Teaching journalism
I’ve just finished teaching two modules of a Diploma in Journalism. It was my first time teaching. Every Tuesday for ten weeks I staggered down Clarendon Street with Lidl bags full of tabloids, broadsheets and mags, gobbled a sandwich outside the Maison de Gourmet, and had a coffee in the Library Bar.
Then around the corner to the rented classrooms to teach one hour of sub editing, followed by an hour of freelance and feature writing, with a short break in between.
I grew fond of the students, particularly the ones who were really engaged, and I made a big effort to point each one in what I thought was the right direction for them. I know how hard it is to get started.
Most of them enjoyed the course and found it helpful. I suspect some merely left with a better understanding of the hyphen and the remnants of their romantic notions in a plastic bag. Some got published though and one even got a job on a paper.
I made it my ultimate aim to get all of the 29 students to write a 1,500 feature by the end of the ten weeks, and try to get it published. To that end I juggled things around a bit on the syllabi I had inherited from the previous lecturer and I gave assessments that built up to writing the feature. The average attendance was 18 and of those, 15 wrote a feature article. Just over half the class.
The class edited several news stories and a feature article. I got them to write a feature brief for one good idea of their own. They analysed newspapers and magazines, looking at the sources of stories, and the ‘news values’, of various publications. I pushed the three ‘R’s on them, “Read, Research and Write”. I gave them handouts, exercises, PowerPoint presentations, page layout plans, suggested reading, job hunting tips and case studies from a bunch of working journalists. To focus the course more clearly I surveyed them on what they read, journalists they admired, what they wanted to write and why they wanted to write it.
And for my part I learnt you cannot teach people to write, particularly if they do not read. In fact, you cannot really teach people, you can only facilitate them learning. Talented people, such as those who got published, will generally succeed even if you’re rubbish at teaching, and the untalented will remain pretty much as you found them, though with perhaps a better appreciation of punctuation.
I was surprised at how many of them didn’t read newspapers, even though they were doing a class in journalism. And for every one of them who understood that journalism was about honesty, fact checking, accuracy and the public interest, there was another that didn’t see the problem with junkets, regurgitating press releases and unverified third-hand reports. In this, the class was a perfect reflection of the professionals they aspired to be.
The class notes I had inherited talked about ‘the changing roles of journalists’ with the advent of new technology, saying that ‘there are more opportunities than ever for freelancers’ but failing to mention the collapse of trade union power that complemented the shift. No mention of ‘outsourcing’ and the subsequent deterioration of working conditions. The books and notes were silent on some of the realities of freelancing, talking about ‘discipline’ and ‘persistence’ but failing to mention ‘set-up capital’ and ‘nepotism’.
Some of the notes and text books I consulted were equally selective when discussing career opportunities and the relationship between journalism and public relations, treating them as two branches of the same tree, which is perhaps the reason why so many students were unreflective about the role of PR in news production. I found myself wondering who is writing these textbooks, and deciding there is certainly a need for a ‘no bullshit’ how-to book covering the Irish print media.
I showed them the results of a rough content analysis of The Irish Times I had done. Out of 56 stories in the first 10 pages, most domestic news, something like 24 were based on press releases, 18 on court reports, a couple on wire copy, five from the Dail and the rest were original reporting. Most of them were shocked, and I suggested that, were they try the exercise for other papers, the number of stories based on press releases would be significantly higher.
In DCU, where I did an MA in Journalism, ethics was an hour-long class squeezed into the dog-end of the schedule. And as my class learnt, it is even harder these days to squeeze ethics into the newsroom or editorial office, where a journalist might be producing ten or more news stories a day, and relying more than they should on wire copy, press offices, marketing managers, and ‘corporate services’ as the local authorities call them. I showed them the weekly diaries of reporters on dailies and weeklies. I asked them what they would do if they were in the newsroom under pressure to pump out stories.
Then I told them how bad the money was.
Back when I was an undergraduate in Maynooth I did a Certificate in Journalism in Griffith College. I was repeating first year anthropology and working in a video shop. One night a week I would take two buses, a kebab in hand, out to the class. The following year I took what theory I had picked up on the course and applied it to the college publications. I have undoubtedly learnt many of the essentials on the job since, from the days of getting paid in pints on Friday in my first subbing gig, to the more lucrative present.
Both the MA and certificate courses I studied gave me three advantages. They brought me into contact with working professionals, who often treated the course syllabus with a slight disdain or bemusement I found revealing. They taught me the mechanics of writing for newspapers, which comes easily if you read a lot of them. And they also lifted the lid on the industry; somewhat disillusioning but nonetheless vital.
Do journalism courses produce good journalists? I think the answer is of course they do. But they also produce exceptionally bad journalists. More…The quality of the course is invariably dependent on the amount of practical training provided, which leads one to conclude that – given the chance – a lot of it could be picked up through work experience, which the students will have to do anyway. I made my students edit, write, research and pitch precisely because that is the only way to learn it. Plus you only make a mistake once; the only way to learn is the hard way.
That aside, there is a danger that what courses teach in terms of best practice is balanced out by what they engrain in terms of bad practice; over reliance on PR and the failure to seek out the ‘why’ behind a story. A big challenge for anybody who goes straight from school to spend several years studying journalism in university is to actually understand the ‘why’ of what they then go on to report.
PR is fabrication. Pre-packaged material for the easy consumption of journalists, whatever the subject matter is. If students aren’t taught to automatically treat it as highly suspect then they aren’t getting the best training.
But with the industry so utterly reliant on PR fodder, there is the distinct possibility their new job will be one where they spend a large chunk of time rewriting press releases, making a couple of calls, slapping a headline on it, and calling it news.
admin @ April 24, 2008