Can Journalism School Save Public Interest Journalism?

Miller-McCune has an article posted examining the current miserable state of journalism. As major papers close — such as the Rocky Mountain News — or face closure — such as the San Francisco Chronicle — and most news-gathering organizations are cutting staff and looking for ways to save money to keep their publications going, the real dilemma will be what will happen to public interest journalism.

Public interest journalism is what journalism is known for, its Fourth Estate function in which it watches the government, from the highest offices in the land to the municipal meetings that take place each day. It’s the nonflashy, at-first-glance boring stories that require months of time and tedious investigation through reams of dusty documents that have been overlooked or just plain hidden by people in government who may not want them to see the light of day. This is the kind of reporting that informs the public of what’s happening in their community.

And this is the kind of journalism we lose when we lose newspapers.

Good journalism is expensive. The sexy stories about celebrities and their latest hairdos, the man-bites-dogs stories that we get our second looks as we pass the paper that’s left on the coffee shop table, the crime stories that lead the nightly news — these draw the readership that buy the papers that fund the public interest news. The good-for-you, what-you-need-to-know stuff. These are stories that take experience to understand and craft. You need years or decades of know-how to be able to ask the right questions, and to stand up to the sources who are trying to avoid giving the answers that the public deserves to know.

I’ve seen this in action during my career as a newspaper journalist, and as our press corps get pared down I worry about what we’re missing, what we need to know, what wool is getting pulled over our collective eyes. And I mostly wonder about where how we’re going back to that kind of reporting.

John Mecklin and Len Sellers in the Miller-McCune article discuss this problem, and others that the news industry is facing, and discuss the possibility that perhaps nonprofit journalism is the way to go, with the journalism schools funded to be the training ground and battlefield for the production of public interest journalism.It’s an idea that’s apparently been floating around.

Sellers, however, pooh-poohs this idea.

So we turn to nonprofits for funding. Can the “Innocence Project” serve as a model? That is mainly staffed by students, which you suggest could be a part of journalism schools being structured to fill society’s increasing need for watchdogs. Would a university’s built-in ability to handle grants and foundation funds dovetail with a News21 devoted to regional investigative reporting?

There are downsides. Most students are not too bright. I say that after 27 years as a professor. Smart, disciplined students are very much a rarity. And universities are bureaucracies riddled with regulations, egos, audits, jealousies and ambitions. Think MGM meets the DMV. So it wouldn’t be easy. Safeguards would have to be built into the very framework.

I think he’s being a little harsh. It’s not that students aren’t bright (see me defending you, j-school students!) it’s that they’re just not experienced. They don’t have the training yet. And this, in my opinion, is why bloggers can’t be relied upon yet to be our public watchdogs. Journalism is a craft and a skill, and without  undergoing training, whether it’s in j-school or on the beat at a real live paper or news-gathering outlet, you can’t rely on the experience of your editors or mentor reporters and you can’t get the critical critiques that let you learn to do your job better. There is something to be said about this model, as aggravating and trying as it can be, that at least you are learning, always learning something.

I think that j-school is a fine training ground but it’s like any training institute — it’s just the start. The years in the trenches is where we learn public interest, vital journalism. This is what we need to fund. This is what we as the public need to start demanding.

Where shall we start?