Here at the journalism department at the University of Memphis, we are about to brave yet another assault on mount curriculum change.

I’ve observed this process now at more than one university, and I can tell you it’s the epitome of Groundhog Day.

It’s not that there isn’t a general acknowledgment of the need to change. The problem is that change inevitably means giving some things you are currently doing up (unless you plan on making students take 150 journalism credits to graduate and you have a veritable army of faculty to teach them). And giving things up that you’ve grown comfortable doing or that you’ve come to see as non-discussable is more difficult than just adding shiny new things on.

I’ve already posted a list of skills and knowledge I think all journalism students need (and it got some great comments; check them out!).  So here’s a rough draft of my dream curriculum.

Couple of introductory notes: We are hoping to ultimately “converge” the curriculum (a term I no longer hear outside the academy.) We still have sequences in broadcast, newspaper/magazine, and Internet journalism (yes, we realize that making distinctions between the latter two are patently ridiculous), and we’d like to turn all of those into one “news” major, perhaps with different areas of emphasis.

My personal view (not shared by many other academics I know, I’ll confess) is that the key is to give students choice. Trying to fit them into obsolete boxes doesn’t make sense anymore. For example, is having the ability to do traditional print layout and design still useful for many? Sure. But does every single student have to take it? I’d say no (I have three degrees in journalism from three journalism schools and I never did).  I say limit the number of required courses and let students mix and match and take classes they are interested in. We have good advising here, too, so we can guide them along the way. If they gravitate toward certain courses, offer more of them. While students may not “know what’s good for them” yet, they also tend to be more motivated and open to learning when they perceive that they have a choice in the matter.

So here we go! Feedback and ideas always welcome, of course.

All Students Take:

• Intro to Journalism and Mass Communication: Read Elements of Journalism and learn the core enduring values that apply regardless of medium; introduction to current issues affecting journalism, advertising, and PR
• Ethics
• Media Writing The basic intro to writing and reporting news that all journalism schools have
• Reporting –  Reporting techniques in all media, including video and social media, are emphasized.
• Computer Assisted Reporting – University of Memphis currently requires this of all majors, which I think sets us apart.
• Basic Web Programming – Basics of how to create a Web site. Students should come out of this class with a portfolio Web site/professional blog.
• Visual Journalism – emphasis on all forms, still, video, and graphics
• Advanced news practices - More advanced writing and reporting and editing, using all media but especially honing writing skills
• Entrepreneurship/freelancing /business class – ideally in partnership with business school.
• Capstone – Our new multimedia course in which students take on a meaty, real-world project. Taught “real-world newsroom” style, not just another class.

Everything else is an elective. And there are plenty of electives covering a wide array of skills in journalism.

Emphases would be voluntary, which would mean students could either a)get an emphasis OR b)mix and match and end up with just a degree in “news”

For example:

Broadcast Emphasis would include various TV courses e.g. TV Producing, TV writing, etc.

Web emphasis would include advanced courses in programming, etc.

News (NOT “newspaper/magazine,”  gah!) would include courses like reporting public issues, layout, etc.

Don’t feed the trolls!

That’s what everybody tells me. There’s no point, and next thing you know, they’ll be in front of your house with an AK-47. And I know they are right. But I leave comments on stories anyway, sometimes, even when I know that I’m not going to change any minds.  Why do I bother?

Newspapers have, by and large, let story comments turn into ghettos where hate and personal attacks thrive.  But smart folks like the ones at Xark and Patrick Thornton, writing here for Poynter, have any number of creative ideas on how to elevate the dialogue. Respond. Create ratings systems. Elevate good comments to prominent positions and perhaps even dedicate a blog post or story to expanding on them. Cultivate a community around your site. Although it’s nigh impossible to guarantee people are using their real names, encourage them to do so.

Comments are a rich source of story ideas, can help reporters verify stories or add critical context and background, and they are especially crucial in a time when studies show that readers come to Web sites expecting greater interactivity.

