Journalism, Viral Loops, Etc.
Though I understand a graduate degree in journalism seems like an insane proposition to many right now, applications are up at all the programs where I’ve spoken to faculty, and if you’re going to pursue that course of study, I am more convinced everyday that NYU is the place to do it. Among readers of The American Scene, Jay Rosen is probably the most well known professor. His analysis of the changing media landscape is certainly more sophisticated than anything being done at Columbia University. And beyond Professor Rosen, the program as a whole is making an effort — how successful it’ll be is beyond knowing — to train students for the actual world they’ll be facing, rather than running a program as if they’re all going to get jobs as cub reporters at daily newspapers.
An example just posted on the course listings: “Entrepreneurial Journalism, taught by Adam Penenberg.”
Journalists who can successfully navigate these turbulent media times must be equal parts journalist and entrepreneur. In this seminar students will learn how to build successful freelance careers, manage their own journalism brands that they will extend through social media platforms like Twitter, pitch ideas for media start ups, write their own business plans or book proposals, and explore ways to attract venture capital. There will be a lot of learning by doing. Students will work as media entrepreneurs and run their own online publications, which they will operate as a business. At its center will be a blog, where students will post several times a week.They’ll retain an ad server, market their work to the blogosphere (and beyond) and track traffic. The semester will culminate with students either drafting their own business plan for a media start-up that they will pitch in class to a venture capitalist, or penning a formal book proposal, which a literary agent will also critique in class. Guests will include well-known journalists, successful media entrepreneurs, literary agents and venture capitalists.
Professor Penenberg, the guy who caught Stephen Glass, taught my press ethics class. He also just published the book Viral Loop — and his fascinating approach to marketing it demonstrates that he practices what he preaches.
Interesting how the generation of journalists coming up now is being forced to engage in marketing their work in a way that is, insofar as I know, unprecedented in the field. It’s certainly affected my career. At Culture11, it was once suggested that the three editors who commissioned or wrote basically all the publication’s articles should spend fully half of their time on viral marketing. Editors have asked me to Tweet links to freelance pieces I write for their sites. I doubt that Gay Talese ever considered himself a brand — but I am pretty certain that Malcolm Gladwell has for some time. I wonder what implications brand management, Twitter followers, and all the rest has for the kind of work that is produced by the profession.
Any thoughts?
While I think the idea for the “Entrepreneurial Journalism” is brilliant, it raises the question of why anyone needs to spend tuition to start a project that they could do on their own. Everything that could be taught in that class can be easily found online. The one answer, I can imagine, is that some people learn best through having this presented to them in a classroom setting. But that type of person isn’t likely to succeed as an entrepreneur.
Conor: “At Culture11, it was once suggested that the three editors who commissioned or wrote basically all the publication’s articles should spend fully half of their time on viral marketing.”
By “once suggested” you mean, “suggested once a day”? ; )
See, you guys thought we were being slavedrivers with unrealistically high expectations. Turns out we were just helping to prepare you for a career as entrepreneurial journalists. ; )
— Joe Carter · Oct 28, 01:03 PM · #
In terms of its usefulness, journalism seems to me a lot like business school, as opposed to, say, law or medical school, insofar as they’re graduate professional programs that train you for professions where the theoretical content isn’t very high. That is, while what you learn in grad school can be very interesting/useful, it’s equally possible to learn at least as much through real life experience. (I also believe this to be the case with law school, but that’s another fight for another day.)
Honestly, if you want to be a journalist, I think that the cost and opportunity cost of graduate school, combined with the near-zero costs of publishing, mean it’s a non-starter. Work your ass off, be talented, and I think you have great odds of being in a better place 5 years later than if you’d spent two of those in J-school.
A caveat to that might be what I’d read about elite journalism programs and Harvard Business School’s “2+2” program. (Bear with me for a minute.)
I read somewhere that the focus of elite J-schools was that they helped people who didn’t have a prestigious college degree get into institutions that predominantly open their doors to Ivy League graduates. Without getting into the debate of whether or how long these institutions will remain institutions, I think that’s a very worthy goal in and of itself.
HBS’s “2+2” program is a program aimed at college seniors who want to go to business school. Before the recession (maybe this has changed), many highly successful college grads went on straight to b-school, which posed a problem for admissions offices, who like to have classes made up of students with several years of professional experience behind them, but didn’t want to let gifted applicants go to rival schools. Harvard had a — in my view very smart — response to this with the 2+2 program which, as its name indicates, consists of 2 years of professional experience, sponsored and overseen by HBS, followed by guaranteed admission for 2 years into the MBA program.
I think this might be something that journalism schools ought to emulate.
