Michael Wolff: Columbia flunks relevancy test
Michael Wolff, USA TODAY
Steve Coll, whose books include Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, and who has just been appointed dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism — aka the “J-school” — is a very thorough and worthy writer. But, in my opinion, he’s also quite a boring one.
Often, boring equals thorough, and so is a positive virtue. But it might seem that, as journalism becomes an ever-more challenged profession, people trying to build a journalism career might want to know how to hold an audience’s attention, with verbal pyrotechnics, say, or technological acumen, as well as how to scrupulously inform it.
Coll, like his predecessor as dean, Nicholas Lemann, comes from The New Yorker, and before that The Washington Post, two organizations that were once powerful voices but are now substantially less so (and, as well, less advertised in).
I’m sure they are hoping at Columbia that Steve Coll will be something of a renaissance man and can, despite his own orientation, look to the future.
But hiring another New Yorker writer, one who, of note, has never tweeted in his life, is yet quite an audacious statement about news values and direction. It is an opposite point of view, and almost as audacious as just hiring the journalist with the most Twitter followers.
The overriding circumstance which the J-school seems to regard as not its concern is that the news business, which it counts on to employ its graduates — newspapers, magazines, television news, even online news — is shrinking at historic rates. According to Outsell, an information industry research group, newspaper revenue has fallen by more than 40% from 2007; at the same time, television news is stagnating and online advertising rates at news sites are in steep decline. Given that this pace seems to be continuing, Columbia, raking in $58,008 in yearly tuition and fees from each student and then sending them into a world of ever-bleaker prospects, ought, more reasonably and honestly, to just shut its doors.
But, ironically, or cruelly, journalism schools are getting more applicants precisely because it is harder to get a job. (Coll, like Lemann, the current dean, conspicuously did not go to journalism school.)
Journalism school, especially Columbia’s vaunted program, is often anti-market in outlook. Much of what the market wants, journalism training doesn’t give it. You surely won’t learn at Columbia how to be a tabloid reporter, or an opinionated Fox News host, or an online aggregator, or a brand-name columnist full of brio or bile, or a social or mobile visionary or quant.
Rather, journalism school tends to teach you, admirably or quixotically, many less economically valuable skills: methodological reporting, sourcing protocols, research procedures, and a grounding in ethical and civic responsibility. The ideal goal continues to be to get you a job on The New York Times or Washington Post, two organizations trying to fire more people than they hire.
The J-school has begrudgingly tried to adapt, at least to the extent it has been necessary to avoid open ridicule. (It often adapts after the ridicule.) It slowly accepted television. After many years of avoiding the inevitable, it expanded its digital program — curiously hiring a Web editor from London to run it. It now has courses about using data in reporting. But to say it resists the outside world would be kindly.
Many of the school’s teachers continue to be journalists who have lost their jobs, or who have barely had them in the first place, or who are book writers or magazine writers — which hardly represents a job market. Indeed, as the news business shrinks, teaching becomes one of its few growth areas.
Fairly, you might say that, as a professional school, Columbia’s failure to modernize and meet the market is a type of professional malfeasance or academic scandal. (Sylvia Nasar, a professor at the school, filed a lawsuit last week against the university, accusing it of an actual scandal — looting part of the journalism school’s endowment.)
The disgrace is not just that the school takes students’ or their parents’ money to train them for a livelihood that it reasonably can predict will not exist. But it is also an intellectual failure: The information marketplace is going through a historic transformation, involving form, distribution, business basis and cognitive effect, and yet Columbia has just hired a practitioner to lead it with little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.
The J-school is a product of many New York organizations, such as The New York Times and Time Inc. — supported by these organizations, getting its teachers from them, trying to send its students to work for them — which themselves are existentially threatened by the future. So perhaps the hole is just
too deep to dig out of.
But the missed opportunity is painful.
New York remains the information capital of the world and the benefits to the city of people who can think creatively and astutely about the rapid industrial transformation occurring in the business would redound for generations.
In a logical if imaginary world, there is no reason why Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism should not be as vital to the building of the front end of new information forms and relationships as Stanford computing students have been to creating the back end.
The J-school should be disgorging class after class of information entrepreneurs — except for the fact that there is practically nobody at the school who is an entrepreneur.
And if they can’t do this, the school should at least be teaching its students how to write exciting prose.
Michael Wolff is a graduate of Columbia College but not of Columbia’s journalism school.
Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com (mailto:michael@burnrate.com), and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC (https://twitter.com/MichaelWolffNYC).
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013