Even more importantly, one of the core principles of journalism, as noted by Kovach and Rosenstiel,  is that it must provide a forum for discussion on issues of critical public importance.

Let me share a brief quote from them:  “The news media are the common carriers of public discussion, and this responsibility forms a basis for our special privileges. This discussion serves society best when it is informed by facts rather than prejudice and supposition. It also should strive to fairly represent the varied viewpoints and interests in society, and to place them in context rather than highlight only the conflicting fringes of debate.”

So despite my knowledge that trying to change individuals is more than futile, I sometimes jump into the fray with this principle in mind, hoping that over the long haul, being willing to participate will elevate dialogue. And I figure that if journalists don’t have the courage to stand up to knee-jerk charges of political bias, then at least professors probably should step up to the plate and be willing to, for example, say something is false when it is demonstrably false.

A couple of days ago,  one of my professors when I was at Mizzou, Charles Davis, published a column in the Columbia Daily Tribune in which he argued that journalists have not done a good enough job covering the outpouring of hate raging across the nation. In his view as a First Amendment near-absolutist, the more we expose hate for what it really is, covering it openly and rigorously,  as journalists once did in the days of the civil rights movement, the more likely it is to shrivel up and go away.

As you might expect, the comments described Davis as a Nazi and similar, as well as predictably trying to assert that calling for civility and for exposing hate for what it is – is  somehow politically liberal?

So I left a comment. And as always, I left my real name. I always do. And I challenged the other commenters to do the same.

I will admit I probably could have been more diplomatic myself, but the comments I made were,  I thought, fairly benign. One thing I do know for sure is that they weren’t political in nature. You can read them yourself at the end of the article – my name is signed at the end and my handle appearing above the comments is my Twitter name, brizzyc.

Personal attacks rolled predictably in. I was called “smug” and “self-righteous,” among other nice things.

And a woman named Ellie Funke of the Columbia/Jefferson City, MO area took it upon herself to email my boss and one of my colleagues with a link to the article and the following comment: “Not sure if you have seen the articles and ramblings your assistant professor contributes.  She and her colleages (sic) are not someone my (sic) will study with”

Sigh. So what is the lesson here? I don’t know, you tell me. Clearly, as one of my colleagues noted, mud wrestling with a pig leaves you both filthy and the pig will enjoy it. But I hate to refuse to participate in public dialogue out of fear.

Picked up a few good tips at AEJMC in Boston last week from some smart folks on how to better prepare journalism students to be entrepreneurs.

This is something we in the academy are increasingly (or should be) interested in.  Journalism students should be prepared not only to launch their own enterprises, but also to have a more entrepreneurial mindset even in traditional news organizations, as my last post explained.

Web developer and founder of Placeblogger.com Lisa Williams discussed the importance of learning to pitch your idea over Indian food with some  Web-interested professors one night. If you can’t pitch your idea, not only are you unlikely to get others interested, you also may not have enough clarity yourself about your core purpose.

Your pitch must be concise, compelling, and clear.  If you can’t get them in under 30 seconds, you won’t be able to get them in an hour. Practice it over and over, get honest feedback, and keep cutting the fat.

She added more specific classroom ideas via Twitter:  One way to start – and I plan on doing this – is having students practice pitching their stories (which should have the added benefit of improving leads & nut grafs). Ask the class if the pitch is clear, and ask them to paraphrase it to test.  Then ask:  Is it compelling? Why would someone both reading/paying attention to this?

For example, here’s Williams’ pitch for her site Placeblogger:  “Placeblogger is the largest searchable index of local weblogs.”

Also, never pitch unless asked, Williams says. Nothing worse than irritating the people you need to impress.

Dan Gillmor, author of the well-known book We The Media and the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State, also spoke at a panel on student entrepreneurship.  Gillmor co-teaches a hands-on course that guides students through the process of online media development, entrepreneurship and business. Here’s the syllabus.

