Newspapers enhance intellect
This is a time for reflection over a most difficult period in our history. So, too, is it time to think about the news media and its future. There’s no absence of opinion and only time will tell how accurate the prophets and pundits are about the shape of new media.
The burden on major academic programs is greater than ever. Gone are the days when there were bright, red lines between such divisions as print journalism and broadcast journalism. The digital age means convergence. Convergence requires educating those wanting news careers to gather, write, and report news for all media, including Internet versions of stories.
One of the great pilot programs in the nation has been under way in Chicago, where the Tribune is asking its reporters to write for the paper, WGN-AM and WGN-FM and WGN-TV and the Tribune Internet site. Each calls for variations on the theme, including the gathering of news by the same reporter using a digital camera.
So convinced is Tribune management that multiple outlets will ensure its dominance of the greater Chicagoland market, it used its foundation, the McCormick Trust, to give the famous Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University $20 million to build a convergence journalism building. Medill has long been a major supplier of intellectual talent to the Tribune.
Yet, as this move is under way, Medill has created specialized journalism tracks to cover areas long under-reported by major media, such a religion and ethics. Certainly, given Enron and the mutual funds scandal it would seem such a move is warranted.
The students now filling classrooms, standing in front of cameras, writing Internet news, or serving internships will be the reporters, photographers, designers, and anchors of the future. What the universities do, or do not do, will impact the quality of America’s giant news business.
No university can ensure it will or won’t produce a Ted Koppel or a Geraldo. It can discuss law and ethics in several classes and even have full courses in those areas, but that only means the student was exposed to the history and issues of the day.
A compounding fact is the uncertain future of all media, including movies, broadcast TV, what new media news definitions will be, even if radio will survive. Futurists have long believed the ultimate system will be one system, pumped by wire or satellite into your home.
But wait. What about our newspapers? Researchers have developed a computer screen the thickness of three human hairs that can be rolled up after getting a newspaper download and unrolled as you ride the train or trolley to work.
The future of newspapers is the most vital question of all. While one can speak of major media and overarching news as the capture of the Baghdad Butcher, the newspaper remains our greatest source of local news. If you think not, look at the poor old Tennessean struggle to cover the counties by giving you one story a day, often the local shooting or stabbing, which to me is worth a couple of paragraphs. It’s your local paper that will be carrying the zoning meeting and the city council and that’s vital because we no longer go to such meetings unless they touch us very, very personally.
Now to point: Al Gore, in a major address at MTSU, decried the absence of solid reporting and the decline in the critical edge required of a free and democratic nation. When America turned from newspapers, he argued, intellectual discourse began to fade away, with notable exceptions being our great newspapers (there are about 10 left). In summary: our nation is at risk.
At dinner that night, he wondered aloud if we are at the end of the Enlightenment in the post-modern age. My heart sank. It’s that unanswered question that may well hold the future of this oldest living democracy in history.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)