Here's a piece submitted to us by Chris McGillion, former Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He currently coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia. In the following two-part essay, he reviews the pros and cons of journalism school programs today, and how editors, teachers and journalists can benefit from them :


Over the years that I've spent teaching journalism more than practicing it, I've had to take a keen interest in complaints from editors about the graduates of university-based journalism courses. I detect that some of these complaints reflect an antipathy towards university degrees by people who have risen to the top of their profession without one and I suspect that some complaints are nothing more than attempts to sheet the blame for bad appointments home to someone other than the hirer.

But other complaints are not so easily dismissed. Among these are the charge that university courses over intellectualize what is basically a craft, that curriculums more often reflect the interests of academics rather than the industry, and that journalism graduates have been taught how to communicate rather than what to communicate - that they lack, in other words, the kind of knowledge that is needed to get a handle on a round.

All of this is true but it is not equally true of all journalism courses. Many are little more than media studies courses parading as journalism courses. These produce graduates who (think they) know how journalism should be done rather than how it is done and for this reason often develop a disdain for the profession they are trying to enter.

Many universities delude themselves (and their students) into believing they are the breeding ground for senior and/or specialist journalists (investigative reporters, feature writers, even columnists) when in fact the industry is most often looking to recruit junior reporters who can put their hand to any story they are given.

Many journalism courses encourage an academic study of politics and history when editors want simply a solid grounding in general knowledge (dates, events, personalities) in order to be able to contextualize stories for their readers.

And many universities compound each of these problems by requiring staff to undertake PhDs and "peer-reviewed" research in order to get promotion with the result that good teacher-practitioners develop into academics far removed from the cut-and-thrust media world they are supposed to know about.

I would be the first to argue that the best place to learn journalism is on the job. Ironically that is how I and most of the journalism teaching staff I work with came to know what we know. But I would also argue that a journalism course, properly structured and taught, is the best way to prepare most people to learn quickly on the job.

One reason is that the best journalism courses involve students unlearning inappropriate skills - not just acquiring appropriate ones. Take writing for example: most students enter university understanding writing to be something you do for a small audience of people who know more about the subject than you do and who are paid to read whatever you write. I'm referring to teachers.

Getting students to understand - as a matter of reflex - that journalism involves writing for a broad range of people who expect the reporter to tell them something they didn't know and who won't read it unless the writing itself provides good reason means combating 13 years of schooling. Is the industry really prepared to take on that task?

Another reason is that a journalism student has generally had three years to think about whether or not they actually want to pursue a career in journalism. Whenever I've asked editors if retention rates are higher among journalism graduates than other graduates (or non-graduates), I'm met with a stony silence. No one seems to have done the research and yet the answer - which I strongly suspect is in the affirmative - would seem to me crucial in determining the investment of time and effort an editor makes in a recruit.

The other challenge I constantly put to editors is to work with those journalism courses they know produce the better graduates in order to help produce the best ones. Too few respond positively with internship placements, offers of industry-funded workshops, training manuals, etc. But until the firewalls between academia and the media are broken down in this way, editors must bear some responsibility for the graduates they get.

Source: written by Chris McGillion, who coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Before taking up his teaching position, he was the Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.