It's Time for a News Corps

Now, the nation's youth are, in their idealism, fleeing to farms, organic ones of course, as a way to make their mark on the new world. They are willing to shovel manure before dawn, in the belief that they are making a difference.

The organic farm internship movement -- which had a good run near the top of the New York Times' most e-mailed stories list Sunday -- joins education in capturing youthful enthusiasm.

Curiously, though, we see no such movement of the young in embracing the reinvention of the news, of remaking journalism in the digital age. We should. Journalism's never needed more reinvention, more passion, more youth.

Instead, even top young journalists are going in other directions.

Consider this Bloomberg article by Oliver Staley:

"The Harvard Crimson has produced 12 Pulitzer Prize winners and prepared generations of journalists for newspaper careers during its 136 years. That wellspring of talent is drying up as the paper’s editors now shun the field".

The piece goes on to tell us that "just three of the 16 graduating seniors who were on the Crimson executive board are seeking positions in journalism" and that the trend away from journalism, among Crimson editors, has been pronounced for five to 10 years. 

Yes, communication and journalism school enrollment is still up across the country, but that enrollment number may be masking the emerging problem.

First, much of that enrollment is devoted to the related arts of advertising and public relations. Second, some of the talk in the J schools is moving toward the applicability of the journalism major to other employable fields. In fact, Tim Gleason, dean of the University of Oregon journalism school, recently told me, “In the past, parents used to say, ‘I’m so glad he’s a journalism major rather than an English major.' That may change." Third, we have a sense that much of the top journalistic talent -- like the Crimson's -- is blowing away from journalism.

Curiously, the Crimson's outgoing managing editor, Paras Bhayani, is heading for Teach for America. That says reams about the crossroads of the country's talents and the mojo of the moment. TFA is and has been hot for several years, as graduates have heard the calling to fix the nation's perpetually underachieving educational system. TFA offers a challenge to new graduates: take what you've learned and reinvent the way of education, making a two-year-long personal commitment. It has graduated 14,000 teachers, and I've had the privilege to meet a number of them.

They embrace both the intellectual and on-the-ground challenges, and they do so with relish. 

I believe that we've got to see the financial collapse of the news business within the wider perspective of national change. The country, by force and by wish, is in the midst of reinventing education. It may soon be in the midst of reinventing health care. When we see smart, committed youth willing to move the manure along, surely we can find ways to engage them to move stories along, to push the news forward. 

Call it Daughter of Woodstein. The Woodward-Bernstein myth, as powerful as it was to a previous generation, is spent. The best evidence of that may be today's rehashing of the Post/Times Watergate saga; how yesterday to anyone born in the last 35 years. We need a new myth. We need tales of spirited multimedia reporters bringing back the news from Iraq and Indianapolis. 

Just for starters, let's think of it as News Corps. Yes, it's a bit close to News Corp., Rupert Murdoch's global empire, but maybe he'll support it. It borrows some almost-ancient WPA sensibility, and focuses on storytelling, but journalistic storytelling. It is this amazing set of storytelling tools --- the wonders of audio and video and text, of blogging style, of instant reader connection and involvement -- that define what should be an optimistic time, not a time of mourning. Never before have journalists had such a set of tools arrayed before them.

The News Corps notion, of course, would be just a piece of the puzzle. Beyond training and empowering a new generation of newsies, we'll need new ecosystems of training and mentoring and of distribution and aggregation. We can see the outlines of those already, though they hardly fully formed. 

Indeed, some of that reinvention is starting to happen, as we look at the start-up local news and investigative operations from coast to coast and the injections of foundation capital into those enterprises. That reinvention is good, but we're going to need more.

We need to make news cool. We need to make the deeper informing of communities a public good, a point that MinnPost's Joel Kramer made well in a recent Nieman Lab interview. We need to attract some of the most energetic and innovative minds to this reinvention, much as we need them in education, in health and in agriculture.

What News Corps would do is inject new supply into the system, and the supply is one of key problems we have. Those close to 10,000 newsroom jobs we've lost in the last several years means that hundreds of thousands fewer stories are bring reported and written this year. 

So let's start with a News Corps of 1000, and a starting wage of $35,000 a year, a decent start and parallel to what TFA provides. That's a tab of $35 million a year, a paltry sum by many measures and one that could be funded by a consortium of foundations to keep it free of government taint. News organizations, start-up and legacy, could apply for positions, promising mentorship, learning and engagement. News Corp could track the upward trajectory -- the difference its stories make -- that could offset the cascading gloom-and-doom clicking down of the traditional news industry.

