Serious Business   

The terrorist attacks have impelled many journalism students to look at their future profession in a new way.

On the morning of September 12, Jacqui Banaszynski, who holds the Knight chair at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, led her writing students up the stairs in Lee Hills Hall to the newsroom of the Daily Missourian. There they sat through a brainstorming session of editors and reporters on how the paper should cover the aftermath of the terrorist attack on America.

Afterwards Banaszynski gave her class a choice: Stick with the course syllabus, or tear it up and plunge headfirst into real-world stories. They chose reality.

Working in teams, one group of students began assessing security at Missouri airports, only to be thwarted when government officials shut off records they were seeking. Another team interviewed local leaders of five different religious faiths with questions ranging from how you find solace in the face of tragedy to how each religion views grieving, justice, retribution and violence. Another group explored how successive generations learned about war, from World War II to Vietnam to the Persian Gulf to the reservists and ROTC students now facing the war on terrorism.

"They learned how to take a big international event and make it local without looking stupid," says Banaszynski. "Some rose to the challenge, others were confused, and some fell by the wayside."

If the attack challenged and energized the nation's newsrooms, it also injected a welcome dose of reality into its journalism classrooms. Professors quickly revised or shredded course outlines to exploit what Indiana University's David Boeyink calls "a teaching moment."

Journalism students, faced with front-line reporting that eclipsed anything they'd seen in textbooks or videos, were forced to admit how little they knew about the world. They suddenly were reading about comparisons to the Vietnam War, which ended before they were born, or the Persian Gulf War, which flashed by most of them in elementary or middle school. That some were reading newspapers at all was revolutionary, so accustomed were they to getting their news from television and the Internet.

And on their own, or prodded by professors and guest speakers, they were quick to question what they saw, especially the initial flag-waving by some journalists and the extent to which the terrorism story crowded out other interesting news. Some were inspired by the chance to get a taste of a big story; others were turned off. Some reacted to the biggest story of their lifetime by questioning their own fitness for the reporting craft.

Robert Zelnick, acting chairman of the Boston University Department of Journalism, says the events of 9/11 opened students' eyes. "Before, they were more interested in fun things. They wanted to be an anchor at ESPN or cover the arts," he says. "They now have some sense of the responsibility that journalism has."

At American University's School of Communication, associate professor Wendell Cochran says his students have become a little more serious about the role of the press. "I think they have recognized something I told them: If you believe in the Jeffersonian principles of what we believe is journalism, it's times like these that reaffirm our status," he says.

Journalists like to talk about big, defining moments that shaped their career or gave their profession its cachet. They cite the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate--even the feminist movement of the '70s and '80s. Most deeply embedded in this folklore is the notion that young people watched "All the President's Men"--the movie version of how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon – and then flocked to journalism schools with stars in their eyes.

It's all myth, according to Lee Becker, a University of Georgia professor who annually tracks journalism and mass communications school enrollment. He says there's no evidence that Watergate or any other news event spiked interest in the profession enough to cause more people to enroll in communications programs. The increase in people going to J-schools began before Watergate in the '70s and continued through the '80s and into the '90s, Becker says, and was a reflection of basic employment patterns.

Robert Giles, the Nieman Foundation curator and a former editor and publisher, says in the '80s and '90s some "universities were under pressure to teach more theoretical subjects--with less emphasis on print and broadcast. More Ph.D.s and fewer professionals were teaching. There clearly was a shift in emphasis that wasn't favorable to print, and there was the trend in television toward entertainment-showbiz – that hasn't helped." Giles, longtime president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, hopes the events of 9/11 will move journalism education back toward its roots. Teachers who've queried students in introductory reporting classes about their ambitions know the typical response. After separating out those who aspire to PR and advertising, and those who have no clue, they're left with answers like: "I want to be the next Connie Chung" or "I want to be a travel writer" or "I want to snowboard and write articles about it for a magazine." They don't get many "I want to be the next Bob Woodward" responses because most of them don't know who Woodward is.

