional journalists.

That strain can already be glimpsed on some campuses.
In addition to the local NBC station, the University of
Missouri operates one of the town's two daily newspapers,
the Columbia Missourian. J-school faculty member George
Kennedy has also been the Missourian's managing editor since
199o and wrote a column for the paper until 1995. The dean
of the journalism school, Dean Mills, is also the publisher
of the paper, and because, as Kennedy says, the Missourian's
publisher "rarely" has any input into the
newspaper, it was something of a scandal when Mills took
Kennedy's column away from him.

Today, Kennedy says that Mills was not punishing him
because of the topic of any single column but was merely
expressing the point of view that "someone making news
decisions shouldn't also be writing an opinion column."
But students and Missourian staffers I spoke with say that's
just code: Mills' move to kill the column came directly
after Kennedy wrote a column criticizing Wal-Mart "for
single-handedly ruining small-town America." The town
of Columbia is the proud home to three Wal-Mart stores and,
more significantly, to the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam
Walton's fortune. (In 1995, one of those heirs, the Laurie
family, pledged $so million to renovate the university's
basketball facilities. Though later revoked, it was to have
been the largest gift ever made to the university.) "It
goes to show you they don't practice what they preach around
here," says one disgusted grad student.

If journalism schools can get antsy about their papers
criticizing WalMart, imagine what might happen at the S.I.
Newhouse School of Public Communications, in Syracuse, N.Y.
The Newhouse School is feeling proud of itself lately: A
1996 U.S. News and World Report ranking declared it the
nation's best school for broadcasting and among the best in
several other categories. And the school's dean, David
Rubin, sounds like a conscientious objector, pledging to
‘’resist the integrated communications curriculum with every
strength I can muster.’’

But earlier this year, the school announced that it had
received a $4 million contract from the U.S. Department of
Defense, essentially to train the military on how to make
movies and take pictures of its wartime operations; Newhouse
has provided this instruction at some level since i992. Dean
Rubin acknowledges that during wartime and on issues like
Persian Gulf War veterans' exposure to toxic chemicals, the
Pentagon has a "sorry record for being candid"
with journalists. But he is quick to point out that these
Pentagon students are not the "information
officers" who have notoriously prevented American
journalists from fully reporting the news during every
military operation since Grenada. Instead, the 30 specially
trained students will become part of the pool of
photographers and video-camera operators whose work is a
component of the Defense Department's internal history. Much
of the million dollars a year of Pentagon money will buy
state-of-theart photo equipment that the school might not
otherwise be able to afford. Rubin defends this training,
arguing that teaching the Pentagon how to document its
activities is, in principle, no different from teaching any
other federal agency - although the Newhouse School does not
provide comparable service for any other federal agency.

WHAT'S AT STAKE IN THE J-SCHOOL curriculum war is
ultimately how to teach students to think about power and
powerful institutions: Do you confront the Pentagon, or do
you coddle it? Should you spend your college days thinking
about what Wal-Mart wants you to say about a subject, or do
you go out and find a real story?

Perhaps it was inevitable that the decades-long quest
of American journalists to give their craft the patina of
professionalism would end up making that craft
indistinguishable in a landscape of power centers. The
thinking behind the integrated journalism curriculum
represents only the latest nuance in what is, after all, a
larger American obsession in fields far beyond
communications: namely, the notion that we will redeem our
souls through greater and higher levels of consumption. So
long as journalism wants to be viewed as one profession
among many, it will surely find ways to mimic the mania for
consumer satisfaction that pervades almost every business in
the land.

But even if consumer satisfaction is a virtue in
journalism, it is not the only virtue. Genuine journalism is
one of the only fields in which consumers do not truly know
what they want until they get it. Indeed, a good journalist
must be ready and willing to present the public with
information that it doesn't want, whether that means
exposing a popular politician on the take or the corporate
coverup of breast-implant dangers.

And while the practitioners of integrated marketing
communications are too sophisticated to try to kill the
messenger bearing bad news, they wouldn't mind dropping off
a few bags full of hamburgers at his office. Of course,
there's no more point in denouncing marketing's assault on
the J-school curriculum than there is in ignoring it. What's
more, the marketing and advertising people will always have
the money on their side: That's what they're set up to do.

But there must be a way for traditional journalistic
values to survive - and maintain the core value of
journalistic independence. What journalism schools must do
is teach students to find the gaps in the models offered up
by the proponents of IMC. At the very least, that means
resisting curriculum changes that emanate from departments
increasingly dominated by public-relations professionals; it
may even mean demanding their ouster. Many of the
advertising and marketing courses described here seem better
suited to business schools, where they would raise fewer
questions about conflicts of interest.

Paradoxically, the task to save J schools from the
temptations of PR may entail a bit of PR work itself. For
all the ready opinions that Americans have about the shoddy
performance of the media, they remain startlingly unaware of
what goes on in journalism schools even the ones that their
tax dollars pay for. The real challenge for journalism
educators is to convince university administrators, policy
makers and - perhaps most of all - the general public that
what goes on in journalism schools is important, even
essential, to the functioning of a professional, democratic
media. Until that formidable communications task is tackled,
the debate between old-school reporters and newschool
information providers will not accomplish much more than a
dialogue between apples and oranges.

(*)JAMES LEDBETTER, a staff writer for The Village Voice, is the author of Made Possible By. .: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, to be published this fall (Verso Books).