I would love to see Columbia’s J-School replace its classic degree with its own “2+1” program (come on, J-school oughtn’t take more than 1 year). They would take scrappy, hard-working Indiana State grads who exposed corrupt local councilmen in the school paper as sophomores, and put them on an intense rotation in partnership with journalistic institutions (say, six months in the NYT newsroom, then six months at a large professional blog network, then six months in the AP’s Beijing Bureau, etc.), put them through an intense 1 year program in New York (with classes at the business school and the school of international affairs), and release them into the wild. Some of their wages during the first 2 years might even go to defray the cost of the graduate program, making it an attractive financial proposition overall.
I think that might be a pretty cool justification for J-schools’ continued existence.
— PEG · Oct 28, 01:46 PM · #
PEG,
I’d that that the primary thing I gained from j-school was becoming a better writer — and I don’t think that should be surprising. At the newspaper where I got my start, I found time in my insanely busy schedule maybe once a week to sit down with the one editor from whom I had a lot to learn. After a couple years, I’d learned everything he could teach me.
At NYU, my work got close attention from an absolutely phenomenal collection of writers. When you’ve got Katie Roiphe, Lawrence Weschler, and Ted Conover line editing your work, to name just three, you’re doing something wrong if you don’t get anything out of it.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Oct 28, 02:08 PM · #
Conor: point well taken.
The reason I used the j-school/b-school comparison is because I’m a b-school student myself, so I’m well aware of the complicated mix of advantages and limitations that this kind of model has.
I do believe there are ways to spend two years honing your writing, while learning other valuable skills, and earning some money as opposed to spending it. Doesn’t mean all j-schools should go. But maybe they will.
— PEG · Oct 28, 06:16 PM · #
You know, I had thought about majoring—or at least doing a minor—in journalism as an undergraduate. But every journalism prof I got to be friends with told me that, for any reasonably sharp person, this was simply a waste of time: A class or two might be justifiable, but otherwise one was better off learning an actual subject and assuming that everything else was better learned by doing. In retrospect, it seems like excellent and accurate advice. To be sure, I’d love to get edits from Ted Conover, but I do feel like it’s possible to get that kind of feedback on the job—if not necessarily in daily beat reporting, then at any rate with longer freelance stuff.
— Julian Sanchez · Oct 28, 09:41 PM · #
Julian,
Granted I didn’t pay tuition for journalism school, so I am hardly in a position to judge whether or not it is worth the money, but I can say that I got more thorough, valuable edits there than any publication where I’ve ever worked or freelanced, by several orders of magnitude.
I think I could have probably picked up everything I learned anyway, eventually, but it would’ve taken a lot longer.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Oct 29, 01:27 AM · #
PEG, this is hardly an area of expertise for me but as it happens I was discussing it recently with some folks (some folks, in fact, on a college admissions board.)
And i thought it was worth pointing out: the paradigm used to be that you didn’t go to B-school from undergrad; it was a bit frowned upon. The B-school student was someone who’d been working, maybe even managing, for a few years, and then said, OK, time to get an MBA. Anyway, we were lamenting exactly what you describe: that more and more, people went straight from college to B-school, which seems worthless.
But in that context I’m even hating “2+2.” What you really want to do is redistribute the student base towards managers who are mid-career or early-career, no? And J-school presumably has some equivalents, like Harvard’s Nieman fellows.
— Sanjay · Oct 29, 08:28 AM · #
I’m basing this on anecdotal evidence, but I think there’s a second and, if you will, negative force that’s also driving the uptick in j-school enrollment: the crap economy. I run the internship program at the magazine where I work, and over the past year five out of nine interns have gone directly on to j-school after leaving us. Of the others, only one has landed a full-time editing job (since axed); the rest are freelancing. In the past, those numbers were heavily skewed the other way, but right now there are few full-time gigs opening up — and so many unemployed but highly experienced editors that those gigs don’t go to kids with only an internship or two under their belts. Every one of the five who went on to grad school told me they were basically treating it as a bomb shelter — a place to wait out the recession until the dust clears and the job market opens up again. (Initially this struck me as nuts — incurring massive debt with weak prospects of securing a job afterward — but I suppose it can also be seen as sensible, given that the opportunity cost of the alternative, unemployment, is low.)
In any case, I hope you’re right about the value of the NYU program; it would be a shame for these youngsters to end up having spent thousands on an education that they could have gained through experience, instead.
— Tim · Oct 29, 10:35 AM · #
Sanjay: yes, that is the idea with an MBA (note that this has varied over time), to have people with experience. But I think people should have an open mind. If a young senior is brilliant and motivated, has started a business during school, etc., why not? And why isn’t the “2+2” program a smart middle ground? It might not be best for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
— PEG · Oct 30, 01:40 AM · #
As Tim said, grad school apps being up when the job market is so weak is not surprising. It would be surprising if journalism schools were up more than other programs, though.
Employers always want people with critical thinking and oral and written communication skills. I’d think that you could develop these pretty well in journalism school even if there won’t be many reporter jobs available.
— sacman701 · Oct 30, 02:18 PM · #