Gillmor said emphatically that “I have an idea for a Web site!” is not going to fly in his course.  Instead, students must first identify a need or a void in the community they could fill. This is an important and, I think, often overlooked aspect of building a successful site or tool; researchers Esther Thorson and Margaret Duffy of the University of Missouri have developed a model for helping news organizations identify needs prior to building fancy features.

Gillmor also said that he teaches his students not to fear failure.  Their course projects are not a chin-stroking academic thought exercise – this is about “demos not memos” (not sure who to credit that phrase to, but I love it).  Not everything is going to work, and even a project that ultimately fails may be worthy of an A – the value lies in being willing to experiment. It is important to own both the process and the outcomes.

It’s also important to develop ideas quickly, launch them before you are fully satisfied, and then fix what is broken. Embrace the chaotic process, he said. It’s okay to be embarrassed when you first launch a site – you will learn from your mistakes.

“I don’t think journalism has an entrepreneurial problem, I think it has a psychological problem,”  Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation told a group of journalism professors at a panel on student entrepreneurs the AEJMC conference last week in Boston.

Journalists, Newton said, have finely honed instincts for chasing a story, doing whatever it takes to nail something down and coming up with clever ways for getting the information they need on deadline.  They are, in other words, full of the kind of entrepreneurial skill and spirit needed to bring an idea to life. The problem lies with thought patterns that limit their ability to exploit that skill set -  they don’t think broadly and apply that same mindset to changes in the business model or the organizational structure.

Journalism students are taught that the story is ALL that matters, but this is not true, Newton said. Stories sustain and are sustained by a whole media ecosystem that must function for the best journalism to thrive. That ecosystem includes factors such as monopoly power, capital, and control. (The last sentence via tweet from Mindy McAdams, @macloo, who took better notes on that part than I did. )

This comment struck me as insightful – although I would note that this is a systemic and not an individual-level problem. For most individual journalists laboring in the trenches,   institutional structure and culture make it difficult to think or behave more entrepreneurally, and this is something that will require full organizational commitment from the very top on down to change.

I’d agree that the days when journalists can separate themselves from all other aspects of the business are long past. Of course there are important ethical considerations and we must continue to keep outside influences out of the news, but the time is certainly now for thinking creatively about ways of organizing work flow, and being willing to experiment with new products or ideas that might fail.

Having written this, not sure if it’s as interesting as it first struck me while at the session – curious to see if others have thoughts to contribute.

This is just one of what I hope will be a series of short posts about what I learned at AEJMC this year. I will also blog about what some of the other members of this panel said.

Here’s a post I meant to publish earlier this summer before life got crazy…I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – even a simple, non-traditional wedding takes more time than you’d think to pull off!

Earlier this summer, I read one of the more provocative and unique posts I’ve seen in awhile about the future of journalism in the blog Xark.  It sets out a vision for for how reporters could begin, through their normal day-to-day work, to build detailed databases full of information from their stories – a rich trove that could be mined for future stories to add context and depth, to discover new connections and relationships that lead to great enterprise, and for myriad other to-be-imagined uses.

Instead of simply producing an important but highly perishable commodity, the news story, the reporter is also producing an easily searchable, analyzable, and lasting resource full of information about the community and its institutions and leaders.

In one of our many conversations about journalism that used to be over beer and now, sadly, is more often over email, my friend and fellow journalism professor/Mizzou PhD (almost) Jonathan Groves made an interesting point   – if the future of journalism is about data, then why are so many news organizations laying off their skilled librarians?

He directed me to the manager of the Christian Science Monitor’s library and information center’s Leigh Montgomery, who makes the following point:

“Librarians are precisely who have been leading in managing information and knowledge in the organization, providing technology training and collaborative tools ­ and adding value and context to information to make it accurate, distinctive and unique. Librarians are already doing what the new, leaner, next workforce will have to do more of:  inherently sharing their vast knowledge to help their colleagues, improve the product and grow the business.”

