Dear President Bollinger,
Like many alumni of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, I read with interest of Dean Nicholas Lemann’s departure, and that you would be heading up the search for a replacement. Hence, my letter to you.
I am a graduate of CJS, and I also taught there as an adjunct for 8 years, which I suppose gives me some standing for offering my advice (not that you have to take it). I also taught at NYU’s journalism school for another 8 years; was both founder and President of New York Times TV; designed and built many news channels around the world including NY1, Channel 1 in London, Current TV and so on. My clients over the years have included The BBC, Radio Free Europe, The Voice of America, Conde Nast, McGraw Hill and on and on. In other worlds, I have been around.
The world of journalism has changed radically since I graduated from CJS in 1983. At that time, and I suppose since its founding in 1912, it has been the pre-eminent source of journalism education; the locus of what it means to be a journalist. That is why I consider your choice for the next dean so significant.
Since its beginnings, journalism has been viewed more as a ‘trade’ than a ‘profession’. The graduates of CJS and other journalism schools have been trained to work for other people – reporting, writing, crafting stories now in a variety of media, but craftsmen and women more than anything else.
I believe it is time for a seminal change in the entire profession, and I believe that Columbia now has an opportunity to place herself on the forefront of that change.
When the ‘Internet Revolution’ occurred, it happened in the world of journalism first – (note the enormous impact on newspapers to start, and everything else latterly). The Internet Revolution happened in our industry and on our watch. As journalists, we should have ‘owned’ the web revolution and the web – but we didn’t and we don’t.
The Internet Revolution happened ‘to’ us, not ‘with’ us because we were fundamentally unprepared. That was a failure of our basic journalism education. I would say (as I hire many graduates) that as a profession we are still ‘unprepared’. We are unprepared because we continue to view ourselves first and foremost as employees – employees of newspapers, or television networks or websites. But employees never-the-less.
This is what the school, since its inception, has taught its graduates to be: employees. Good employees for sure, but employees.
Anyone who attended CJS could have just as easily gone to law school. Had they done that, however, their career path would have been radically different. That is because, as a profession, lawyers organize themselves vastly differently than do journalists, at least until now. It is true that lawyers can go to work for corporations, but lawyers also form law firms; and they can make a great deal of money.
Lawyers are in the business of ‘managing’ the law – for their clients or for society. Journalists are in the business of ‘managing’ information. Information was once an interesting appendage to business and indeed society. Today, it is at its very core. The entire Internet is, if nothing more, a technology for information management. The heart of the web is also the heart of journalism – the gathering, processing, curation and presentation of information. This is what journalists do and this is what the web does, whether that information is text, photo, video or anything else.
Until the mid 18th Century surgery and barbering were one in the same trade. It was not until 1800 that a Royal Charter was granted to create the Royal College of Surgeons. Thus it once was with medicine, now it can be with journalism.
I would thus urge you not to promote an academic, nor should you honor a veteran of a dying industry like newspapers or television news with the job. Rather, I would ask you to find someone who can use the position to essentially re-define the entire profession; indeed to take it from ‘craft’ and ‘trade’ to a real profession – one that is on the very cutting edge of the digital and information revolution instead of always playing catch up. One in which its practitioners arrange themselves as professional partners or owners instead of as employees. As one that encourages and honors entrepreneurship and investment, as opposed to seeing business as inherently ‘evil’.
This can be done, but it requires someone who understands that the very definition of ‘journalism’ must now transcend the traditional world of writing and reporting (even with lip service of more to ‘digital’) and instead create an entirely new profession.
Thanks
Michael Rosenblum CJS ‘83
