Journalists need Creativity 101
Peter Friedman’s blog post yesterday on this site about how well law school prepares people to be lawyers got me thinking about how well journalism school - and journalism itself – prepares and encourages people to be good reporters, opinion-writers and editors.
My own experience of journalism school was perhaps unusual – the curriculum was designed to cover the basics of news-gathering and -writing, media law and analyzing statistical surveys, along with photography and layout for those interested, but because I was preparing to be a theater critic, I found I had to essentially construct my own course of study. There were no classes that really delved into the evaluation of creative work or that examined the purpose, ethics and goals of criticism, much less any that offered regular opportunities to practice the craft of reviewing.
Perhaps because I took an unusual path within my profession, it seemed to me that the standard curriculum did little more than indoctrinate students in a rote style of newswriting and narrow categories of news coverage that the business had adopted generations ago and that had slowly hardened into a kind of industry-wide arteriosclerosis that kept journalism from significantly changing and adapting along with the times. There were, to quote a Paul Simon song, “no times at all – just the New York Times.”
Like law schools, apparently, J-schools also seem to attract people as professors who have very little real experience of the trade. Many of my own teachers were either theorists who examined the media’s effects on society rather than how to put out a great newspaper or nuts-and-bolts newscraft instructors who had left the profession years earlier because, apparently, they weren’t much good at it.
And like the law, the journalism industry itself has been run largely by people rewarded for sticking with business as usual, rather than being notable innovators or even just good managers.
Journalism doesn’t prepare its practitioners to be managers; it simply moves reporters or ad salesmen or production folks into higher positions, to deal with people and administrative tasks when their skills lie in digging up information, scribbling, hustling ad space or designing pages. Lacking any real training in their new power jobs, they often resort to copying the older editors or managers around them, perpetuating bad leadership habits and old, entrenched ideas of what a news publication should be. That some good managers emerge is evidence of natural individual talent rather than an astutely planned and run system.
I suppose the status quo becomes gospel in any industry, but it’s particularly inexcusable in a business that’s supposed to be all about what’s new. In medicine, they say “Physician, heal thyself.” In journalism, it ought to be, “Editor, broaden your own darned mind – or you’ll never get your readers to broaden theirs.”
Imagination and creativity have to be encouraged in both the newsroom and the J-school classroom. Students must be shown how to think differently, to try new approaches with every story and every photograph or video; editors must stop copying other publications’ tiny steps forward and boldly experiment, not just with the individual elements of news publishing ,but with the concept of news itself, and let their staffs come up with fresh ways of communicating information.
My guess is that, right now, the J-schools are actually ahead of the industry on this. With young, electronics-savvy students flowing into their programs, many schools have embraced the Internet as the primary medium of the news and are investing in the state-of-the-art equipment and spirit of re-invention with which they need to explore this new frontier, while the economically ravaged professional news industry struggles to overcome its own ossification and get up to speed before it truly and finally dies of shortsightedness, cowardice and a dangerously low idea count.
Someone – I think it was a character in the Steve Carell movie, Dan in Real Life - once said, “Love isn’t a feeling – it’s an ability.” I would say the same thing about creativity - and journalism needs to develop it.