The story of the attacks and the aftermath seems to appeal to students, perhaps because it's so multidimensional. It's not just about responding to terrorism, it's about the economy, science, medicine, religion, the environment, bureaucracy, patriotism, charity and enough heroism and grief to animate human-interest stories for years to come.

Lillian Lee, an Emory University sophomore, says she decided to apply to the journalism program with a double-major in business because of her exposure to 9/11 coverage. "I've been able to focus on the media for the first time in my life," Lee says. "I can remember my dad talking about Walter Cronkite and the Vietnam War, but I was too young for the gulf war." Now, she says, she's reading the New York Times, Time magazine and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and watching CNN, ITN and the BBC. Like many other students, Lee is critical of the flag-waving by the media, the "beating of the anthrax story into the ground" and what she considers the media's kid-glove treatment of the Bush administration.

Erin Fitzgerald, a Missouri news-editorial senior who is also majoring in political science, hopes to find a reporting job in May, but has law school as a back-up. The events of September 11 "showed me that I would rather become a journalist than go to law school. I want to eventually report from abroad," she says. "September 11 reaffirmed that career goal and probably increased my interest in reporting abroad. I still want to be able to write a combination of breaking news stories as well as longer features for newspapers."

At the University of Oregon, broadcast journalism professor Jim Upshaw sees this as a great time for reflection. Upshaw, who thinks journalism schools should be weeding out more students, says: "Students need to look at this event as one that sweeps us off our feet. The question for a 20-year-old should be: How do I fit into this picture? Where do my tools work best?"

Educators have plenty of ideas on how to better prepare journalism students for the world that changed on September 11.

• In Boeyink's Indiana ethics class, a debate quickly erupted over the news that a Missouri television station had asked reporters and anchors to not display patriotic items. "First," says Boeyink, "we discussed how the flag is a symbol that has many meanings, and that others, perhaps someone from the Middle East, might perceive it somewhat differently from you. And if you go out to interview someone wearing a flag on your lapel, it might raise questions about your objectivity. I think they got it. It was a good learning moment."

• At the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, interim director of journalism Michael Parks launched weekly meetings and coffees with students on topics as varied as what responsibilities journalists have in war, how journalists can keep their emotions out of their coverage and how to evaluate the job being done by newspapers and television. The Annenberg School was one of several USC programs to support a series of campus "teach-ins" on the war.

• At Fordham University, the decision by the television networks to drop advertising in the first few days after the attack presented Professor Everette Dennis' class on media and the entertainment industry with an instant case study on the public-service versus profit-making role of the media. "We were immediately able to use this as a living laboratory," Dennis says.

• At the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, lecturer and Annapolis bureau director Adrianne Flynn quickly suspended the old beat structure in which students in the Capital News Service cover state government for some 70 clients. "Almost every story we've done since September 11 has had a 9/11 angle," Flynn says. "It colors everything we do." When about a week after the attacks, some students asked Flynn if they could get back to their old beats, she replied: "Nine-eleven is your beat."

The news service's stories included an examination of the sensitivity levels of metal detectors at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, and a look at air-raid sirens and how they've gone out of fashion. Graduate student Christopher Sherman wrote about life aboard the USNS Comfort, which sailed from Annapolis to Ground Zero in New York City, where the ship provided food and supplies to rescue workers.

• At American, Cochran had his graduate students put out a special edition of the school's online newspaper. "Some were glad to have something to do," he says, "but others just wanted to watch TV." A few days later, Cochran found himself in a real-world dilemma, trying to decide whether to let his students go to Capitol Hill to cover the anthrax contamination of the Hart Senate Office Building. He decided against it.

• At Emory, before September 11 journalism program director Sheila Tefft's World Media and Foreign Affairs class was studying how the American press failed to chronicle the Holocaust. "September 11 suddenly became the centerpiece of the course," says Tefft, a former Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent in South Asia who reported from Afghanistan. There seemed to be a parallel, she says, to the original theme of the course: "Terrible things can happen when the press doesn't pay attention to what's going on internationally. Or when it doesn't question the government for reasons of patriotism, or whatever."