One thousand new journalists would be a start and a no-lose test. I guarantee we'd learn things about the craft of journalism that we've only conjectured about. If the 1000- newly-minted-journalist-experiment works, think about the difference that 10,000 journalists could make. At that level, we're still only talking a third of a billion a year. The American newspaper industry itself, even in its flagging state, will bring in about $36 billion this year.

Yes, Knight and a legion of other foundations (among them The James Irvine Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Blandin Foundation) are stepping up to the challenges of the era, and that commitment has only been made more difficult by their recession-wounded endowments. They are now stepping beyond piecemeal funding of experimental projects to providing two- to three-year funding to build new core capacity among new news gatherers, as the recently announced California news initiative, which will operate out of the Oakland-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

I'm not convinced that we need a National Journalism Foundation, as suggested by Knight Fellow David Sasaki in November, but it's another idea that's worth considering here.

Let's look collectively at a big step. Let's look to scale. We've lost scale; now we need to gain scale and make a statement. Jump-starting supply by engaging talented and motivated young people is one way to do that.

Eventually, we figured, the woes of the news business would dawn on the young, and that time has apparently come. They may love the idea of writing and the romance of reporting, yet the economic realities of our time are pushing them in other directions. Let's re-kindle the fire, knowing that a thousand flashlights poking into near and far corners of our communities is a good and timely thing.

Comments

[KC]

While doing research at my internship, I came across this post, and love this idea. First of all, I'm 25 (three years out of college) and interning because I can't find a job, and now this show is being shut down as well. I've tossed around a ton of ideas in my head...go back to school for a Masters? Peace Corps? Teach for America? I KNOW that I am meant to be a journalist and a teacher, but I am struggling with the thought of joining the mainstream media and its definition of "news." I've done a handful of things with my degree, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where I fit in. Something like a "News Corps" would be right up my alley. How do we do this??

[Maria Minno]

WHAT???? You have totally missed the boat! Look at YouTube, Indymedia, and all the millions of blogs young people are putting out, not to mention 'zines and podcasts. Why would they want to join the conventional news industry that is manufacturing lies and industrial viewpoints, when they can have free speech and self-publish in whatever medium they choose?! Even teeny tiny radio stations are popping up all over the place. What planet are you on????????

[Steve Katz]

Ken - apologies for the long cut and paste, but here's an excerpt from Free Press' book on Changing Media (http://www.freepress.net/summit/book) - more than relevant to your proposal, and more to the point: actionable.

Journalism Jobs Program
The final proposal for a short-term remedy to the journalism crisis is an attempt to
support veteran, qualified reporters and simultaneously to engage young people
in journalism. One of the biggest problems with the collapsing business model
of print newspapers is the possibility that tens of thousands of highly trained and
experienced reporters will dissipate into other sectors of the economy, and tens of
thousands of talented young people will be dissuaded from becoming journalists
in the first place.

With the recent expansion of AmeriCorps’ existing domestic service program,
now would be an opportune moment to include journalistic activities as part of
its mission. “The Serve America Act,” which Congress approved in March, will
dramatically increase service and paid volunteer jobs from 75,000 to 250,000
positions. The New York Times reports that full-time and part-time service volunteers
would work for “new programs focused on special areas like strengthening schools,
improving health care for low-income communities, boosting energy effi ciency and
cleaning up parks.” The AmeriCorps expansion — which will cost approximately
$6 billion over five years — also provides for a Social Innovation Fund to expand
on proven initiatives while supplying seed funding for experimental programs.
Volunteers would receive minimal living expenses and a modest educational
stipend of $5,350 after their year of service. There are also special fellowships for
people 55 and older, as well as summer positions for middle- and high-school
students.

Building on Eric Klinenberg’s idea, a small percentage of these AmeriCorps jobs
could go to journalism positions, fellowships, or even to journalism projects
to report on the new initiatives being created through this act. These also could
provide a much-needed service if combined with or subsumed under university
media literacy programs. A promising model has been implemented recently
by a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation-backed initiative at Stony Brook
University. The school has hired 50 laid-off journalists to undergo summer
training with the goal of joining dozens of universities in the fall to teach “news
literacy” to non-journalism majors.

A similar program could be established to
hire journalists to teach media literacy and help launch journalistic endeavors at
all levels of education. The media literacy program could be expanded to include
many more universities through the creation of formal Department of Education
grants that might be leveraged using foundation support.

