I can’t seem to get online from here…
I was in the class of 1983 at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
The MA program lasts only 9 months, so I started the school in the fall of 1982.
When I walked into the newsroom, I was a bit astonished to see that we were still using manual typewriters.
Not only had the Apple II been released some 3 years earlier, IBM had also come out with its PC two years before. Yet there was not even a Smith Corona Selectric in the place. It was all clattering keys and ribbons and carbon paper.
Some 28 years later, not much has changed in the journalism education department.
Tuition at Columbia is now a staggering $51,156, not including room and board. For 9 months!
There are 400 students in each class, at least according to their brochure.
The school is thus taking in $20,464,000 a year in gross revenues.
There are 43 full-time faculty members listed on the school’s website.
Let’s assume the average salary for a full-time faculty member is a generous $100,000 (which I think is probably high, but so what)
That means that the school is spending $4.3 million on salaries.
Where is the rest of the money going?
Hmmm?
And more importantly, what are the students getting for their $50 grand investment?
The whole notion of a Journalism School is a relatively recent idea.
The school was founded in 1912, driven by a $2 million grant by Joseph Pulitzer, a notorious tabloid journalist. (Maybe he felt guilty). The school was very much the product of a newspaper driven mentality.
Journalism, unlike law or medicine is a hard thing to define, and it’s whole founding is so recent that perhaps we would do well to take a moment to re-define it before the current vision we have takes it down the drain with the newspaper industry.
We live in an information society.
Almost everything we do, and pretty much everything on the web, is based on the gathering and processing of information. That information may come from reporting, but it may also come from the web, from blogs, from ‘citizen journalists’, from corporate sources – the list of contributors just keeps growing.
In such a world, information curating, management, packaging and producing is a big business.
How big?
Just ask Google. That’s what they do.
Our world is now defined by the ability to process this growing avalanche of information.
In 1912, when Joseph Pulitzer’s school started, there was no ‘wave of information’. On the contrary, information had to be extracted – like gold from rock reluctant to give up its secrets. Those days are very much over. We are in a world that is the polar opposite.
When I went to the J-School we learned how to find those tiny facts. We had a ‘clip file’ in the library – envelopes filled with old newspaper clippings. It was 1983, but it might as well have been 1883.
Today, the demands of the world are vastly different.
The journalism schools have a unique opportunity to take command of this relatively new world of information curating and processing and packaging.
There is no Graduate School of Google. But there should be.
The ‘profession’ needs ‘professionals’. It needs professional standards. It needs people trained in what is, in fact, an entirely new but explosively growing field.
I don’t think Columbia is the place where this is going to happen.
But it might happen in Colorado, if the news reports are to be believed.
The University has a moment to place itself on the cutting edge of a new discipline, much as Columbia did in 1912.
The question is, will they have the courage to do it.
