Chris Lynch on What The Reader Elite Means For Journalism Schools

Chris Lynch suggests that declining readership of newspapers and the rise of pay walls will lead to strange results: a reader elite and the demise of journalism.

What The Reader Elite Means for Journalism Schools

In the wake of my last post about The Reader Elite, I had several discussions with friends in the media industry about what such an audience would mean for journalism as an academic concentration. The Reader Elite is what I call the group of people that will emerge as paywalls begin to ramp up in earnest. The Reader Elite is affluent, well educated, and small in size, and perhaps the only group that will be willing to pay money for professional content creators.

Since that audience will be small — and thus the amount of people whose sole job it is to serve them will be smaller, too — is there any purpose for having journalism schools anymore?

In the coming years, I think most journalism schools will shrink or disappear. The ones remaining will be drastically different, with students focusing on topics that don’t relate to content creation at all. Moreover, some of the best new professional content creators won’t attend journalism schools. They will hail from different majors and degrees, like business, computer science and finance. The notion of being a professional journalist who is merely an objective observer of a topic or industry will officially fade in the coming years. This is a good thing, since it was a stupid fantasy that it should be like that anyway.

Even with the Web 2.0 decade now closed, journalism schools still teach decades-old methods that make no sense for the current media landscape. Many think that adding a “Web journalism” or a few HTML hacking classes can bring them into the 21st century, but it doesn’t. Journalism school teaches kids to be reporters, and little else. They learn to call people and collect information to construct a story, and they boil it down into a “he said, she said”story.

Whether it’s captured in text, sound or video, the “he said, she said” story professes to put a journalist on the sidelines as an objective observer. It presumes that regardless of their own opinions, if you can get quotes and information from two opposing sides and package them into a story, you have been a good journalist. If you’re really good, you might even be able to appear on television as an “expert.” Students in J-Schools are thus taught to worship what my friend Stowe Boyd would call the Church of Journalism.

The problem is, most journalists today aren’t experts; they merely report about people that are. This creates a barrier and credibility problem that people paid little attention to before the Web because the journalists’ identities to regular people were less transparent, and less social. Even those journalists on TV whose face you did see  — you couldn’t click on a link to see their background, disclosures, or why they might be qualified to be reporting on a certain topic.

Apparently, Chris has touched a nerve, considering the number of journalists and journaism teachers that have commented, like this one:

One thing we teach at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism is that all writers should know at least something about which they write. The author of this column knows nothing of what modern, progressive colleges of journalism teach, and until he has done his homework, he should sit down and be quiet. Conrad Fink, Morris Professor of Newspaper Management and Strategy, University of Georgia

You know you are on to something when people violently suggest you should shut up.

Somehow I knew he was an old white guy.