There are other direct avenues for federal government programs to aid in job
creation in this industry. The Department of Labor could design a program
aimed at keeping reporters employed at existing news organizations or at new
outlets. Such a job-creation program would stimulate the economy and offset
unemployment payments that might otherwise go to out-of-work reporters. The
structure and administration of such a program requires further study, but the
basic cost-benefi t analysis is promising. If the government were to subsidize 5,000
reporters at $50,000 per year, the cost would be $250 million annually, a relatively
modest sum given the billions coming out of Washington. Drawing on Ed Baker’s
ideas for subsidizing journalists and from the New Deal-era Federal Writers Project,
this injection of resources would serve as a bridge to help keep reporters on the
beat in local communities as the industry transitions to new business models and
new media forms.

[anon.]

How to resurrect journalism's standing among young people:

1. Spend less time talking about yourselves.

2. Spend more time focusing on societal problems (or: less time obsessing over access and V.I.P.s).

3. Drop the fetish for so-called 'top' people "fresh out of journalism school or Ivy League colleges." The current state of affairs was ushered in by members of just such a surge in the '70s.

You could enlist an entire Harvard graduating class, but until you prioritize integrity and independent thinking, journalism's rep won't see a miraculous turnaround.

[Doug Cumming, Ph.D.]

You're right. In 1989, when we needed a sharp young hire for a monthly magazine launch, I drove up to Cambridge to interview a couple of graduating Crimonsites. They both wanted the job, but we could only hire one. One's now with the NYT, the other an editor at W.

The problem now is not so much "reinventing" journalism, but finding patronage. The digital, interactive, multi-media reinvention is unstoppable, and pretty neat. It's the revenue model that needs reinventing (and I assume some smart people, young and older, have been hard at work on that).

Meanwhile, the apprecticeship system that transmited the accumulated wisdom of journalism (or, let's call it good "reporting")is disappearing. That's why we need something like you idea of a News Corp. I think I have a better name for it. I actually wrote this four months. People would think I stole the idea from you -- but here it is, verbatim, from January 2009:
Create and train a corps of top-notch, idealistic young reporters
fresh out of journalism school or Ivy League colleges (with at least
some experience on the campus paper) the way Teach for America does
for hard-case teaching jobs. An endowed foundation would pay for
terrific award-winning news veterans (who are also good, enthusiastic
teachers) to give these recruits intensive summer-long training – again, following the Teach for America model. And like Teach for America, these recruits would be selected
carefully, and sent only where they are needed (small-town newspapers
willing to take on aggressive, independent young reporters). Call it “Reporters Without Borders.”

[spencer soper]

35K? Ken, where were guys like you when I graduated? My first journalism job was part-time, at a weekly, for $7 an hour. Cut grass, carried golf bags and scrubbed urinals on the side. Or, I should say I cut grass, carried golf bags and scrubbed urinals, and wrote news stories on the side. First daily job paid $16.5K a year, or about $22K in today's bucks, and that was after I had already learned my way around a bit. But I went to state school, not Harvard.

[Jim]

Good post - want to see the news corps already in action? Missouri School of Journalism partners with Newsy.com.
www.newsy.com

[Steve Collins]

I love this idea, but it'll never happen. The money, of course, is the main reason.
The other thing -- and this is no small thing -- is that the $35,000 annual pay you propose is probably about the average salary of journalists across America. It's more at large papers, naturally, but it's a whole lot less at many little ones. And since it's the smaller and mid-size papers that are hanging on best, I'm not sure you want to have trainees coming in at a pay scale they'll never see again.
Personally, as a founder of Youth Journalism Internation and The Tattoo teen newspaper (readthetatto.com), I've had the pleasure of working with hundreds of young journalists over the past 15 years. I know they have great ideas and lots of energy. But to unleash it, we need to do more than provide them a temporary job. We need to provide the places that succor them the funds to let them show us a way toward a better future. It doesn't do much good to say we can try these nifty multimedia, online experiments and then add there's no money for them.

[Betty Medsger]

What happening at the Crimson is not what's happening elsewhere. There also have been stories that report that applications for the best journalism schools have hit record highs. Students are inspired to enter journalism, apparently seeing this as an exciting time to create something new.

[Frymaster]

Hey, I know. Have them all keep a journal of the stuff they see and learn about. Maybe don't call 'em journals, though. Sounds like the name of a newspaper.

How about we call 'em "logs" like Captian's Log on Star Trek.

Oh, and then they could have the logs be on the Internet instead of paper.

Logs on the web.

Web logs.

I dunno. I'm not all that good with words...

[Kit]

Considering the current state of journalism, perhaps a few fewer Harvardians in the mix might not be the worst thing.