Eyes front: Faculty’s forum on future of news packs room

Assistant Professor Nabil Echchaibi reminds the faculty that journalism is a practice and not an institution during a March colloquium on the future of journalism. Photos by Maura Auster.

(This story originally ran in the April edition of Colorado Editor, published by the Colorado Press Association.)

By Katherine Creel

Five SJMC faculty members offered their views on the future of news media at a colloquium on March11. The roundtable discussion focused on how the school’s strategic plan for growth could better reflect the realities of a rapidly changing industry, with innovation and collaboration emerging as the two main themes.

The discussion began with Professor Stewart Hoover defining the role of media in society and on campus. Instead of merely a “tool for stuffing information into people’s heads,” Hoover said, journalism represents a medium for the kind of dialogue required to foster democracy. For media studies to reach its full potential, he called for a curriculum that is both a synthesis of and an added value to the university’s broader liberal arts education.

“We have to be more aggressive about integrating what we do with what we think of as the distributed education that the students are getting elsewhere across the campus,” he said.

Nabil Echchaibi, an assistant professor who came to CU in 2007, talked about why large national and regional newspapers are struggling and how journalism schools need to address the problem. “Journalism is not an institution,” Echchaibi said. “It is especially not a corporate institution, but a practice.” The high operating costs and large staff size of many newspapers hurt not only their bottom line, but also their ability to offer the local, targeted coverage that readers want, he said.

“Network journalism is the future. It’s where the community is brought into that process of the news making,” he said.

In network journalism, which often relies on social Web sites and other new forms of media, readers contribute opinions, ideas and even content. Journalism schools, Echchaibi said, need to recognize this shift away from large news outlets toward the more collaborative and localized network journalism and tailor their curriculum accordingly.

“We think that since we are a professional school, we need only to think in terms of skills, and that’s not working anymore.”

Assistant Professor Rick Stevens expanded on the collaborative model of reporting, saying that The New York Times versus The Washington Post rivalries of the past 100 years are a crippling handicap. Newspapers and television news need collaboration to prosper in the 21st century, he said. Just as “no one person could have created (design software) Photoshop,” he said, no one person or even organization can adequately cover all of the community news taking place.

Because news is often treated as a commodity, Stevens said, the trend in journalism has been to hang on to the competitive practices that proved profitable throughout the 20th century, with new technologies and new forms of reporting becoming scapegoats for the recent financial troubles of many newspapers.

“We keep seeing this frame about ‘technology is killing journalism.’ More and more journalists are starting to realize no one’s killing journalism. We’re killing ourselves. We’ve done this.”

Instructor Sandra Fish returned from a Poynter Institute workshop on teaching multimedia in journalism schools and reported to the faculty and students at the future of journalism symposium.

The curricula at many journalism schools nationwide are evolving in response to such ideas, Instructor Sandra Fish said.

“It seems that a lot of schools are constantly looking and rethinking and trying to find new ways of doing things,” Fish said. She noted some of the innovations at Kent State and Drake universities, among others, such as integrating multimedia components into traditional reporting classes. With an increasingly competitive and technology-driven job market, “students are going to always have to be learning new things,” Fish said.

Tom Yulsman, an associate professor and co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism, said CU-Boulder already has many of these fundamentals in place in its curriculum. Professors and students need only to “jump in” and do the kinds of multimedia projects that are becoming industry standards, he said.

“We tend to lose sight of the fact that there is more journalism happening right now in a greater diversity of forms and with a bigger audience than ever,” Yulsman said, giving for example the number of successful Web publications focused on environmental issues. “Journalism is not dying.”

The colloquium is part of an ongoing effort by the faculty and administration to update the school’s strategic plan, which guides policy and curriculum decisions. Though it is only 3 years old, the 2006 strategic plan has already been under review for close to a year, reflecting the dramatic changes in the media industries.

“In 2006, innovation was a cool enhancement,” said Paul Voakes, dean of the CU journalism school. “Now, innovation is absolutely necessary.”