“We know this.  And we know it is like shouting into a hurricane.”

“What astounds me is that many news organizations, beyond the publication date, are not as attentive as they could be to the most valuable thing they have:  their content.  There has been such a fixation on a pay wall or the traditional models of subscribers & advertising or getting as much Google juice as possible that no one seems to be thinking about the many ways this content will live on in other markets.”

“In all the ink and pixels spilled over the future of journalism I have not heard one mention of this.  And whether you have been in business for a century or part of a new startup, that information is valuable, and it needs structure ­ keywording & taxonomy added to it so it can be accessed, and repurposed. All this is then repackaged and sold and accessed by students, researchers, professionals, in databases or on other platforms where the user depends on relevant, fact-checked, objective content.”

Brilliantly said, Leigh, and I think this is something news organizations need to start thinking a lot harder about.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as disgusted as the next person that the big TV honchos have lost their way, sending obsequious emails to Sanford promising to let the governor “frame the conversation as you really wanted” (not even bothering to be subtle, eh, Gregory?), and giving a black eye to journalists everywhere by refusing to call a lie a lie for little other reason than fear of being accused of false bias.

But I just wanted to pause for a minute in our “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” lament and say a quick word to honor those journalists who are still, right NOW,  laboring in the trenches doing good work, despite challenges that I think even the likes of Cronkite and Halberstam might have struggled with.

Like others in our current economy, they’ve seen friends and mentors laid off or take buyouts; they’ve had to adapt to an increasing workload and declining morale. But they still love a good story. They’d rather quit than sell their integrity to an advertiser or a crooked pol. They care about what they do. They double-check facts – and wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night if they think they got something – even a small thing – wrong (do you know how many times I’ve heard that anecdote?)

I can tell you first-hand that the vast majority of what I’ll call “real journalists” – often not the famous ones in the glamorous, big market jobs – are thoughtful, passionate, and work hard  because they truly believe that it is important to their communities and to democracy itself.

I’m not just rhapsodizing away here – I’ve done the reporting. I  spent three years traveling to newsrooms all over the country between 2002 and 2005 for the Committee of Concerned Journalists. I don’t have the numbers on hand at the moment, but I can tell you from crunching the numbers myself from the surveys we conducted that the majority of them told us they got into journalism to do good or serve the public. It sure as heck wasn’t for the money.

Our workshops were full of passionate discussions about the struggle to get it right. They didn’t view bias or objectivity in a simplistic way as many assume, but a nuanced one, and they worried and strategized about things like trying to cover all races and classes in their community better, or how to better engage the public on important issues.

My current academic research  involves in-depth interviews with newspaper journalists from all departments – from online to the features design team – and all levels, from executive editors to the fresh-out-of-school reporters. These folks do not resist change in the way many new media pundits think.  While they may fear change (don’t most of us?), they have thought hard about how their jobs could intelligently evolve in an online era. They know what their core values are, and they want to find ways to carry these into the future. Indeed, the obstacles to change come less from the individual recalcitrance that is often blamed, than the power of routines and broader systemic factors (I’ll write more about this later).

And then there are my students, whose eyes gleam when they get a good story, when they realize that they can hold school administrators’ feet to the fire, when they know they have a scoop.

Browse the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Web site. Look at some of the Pulitzer Prize winners.  Check out the Center for Public Integrity.   The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an impressive watchdog team. Media Storm is making hard-hitting, long-form multimedia work. And that’s just scratching the surface. Good journalism is everywhere – if you bother to read or watch it.

Anyway. I’m not trying to say journalism doesn’t have problems and failures (and we sure do flagellate ourselves about those, don’t we?). And YES, there are bad journalists, just as their are bad doctors and lawyers and yadda yadda. Unfortunately, far too many of them seem to work in the highest profile jobs on television.

I believe that citizen journalists, bloggers, etc. do and will contribute importantly to the work of watchdogging and telling important stories, so I’m not just toot tooting for the MSM here, either.

