Data Show J-Schools Are Sitting on a Bomb   

Medsger Report confronts journalists and educators with ominous facts.

Nine out of 10 journalism educators think it is important for faculty members to have extensive professional experience. Journalists who entered the field with journalism degrees during the decade ending in 1994 agree in about equal proportion.

But a shocker: In spite of that, only one out of six people hired in 1994-95 for these faculties (just the journalism units, not including faculty members for advertising, public relations, etc.) had more than 10 years of experience as a journalist.

Work in the field, not the most ordinary kind but even the best, is being demeaned. Academic departments (and their universities) are engaged in a foolish effort to gain or hold respectability with even the most ordinary kind of paper credentialing, often at the expense of quality and intellectual substance.

This is a bomb that has been activated. It is nuclear.

Journalism programs in general, over decades, have gotten better – and some of the best ones much better. This was mainly for two reasons: They continued until recently to give professional experience high priority. And they were adding sophisticated dimensions by scholars who shed light on the historical, sociological, economic, legal, ethical and psychological aspects of journalism (not all of whom need to have journalism experience).

This progress, though, is obscuring the severity of the current trend in faculty hiring. So does the fact that news organizations now overwhelmingly want graduates who have studied journalism, and in general they like what they get.

Õhe hiring trend in most of these schools (not all) is documented in an extensive report by Betty Medsger, an outstanding reporter who later built a strong journalism department at San Francisco State University.

If you care about this and want to know more about what educators, new journalists, recruiters, supervising editors and others think about the trend and related matters – who is being hired, their level of satisfaction, their low salaries, and a serious movement to merge journalism with other fields in teaching – you should get "Winds of Change: Whither Journalism Education?" The first, summary part has just been published by the Freedom Forum. (Honest disclosure: I was on a panel of editors and educators who discussed the report at the recent Newspaper Association of America convention in New York; the foundation, which also sponsored the panel, paid for my expenses.)

The Medsger Report, with a great array of support statistics and interviews, leaves work to be done – including more teasing of the data in hand, which Medsger plans to do.

For instance, it properly deplores starting salaries; but the mixing of rock-bottom broadcast salaries with newspaper salaries produces a figure ($20,154) that seems to be less than representative of both.

The report has major implications for journalism accreditation. It points out significant failings in calling attention to amateurishness in teaching professional courses, and it notes disinterest in the extent of rigor in teaching writing: an ultimate test of critical-analytical skills.

This is a landmark study, perhaps the most important one of its kind in a decade. The ensuing debate cannot be muffled.