• At the University of Washington's School of Communications, associate professor Roger Simpson awoke September 11 to find years of future research staring him in the face. Simpson heads UW's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which studies how reporters cover victims of trauma and how stressful situations in turn affect reporters. He uses classroom acting exercises to demonstrate how to interview people in stressful situations.

More long-term, ingrained changes to journalism programs are also in the works. These changes would include incorporating a heavier international affairs studies component within core journalism courses, offering students a better understanding of the First Amendment and giving more instruction on such basic skills as source development and clear writing.

Since his school was in the midst of a curriculum review when the attack came, USC's Parks is considering requests to add courses in international affairs, and will coteach one himself on international crises--how they are managed and how the media should cover and make sense of them. In the public relations sequence, the school will add lectures on how that industry's practitioners should deal with events like September 11.

And Annenberg will expand its science reporting class. Students who previously learned how to cover basic science, health, medicine and the environment will now also study "engineering dynamics." The addition, a direct result of the attack on the World Trade Center, is designed to teach students what questions to ask about engineering.

At American, Cochran is considering a new course on the press-military relationship and wants to build into existing courses a segment on how journalists should deal with trauma, much as it is taught at the University of Washington's Dart Center.

Loren Ghiglione, the new dean at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, is considering a course in which students would visit refugee camps, perhaps in India. Another idea is to have students observe people coming to Chicago from Sudan and similar countries, then visit those countries to see how those people lived there. At the graduate level, Ghiglione envisions a program in which general assignment reporters could come to Medill and get a master's degree in business and economics with an international emphasis, capped by a 10-week work/study trip abroad.

Joe Foote, director of the Cronkite School at Arizona State, is counting on the terrorism story to help journalism schools make the case for more international content in their curricula. He says the television networks' coverage of foreign news before 9/11 "bordered on malpractice." And curricula must also be presented in a way to make students understand the pressures they'll face, especially in wartime, he says. "They will be under pressure to be openly patriotic and to not question the government," Foote says. "Students need to be prepared for this."

Whether or not the war on terrorism ends up turning students toward traditional journalism, it's clear that at the very least, it's clarifying the role of the media for many of them. And while the trying times are turning some journalism students on, others who've had a taste of the kind of reporting this situation requires are rethinking their career choice.

For Maryland's Flynn, the events of 9/11 prompted a jumble of reactions. There was a rumor that the nearby state Capitol was a terrorist target. "We had some people crying. We had mothers calling and saying, 'Send my child home right now; I don't care what I'm paying for this education.' " While the student reaction over the long haul was for the most part positive, Flynn says, some "freaked out" and few "saw it as the biggest thing since sliced bread." Grad student Sherman "was really gung-ho about journalism" when he came back from his trip on the USNS Comfort.

Missouri's Banaszynski, who is also assistant managing editor/Sunday of the Seattle Times, says the reactions of her students who are getting the dose of reality are mixed.

"My graduate students are like 'wow,' but the undergrads are still learning," she says. "Some are getting jazzed, but others are turned off by having to get into people's faces. They want to write nice stories, but they're horrified by having to ask tough questions. They are asking themselves, 'Is this really what I want to do?' They're saying to themselves: 'I feel too much pressure here.' "

But for USC's Parks, the situation fosters the perfect marriage of the real world and academia. The former Los Angeles Times editor and foreign correspondent – he recently checked his old passports and found that he'd made 22 trips to Afghanistan--is almost giddy describing how some of his students have reacted. He tells of one American-born graduate student whose parents moved from India to Pakistan when it achieved independence. She decided to bring a camera to Pakistan during the holidays and shoot a project on the lives of women there. "She's totally charged up," Parks says. "It was her idea. She really wants to be a foreign correspondent."