Unfinished business
September 16, 2007
This is how the schedule breaks down. Monday and Tuesday are reporting days, and belong to the class, RWI, which is Reporting and Writing I. This course holds the majority of credits and represents the most intense workload for the first semester. It takes at least three days a week, two days for reporting on the beat, and one day in class.
Of course, because “reportage” means anything from going out on the street to see, smell, hear, touch and taste the beat, to home research, phone calls, visits to other resources, tracking down sources, and more, this course actually takes my weekends as well. Then, Wednesday is class all day, with a seminar, which is basically a workshop, and a drill, which is a two hour writing session where we learn, under some sort of pressure, how to write quick and proper according to AP style, which is how the Associated Press defines how it’s done through an annual publication. Many of the aspects of AP style have been determined historically by the constraints of the analog news wire. For example, not spacing in between an initialled name, i.e. W.C. Fields instead of W. C. Fields. And they do this because they do not want a name separated between lines as it is transferred over the wire. Functional grammar.
Thursday is my feature writing class. It has not yet begun.
Friday begins EARLY, with law, precisely the class to lull one back to the fluffy pillows of sleepytime. I pulled myself back into consciousness several times during this lecture. But watch out! They know where everyone is seated, and they call you out just like in law school.
Next on Friday is Critical Issues, the closest thing to an ethics course that we have. In CI, we discuss the history and current ethos of journalism. So far, nothing concrete has been said. Rather everything has been left up to us to discern. No easy answers. No finite quantities. No firm borders, besides the obvious (like inaccuracy, plagiarism, et. al. All things that get one fired from a journalism job, or kicked out of school).
Finally, on Friday, I meet with my master’s project advisor. Deadlines are set up throughout this semester for this monster piece of writing. In two months from now, I need my project topic approval. After that, it gets crazy. Deadlines hot and fast. Source lists, notes, outlines, complete reporting (from all sources) before the winter break. And then we write. And submit. And write again.
And still, my Skills course has not yet begun. (New Media. There, I think I’ll be learning how to work with Flash).
So that’s it. That’s semester 1 at Columbia. I can tell you now, with the work expected in RWI, that single course would fill any normal semester. I’m beginning to appreciate how this can work as a one year master’s program. Whether I maintain my sanity is still in question.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Thank you for sharing!
December 23rd, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Its nice to see what students are doing in “J” school these days. I attended the University of Arkanasas/Fayetteville graduate “J” school in the late 1990s. In that time period, I found that many “J” schools, especially Colombia were teaching “social justice” (whose they did not say, but from their reportage, the Hard Left) and not real “fair and balanced” journalism.
As the enclosed article implies, such “journalists” were in the business of backstabbing, writing the story before they interviewed, on some kind of “mission” with a far-left agenda, and really did not care about a) if they got their “facts” right, or b) the consequences of what they were promoting. It became even more ludicrous to see all these “J” school graduates treated as “professionals” when in fact, they were unregistered “lobbiests” (mostly for the Left and the Democrat Party) without so much as a “whimper” from either the “Right” or other journalists.
I further noticed in my school these budding graduate journalists could not tell the difference between an “op-ed” story, and real news. When the “news” becomes just another piece of propaganda, then there are no longer any borders, ethically or morally, between news, entertainment, or opinions. It becomes all the same.
I became a business editor of a mid-size Texas newspaper, and to my disgust, I was encouraged to write flattering articles about local businesses, who spent a lot of money for paid advertising in my newspaper. Once again, journalism actually functioned as advertising.
At least in European newspaper, newspapers will come out and state in the masthead that it is “Liberal, or Conservative, and even Communist.” However, in the US there is still this ridiculous hypocritical attitude which believes the myth that the “media” is about the news. No it is not. The “media” is about selling advertising…therefore, all that is written or stated is edited and formatted for its political correctness, based on demographics…in order to sell advertising, and ultimately so those who do advertise increase sales. It is never stated to the public, that not a single news story brings in a “dime’s” worth of revenue in order to keep a particular media outlet going.
Lastly, since the 1990s when the public began to wake up to the vagaries of the press, including outright “lying” and smear campaigns…of the “unfavored” i.e. mostly Republicans…journalists have had about the same credibility as a “used car salesman.” My question is…does this lack of credibility still ring true? “Journalism” needs an overhaul from top to bottom, especially in the ethics department, and there should be a national debate about exactly what modern journalism is…. What the public senses is that journalists are no longer trusted, or even liked. However, what continues to amaze me is the continued arrogance among journalists, mostly on the left, who truly believe…the public is naive and uneducated, and it is the job of journalists to “influence” the public anyway they see fit. Such journalists will be thrown out on their ears…very soon, because the Internet is gaining ground and now functions as unfiltered, make-up-your own mind “news” sources.
Diana Wilson PhD