Professional Journos Need Training, Too

They're not fulltime journalists yet, but my journalism students have the same reservations as professionals when it comes to citizen journalism. For a journalism history assignment at the end of this past semester, I had the students claim a spot on a timeline spanning the next 10-12 years and write a short essay about a future development, drawing on some of the journalism history we’d studied to provide context. They could pick something that is unfolding in 2008, too. A couple of students “predicted,” or shall we say projected their (understandable)wishful thinking into the future, and saw the public and industry requiring journalists to get licensed, or at least a BA in Journalism, to better draw the line between amateur and professional. (They see wisdom in training citizen journalists as well, recognizing that some will play a necessary role in the future.)

The oral forecasts provoked lively discussion, and while ideas like licensing of journalist bring up important constitutional concerns, I won’t dive into the deep end of the pool today. At some point, I will, though. Journalism, of course, is not a profession in the strict sociological sense of the word. Certainly, journalists are professionals and have lots of protocols and rituals for getting things done. But journalists have often taken pride in not being a profession like lawyers and physicians, pointing to the First Amendment as their source of legitimacy, right, and freedom. They argue that their special expertise has been their access, writing ability, information-gathering, and thinking skills, all marshalled on behalf of the public.


In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, which eyewitnesses reported through text sent via cell phones, journalists were quick to draw lines to separate the accounts filed by what some call citizen journalists(there is debate over which amateurs deserve this title and which are just people in the right place at the right time), from journalism. In some discussions, turf-protecting journalists sounded as if they wanted to beat up somebody. We heard a lot about journalists being the ones with the expertise to connect the dots to provide meaning and context of events, something mere bystanders can't do.

The New York Times recently ran a piece showing how the most informative images out of Mumbai were in fact captured by professional newspaper photographers , not eyewitnesses with camera/cell phones who were in fear of their lives and weren't being paid to take risks to get the shot. But meaning-making, the expertise some journalists are claiming, is a very complex process. As someone whose research specialty is news reception, I’d say that consumers of news extract meaning (they get the news from the news, so to speak). And context is complicated. Much of journalism is devoid of context; that is often the big disappointment for people reading and viewing the news. For all its strengths, American journalism is actually quite weak on analysis, or rather, meaningful analysis. Reporters are good at telling us who met with whom over lunch to get votes for this or that proposal, but many journalists aren’t very good analysts.

Everybody Could Use More Training...

As journalism reconfigures itself, one of the areas in need of more development is the skill set of the professionals. Journalists need better training to understand processes like change. They don't need to become social scientists, but journalism is going to need to incorporate more reflexive methods if the professionals are to give their reports the kind of added value that get journalists beyond the professional versus amateur debates. Newsrooms are notorious for their small investment in training, and some of this no doubt relates to the conception of journalism as a craft people learn by doing. In many ways, journalism has been practiced on the cheap (I am fully aware of how expensive newsrooms are). My comments stem more from my sense that journalistic expertise will need to be developed upward even as it becomes more hyperlocal and accessible to anyone who wants to do journalism.

I will write more on this topic in coming weeks. For now, I’m hoping that this time I’ll be a more regular blogger than I have been in the past. I have been starting and aborting blogs since 2001. Sharing the blog with a partner, my brother, a technology journalist in the DC area, should keep me going. Between the two of us, there’s a wide range of topics on which we can provide fresh commentary and reportage, even some expertise. More important, I see blogging as an act of independence for journalists. Often journalists are at the mercy of editors to greenlight writing projects. Taking to the web to throw ideas into the mix is an act of freedom not readily available in the everyday practice of journalism. At a time when strong currents are coming at us in almost all areas of life, a blog seems like a good way to help myself and others make sense of it all.