But if we fail to honor the good stuff we DO have in the pursuit of an ideal that may or may not have been as bright as we think (would Cronkite had been the same competing against the cable networks in a 24-7 news environment? In the middle of a massive economic cluster!@%? I hope so, but who’s to say for sure?), I think we will ultimately ensure the demise of good journalism rather than continue to improve it.

We talk, and we talk, and we talk,  and we reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again.

Some days, I want to cry uncle.

If you know me, you are probably rolling your eyes right now because you’ve heard this rant I’m about to launch into before. For years.  Let us ALL hope we can stop talking about this, and start focusing on concrete ideas for the future.

Back in 1997, Bill Kovach,  Tom Rosentiel and the Committee of Concerned Journalists  convened a series of forums throughout the nation, bringing together no fewer than 3000 journalists, academics, First Amendment scholars, and regular folks to identify and discuss the core values of journalism.  [Yes, they were my bosses for three years in a  fantastic job I had with CCJ. Maybe I'm just biased. But read on.]

They also partnered with a team of university researchers who conducted more than 100 three-and-a-half hour interviews with journalists. They conducted two national surveys. They did 12 content analyses of news coverage.  And finally, they did their own extensive lit review of the history of journalism.

They compiled the results in a little book called The Elements of Journalism. Here’s the cheat sheet. This book is not, as I’ve heard some academics refer to it, “the Kovach and Rosentiel view” of journalism. As the previous methodologies described attest, these core principles are widely agreed upon, and indeed, they are at the very core of the professional identities of every good journalist I know.   Truth, accuracy, a discpline of verificaiton, transparency,  independence from faction, watchdogging the powerful, committment to conscience, and more. Each individual journalist/news organization might apply them somewhat differently in a particular situation, but these principles honor and respect that.

I refer to the book, only slightly in jest, as the Bible of Journalism to my students.

These are our values. Anything out there that follows these values is journalism. Anything that does not is something else. I’d even go so far as to argue that the “something else” isn’t per se bad. But it IS different.

So WHEW, now that we’ve figured that out, let’s take these values and carry them into the future. How can we make them come to life in new media? How can we help audiences to understand these principles that guide us? How can we build community and actively engage our audience in becoming partners with us in carrying these principles out?

Ah, but yet.

Still.  Still I have to try to convince a small group of academic colleagues that “the blogs” are actually just a content management system, just as newsprint is also a vessel for the National Enquirer.  Are bloggers journalists? Ah, but that fraught question has such a simple answer. If a blogger follows these principles, why indeed, she is. If a blogger opines in his pajamas without any basis in fact, he may be adding quite productivley to the cacophony of voices that makes free speech and democracy great, but nope, not a journalist. Can a “citizen” BE a journalist?  Sure they can, if they follow these principles – although I’m among those that certainly believe that healthy democracy still depends on people who can actually make a living wage doing this.  But I digress.

Today I “attended” virtually a symposium sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at my alma mater, Mizzou. One of the fellows, Mike Fancher, formerly of the Seattle Times, did a year-long project on modernizing the “journalist’s creed.”  He pointed out the importance of conscience, a discipline of verification, and “telling the readers how we know what we know” which Kovach and Rosentiel call transparency. Now, I agreed with every word that Mike said.  It was an intelligent and thoughtful presentation, and it was only five minutes long, so I’m sure he was barely able to scratch the surface of his work.  But I couldn’t help but be struck that we’ve been here before.   Do we need to continue re-doing the same research that produced Elements – or should we move on to figuring out, in the concrete sense, how to bring them to life online?

This is the focus of my own research, which I hope to start blogging about more now that the semester is over.

If anything, the Internet is the best thing to happen to journalism, as Steve Rhodes smartly argues. Yes, we need a new business model (Fine folks at RevenueTwoPointZero have brilliant, concrete ideas on that.)  But let’s move forward and quit getting distracted by the same debates.  I don’t have all the answers, but I’m excited as heck to try and find them.  After all, democracy depends on journalism. Let’s do it.

