I was looking over Tim McGuire's syllabus for a class he's teaching at Arizona State, Business and Future of Journalism, and one paragraph really caught my eye:
Every media person you meet will tell you the journalism world you stand to enter has changed profoundly. Much of the blame for that alleged change is laid at the doorstep of “the business side of journalism” and that phrase usually involves a snarl and some spit. And yet any journalist worth any salt at all knows that it is essential that a successful business support quality journalism.
(Emphasis added.)
Are journalists anti-business? Back in the 20th century when I worked at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where McGuire was editor, we made "diversity" a priority. I always thought our diversity goals weren't diverse enough, because they failed to address some glaring weaknesses in our newsroom culture.
One of those weaknesses was a general lack of understanding of the business world -- not just the "business side" of newspapering, but all small and big business -- that sometimes bubbled up as the "snarl and some spit" that McGuire cites.
I don't buy the self-serving "liberal media" bleat that's been coming from crass right-wing politicians and performers for the last decade or so, but we should recognize our weaknesses and I think this business thing is one of them. I wonder if the "separation of church and state" that's part of the standard J-school indoctrination inadvertently contributes to it. After all, the opposite of sacred is profane.
Or maybe it's simpler than that. We're all the product of our experiences. If you go to college, get a degree in journalism and set out to be a newspaper reporter, you're not living the same kind of life as the entrepreneur who's trying to meet a payroll and obligations. (I had a taste of that life early on, running a cluster of weeklies, and I can tell you it's not a bed of roses.)
Anyway, I have to applaud ASU for making this a required course. In struggling to understand the extraordinary business challenges faced by news companies today, these students may develop a framework that helps them do better journalism by understanding business in general throughout their careers.
Comments
Sadly, a lot of
Sadly, a lot of journalists—I dare say most—are anti-business. It comes from an innate suspicion of powerful institutions, I guess, not to mention a lack of understanding of simple mathematics and business practices, but it's dumb and now, with the industry in trouble, very hurtful.
I've seen reporters fail to mention the name of a fast-food joint where a crime occurred because they somehow thought the "plug" would help the restaurant's business (when, in fact, it would help the reader understand where something happened). General skepticism of the motives of large companies is also rampant—indeed, the media constantly carps about the huge profts being made by oil companies and other firms without understanding that a) those profits go back to shareholders, not some mysterious, unseen "big business" force and b) that until recently, newspapers happened to be one of the most profitable businesses around (somehow that comparison never got made).
And now this attitude manifests itself in whining about the tough choices newspapers have to make simply to stay alive. Newspaper companies probably would do well to hold seminars to help employees understand all the challenges facing the industry right now. It might be a real eye-opener for a lot of people.
Newspapers should hold seminars?
Are journalists so intellectually lazy and fundamentally ignorant about the realities of their situation that they need to be led into seminars and have some knowledge force-fed to them?
Yup. They are. And that speaks volumes about their anti-business attitude. It comes from a studied unwillingness to open their minds in any serious way to the world around them.
Journalism does not, as anyone who has had prolonged contact with its practitioners knows, attract very many of the nation's best and brightest. How can they be expected to understand anyone else's business when they won't take the initiative to understand their own? Hasn't journalism become, over the years, an occupation where the mediocre have a platform from which they can pretend to be our betters, with no one in their own organizations telling them otherwise?