Columbia University Graduate School of The Internet

www.thefuture.com

I have a meeting with Nicholas Lemann this afternoon.

He is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

I, myself, am a graduate of the J-school at Columbia, class of ’83. I also taught there until 1993, when I was fired for dating (and later marrying… and later divorcing (but I don’t think they fired me for that)) one of my students.  All in all, a very big mistake – but more on that another time.

Today, I am going to Columbia not to discuss marriage but rather to talk about the future of journalism and the school.  

I responded to the school’s report on the future of journalism.

I was against it.  

I thought it was pointless oatmeal.  I still do.  

Much to his credit, Dean Lemann invited me to come up to Columbia to talk about alternatives to the report.  That’s my job this afternoon.

And here is what I am going to propose:

Columbia’s Journalism School was founded in 1912 based on a $2 million grant from Joseph Pulitzer, publish of The World. (Think of this as The New York Post, 1912 version).  The school didn’t really get started until 1935, when Dean Carl Ackerman created the first Graduate School of Journalism.  It was based on a mini-newsroom in which students spread out across the city of New York during the day to gather stories, then wrote them up.

Think of The Front Page.

That model of the Moot Newspaper Newsroom was the model that I encountered when I went to the school in 1983.  We still had manual typewriters.  We still had clip files in the library. We still had a library!  And the students published their collected writings in a make-believe newspaper that they turned out called “The Bronx Beat”.  

My year was an election year, and we had a make-believe TV newsroom coverage of the election.  I can still remember my classmate Ron Suskind (who later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize himself) doing the ‘minute by minute’ analysis into a microphone that went… nowhere.

What Pulitzer constructed for himself and his newspaper was essentially a factory to create good employees for his newspaper as soon as they graduated.  

The school trained good employees.

It still does.

This is its biggest flaw. 

First, the shop floor that it trained its employees to work on increasingly no longer exists.  

The ‘newspaper newsroom’ is a dinosaur, soon to be extinct.

As Pulitzer created a kind of make-believe newspaper newsroom of the 1920’s at the school to prepare the students for the ‘real working world’ of the 1920’s, so perhaps it is time for the school to create a make-believe newsroom of the 21st Century up there at Columbia. And that would something that is entirely online.

For in the future, there will be no newsrooms.  As there will be no newspapers.

Alas, the faculty at most of these places is populated by ‘former’ employees, and so it is very very very difficult for them to dissociate themselves from their ‘glorious’ past.  

“I remember when Dan and I” begin far too many lectures in the TV dept.

Most students would no doubt ask “Dan who?”

Secondly, the whole problem at places like Columbia centers around the ’employee mentality’.

The school was founded by a rogue businessman, Joseph Pulitzer. He was the Rupert Murdoch of his day.  He tried to expurgate his many sins by building the school. Instead, he compounded them. He succeeded in creating a factory for ‘good employees’, but he infantalized an entire industry.

The graduates of the school long to be good employees – to work for The New York Times or The Washington Post or NBC News or CNN.

Not to build… but to work for.

Good for Joseph Pulitzer and Bill Paley. Bad for the profession.

The report on the Future of American Journalism was written by two lifetime employees. Leonard Downie Jr., spent a lifetime at The Washington Post, as an employee. He rose to be Executive Editor but he still got that weekly paycheck.  Michael Schudson is a lifetime academic. He also has spent his life getting that printed paycheck every week.

Nice guys though they are, they are hardly the right people to ask to figure out the future of journalism.  What they have been bred to do for a lifetime is to figure out where the next paycheck is going to come from. And that is what they came up with in their report. Pretty much devoid of any other ideas, they came up with ‘ask the goverment or some foundations to write more checks’.

Great!

Really great solution.

Well, it’s a bit like asking two members of the UAW to figure out how to save GM. The last thing they are going to come up with is cutting pay and benefits. In fact, all they’ll focus on is how to keep the pay packets and benefits intact – which is essentially what Mssrs. Downie and Schudson have come up with.  

If Columbia is to survivie; if Journalism is to survive, it now has to cast aside its beginnings as a trade school of good employees.  

It has to grow up and embrace the business of journalism. And I don’t mean one course for students on ‘The Business of Journalism’, I mean a complete rethinking of what the profession means.

And that is not easy.

The alternative however, is apparently, begging for a few foundation grants.

And that is no future.