News-Record.com

An article in Chicago Magazine about the new focus at the Medill School of Journalism illustrates the arrogance and myopia of many in my chosen trade. (Via Dan Blank.)

The school's new dean, John Lavine, has brought in a new curricula. He declared that students needed to be immersed in "new media" -- Web sites, videos, filmstrips, video games, and podcasts. And the new curriculum would emphasize an understanding of "audience" -- who the customers are, what they want, how to reach them. The concept of marketing -- widely disdained by ink-in-their-veins journalists -- would assume a key role in the teaching program.

That approach upsets students, teachers and alums who prefer learning the traditional forms of journalism -- reporting and writing -- and, almost by nature, abhor the idea of marketing.

Against this backdrop, Dean Lavine argues, it is worse than wrongheaded to continue to turn out journalism students the old-fashioned way, preparing them for disappearing jobs in print publications and giving them little knowledge of the changing demands of consumers. "It is immoral," Lavine says.

Lavine is right and the position the others are taking is, frankly, embarrassing.

To learn to write or to learn what your audience wants is not an either/or proposition. You must do both to succeed. The marketing will tell budding journalists that people want tough, watchdog journalism. It will tell them that people want useful information. It will tell them that many people don't necessarily want what they are being taught. And it will tell them that if newspapers don't provide it, people will go to where they can get it. (Frankly, you don't need a marketing class to learn that.)

E-bay, Craig, and Google have all gone where newspapers should have gotten to first. Now Facebook and YouTube are the latest "dang-we-newspapers-should-have-done-that" phenomena on the Web. On Facebook, vibrant communities uniting around topics spring up overnight. YouTube tells stories in ways that used to be the purview of newspapers and television. But rather than peering over the hill, journalism educators and many professionals are worrying over crossing some poorly imagined line in the sand separating journalism, digital media and marketing.

Every journalist I know wants their work to be read or seen. You do that by creating compelling, worthwhile stories and taking them to where the audience is. How you do that these days without understanding the audience and without the skills of writing, video and audio, I don't know.

Full disclosure: I didn't attend journalism school.