Earn your master’s degree in journalism at the University of Memphis and help change the lives of some bright, hardworking teens. We’re looking for an eager and energetic journalist who is flexible and loves to work with young people. The position pays your tuition and includes a $7,000 stipend.

The successful applicant will become the new assistant coordinator of The Teen Appeal, the Scripps Howard citywide high school newspaper published in the U of M Department of Journalism. He or she will begin in August 2009, have an undergraduate degree in journalism, strong editing skills plus experience in layout and design and reporting for a campus or commercial newspaper.  Multimedia and Web production skills strongly preferred.

We’ve been operating for 11 years as a partnership with the Scripps Howard Foundation, our Scripps Howard daily newspaper in Memphis, The Commercial Appeal and Memphis City Schools. Many of the students we work with come from lower-income households, and, in part thanks to our program, our alumni are now working in a number of prestigious positions in journalism and other fields.

This position will allow you to learn more about the Web news habits of a critical demographic group that newspapers and other media nationwide hope to attract,  making this position a potential resume booster.  We have high hopes of improving our Web site in the coming year.  A redesign is in progress, but you find our temporary site at http://www.teenappeal.com/.

Please send a letter, CV/resume, and three writing samples (may be in the form of links to online work) to Carrie Brown, assistant professor, University of Memphis Department of Journalism, Brown.Carrie@memphis.edu You can also reach her at 202-251-5719. You will also need to go through the normal University of Memphis graduate school application process. See https://umdrive.memphis.edu/g-journalism/grad.html for more information about the program or contact graduate coordinator Dr. Rick Fischer at rfischer@memphis.edu

The journalism department at the University of Memphis is in the early stages of updating  our curriculum to help our students build the knowledge and skills they will need in the new media world.  I would love to get your feedback as we embark on this project.

Currently, we have three news/editorial sequences:  newspaper/magazine, broadcast, and the rather unfortunately named “Internet journalism.”  We are exploring the possibility of collapsing these sequences into one – but maybe still preserving the opportunity for students to develop an emphasis in one area.

A key aspect of a curriculum revision in this era of converged media is  identifying a set of skills/competencies you’d like ALL of our graduates to have.   Here’s my current list – admittedly these are coming off the top of my head and are fairly general in nature.  I’ve included both “traditional” and the “new” skills here, and many of these we already teach.

I’m doubtful that we could ask our students to develop expertise in ALL of these skills, but I’d like to see them develop at least some familiarity with the majority of them – and maybe go deeper in one or two specific areas. Please add some or comment on these.

(A caveat: The MOST important aspect of a college education in journalism, in my view, is to develop a strong ability to think critically and creatively. These skills I list here are more mechanical in nature – critical thinking is something that must be part of all coursework.)

Skills We Want ALL of Our Students to Have:

• Writing a)Basic grammar and style b)Standard news story c)Feature/Strong narrative writing ability d)Developing a online “voice” on a (beat) blog f)writing a script for video/podcast
• Reporting and covering a beat
• Interviewing, developing sources, talking to people
• Computer-assisted reporting/databases
• Basic video shooting and editing (Final Cut?)
• Basic principles of Web design and some coding (CSS)
• Basic principles of shooting photos/ability to put together a slideshow (e.g. Soundslides)
• Record audio and produce a podcast
• Writing headlines AND basic search engine optimization
• Content curation – how to select good links/content and make sense of it to readers, and offer context/background on an issue for going deeper (akin to NYT Topics pages)
• Using social media to a)report b)promote your work c)foster community d)cover a beat e)figure out what’s going on in your community
• Flash? Creating (simple) Web graphics? (I know less about this myself..)
• How to produce live reports – via text, via Twitter, via CoverItLive…
• Be able to answer the question: What is the BEST media to use to cover this story?
• I’d tend to argue that layout e.g. InDesign is no longer as relevant – but I never had to take a class on it when I got my degree in the 1990s either, so I’m no expert.

Knowledge:

• Core values of the profession – Elements of Journalism (and ability to think critically about how to apply those values in their daily work – and in new media)
• Ethics
• Media law
• What is going on in media/journalism today? (All students should be armed with ideas for new business models, ways to deliver content how/when people want it, etc.)
• Basic knowledge of the institutions of civic life, e.g. county/city/state/national government
• Entrepreneurship? Learning how to freelance and work for non-traditional organizations?

Old media vs. new media. Tired, tired, tired.

I’m far from the first blogger/Twitterer to point out that it is getting old, but yet, it persists. New media folks love to congratulate themselves over how smart and cutting edge they are and to snuffle at those who just “don’t get it.” (The journalism Twitterverse was alive with self-satisfied, condescending giggles at year-end “you’ll miss us when we are gone” columns appearing in force in newspapers). Old media types are still quiver over the inferiority of “the blogs” et. al. and how these uppity upstarts “can’t replace” their standards and their judgment.

Let’s try something new in a new year. Or perhaps better put, let’s remember something old.

What this fight is really about, at its core, is journalism. I believe in journalism like I believe in few other things. Journalism is, according to the hundreds of journalists, academics, and citizens interviewed around the country by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, a process governed by a set of core principles for the purpose of giving citizens the information they need to be free.

These principles (which bear review for all of us) are what define journalism – not who practices them or what organization (or lack therof) they work for. Anyone CAN be a journalist, provided they do work in accordance with those principles. Also, journalism is not a FORM. Journalism can take place on a blog, on a You Tube video, in a newspaper, or on TV (etc.). These things are just the shell, the tool, the vehicle.

Distilled to its essence, journalism is ultimately a search for what the brilliant Stephen Ward calls pragmatic truth. It is a method that assists us in the constant struggle for an inherently imperfect understanding of the world around us. This struggle has been around long before the printing press and the term “journalism” was even invented, though through the years we’ve continued to adapt, and (mostly) improve the method. Journalism tells us stories about ourselves and the time we live in. It binds us together. It keeps us free.

Advocates of citizen journalism who would just as soon see newspapers implode and the most curmudgeonly city editor out there who sneers at the self-absorption of those who Tweet, I think, agree on some fundamental level that journalism – if defined this way – is good. It matters. It is worth fighting for.

This is not an either-or, zero sum game. Traditional and new media are BOTH vital – we are on the SAME TEAM. The “Internets” — as we fondly called them in graduate school — make journalism BETTER – offering a host of ways to make those principles come to life.

The current rub is that most (not all) of the people who abide by these principles of journalism work at newspapers. And at the other “mainstream media” outlets as well. Newspapers are still the largest employers of journalists in local communities. Just because everyone CAN be a journalist doesn’t mean that everyone WILL – funny how it helps to have a paycheck, health insurance, and a 401K to really get things DONE. It is hard work, after all. The important thing is certainly not the dead trees or the form but the PEOPLE whose job it is to do this very important thing called journalism.  What we need to do is find as many creative ways as possible to keep those people doing journalism – in whatever form it may take and regardless of who ultimately signs the paycheck.

What we are REALLY up against, all of us, in my view, is a poor education system that does not do a very good job teaching people the basics of government and the fourth estate nor prepare them with the writing and information gathering skills they need to be more than passive media observers.  We are up against a broken business model that hugely undervalues the service we provide to our communities. We are up against apathy and anti-intellectualism. We are up against mind-numbing reality television and infotainment. We are up against a culture that makes having work-life balance an ever-elusive goal, a culture in which we barely have time to breathe much less truly care about and invest in our communities.

OUR new years resolutions should be less infighting and gloating, more solutions. More transparency. Do our part in a variety of ways to empower the voiceless in our communities to learn how to create their own content and to recognize the value of journalism.

All hands on deck, people. We’ve got a wild ride ahead.