Back to Business

“In deed if not in name, by 2000 America’s journalistic leaders had been transformed into businesspeople.  Half of newspaper newsroom leaders reported that they spent at least a third of their time not on journalism but on business matters” (70).

So write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism.  As a teacher of journalism, I was struck by how closely this statement could apply to the field of education.  Just substitute a few words, and you’ll have a description of most educational leaders I know: We spend a great deal of our time on business matters instead of what really matters—the students.

Harry Truman's second grade report card (1894).  Harry S. Truman Presidential 
Museum & Library.  Independence, Missouri.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan 
(June 28, 2014).

The term “educational leaders” conjures up images of principals, assistant principals, and district office officials, but I would argue the real educational leaders are the teachers, the ones actually doing the work of education.

Unfortunately, it seems the real work of education, like the real work of journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel refer to, is increasingly moving toward the business end of things.  Like those newsroom leaders who spend one-third of their time on business, I would venture to estimate many teachers spend much more than a third of their time on endless paperwork, incessant meetings, and other administrivia.

And just like those journalists who don’t get to spend that time on journalism, those teachers don’t get to spend their time on educating the students.

January 16 was a teacher work day, one of those rare days all teachers hungrily look for on the district calendar because they know they will have time (that beautiful, elusive, ephemeral notion) unencumbered by meetings (we hope) to make a dent in some of that business work: lesson plans to be written; papers to be graded and recorded; handouts, tests, quizzes, exams, activities, and/or projects to be typed, formatted, and copied; guidance referrals, discipline referrals, attendance referrals, Student Intervention Team referrals, nurse referrals, and/or social worker referrals to be filled out; parents to call, e-mail, or send letters to; e-mail messages and phone calls to respond to…and those are just a few of the things all teachers do—throw in an extracurricular activity, club, organization, and/or sport to sponsor, and you add a whole other dimension of paperwork and business to take care of.

Now I know how those journalistic leaders—those newsroom leaders—feel because they don’t have time to devote their full attention to their craft, journalism.  I remember how elated I was when January 16 rolled around—I would have time to do my paperwork job without those pesky students hovering around needing attention and an education!

And as a teacher of journalism, I feel doubly put upon by this emphasis on business.  Each profession alone is evolving into a business…put them together, and you have big business.

What’s a business without customers?  District leaders love to throw that word around.  Students, parents, and visitors are “customers,” and we must practice good “customer service” when dealing with them.  Customers have become an important part of the journalist’s business, too:

“Bringing business accountability to the newsroom brought the language of business as well.  In some cases this meant applying the language of marketing to news, with readers and viewers becoming ‘customers,’ and to understand them became ‘marketing’” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 83).

So here I am—an English education major who stumbled into journalism and now has become a businessman.  Enough lamenting my fate for now, though—I have some customer papers to grade.

Reference
Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel.  The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect.  Third      Edition.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2014.

The Eyes Have It

Week 2 and another topic has fallen into my lap.  Can I be so lucky for the next fourteen weeks?  Probably not, so let me take advantage of this while I can.

Tuesday I went to Eye Associates of Cayce for my yearly exam.  After the doctor had completed her preliminary examination, she assaulted my eyes with those drops to dilate them and announced that in the meantime, I had to take the test to identify those faint dancing squiggly lines on a screen.  Certainly, the early stages of pupil dilation could only add to the ease of the task.

Detail.  Dillon County Courthouse.  Dillon, South Carolina.  William Augustus Edwards, 
Architect.  1911.  Beaux Arts/Classical Revival/Neoclassical style.  National Register of 
Historic Places (October 30, 1981).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (April 18, 2014). 

An assistant, Bart, came in to lead me across the hall for this test, and he complimented me on how nice I looked (in my new vest and tie), commenting that so many people these days appear in public in pajama bottoms.  I told him I’d seen kids trying to do that at school.  The inevitable questions followed, and he divulged he had a degree in English (but could never teach).  After a proper amount of time discussing the horrible state of people’s grammar these days, particularly on social media, he began quizzing me on teaching journalism.

As our poor-grammar-on-social-media discussion turned into a journalism discussion, Bart revealed his mistrust of many of the “news” items people post online, and how he always takes the time to check out such postings before he believes them. 

By this time, he had escorted me back to the examination room, where I gestured to the notebook of readings for this class I’d brought with me to kill time in the waiting room.  Or it may have been the doctor’s charts—at this point my vision was getting fuzzier by the minute.  But I could clearly see Bart for who he really was.  A literate consumer of news—right here in South Carolina!  I should have placed him in a jar with holes punched in the lid.

I told him I was currently taking a journalism class, and this exact topic was up for discussion.  News literacy.  Healthy skepticism.  The spread of news on social media.  Verification.

Bart mentioned when he wanted serious news and perspective, he looked to a variety of trustworthy sources—aside from WIS (the local NBC affiliate) and The State (Columbia’s newspaper), both of which so many around here rely on—including the BBC and Al Jazeera.  Indicating my notebook (or that stack of charts) again, I told him about the piece we had to read about the American Time magazine covers as opposed to the international covers, and that launched us into a discussion American news tastes and the perception of Americans by others.

I then admitted to Bart I was a bit skeptical of the citizen journalist concept—and he agreed!  I told him about the idea of Open Journalism we’d just read about in The Elements of Journalism: the professional journalist sourcing eyewitness accounts from social media and combining them with his or her expertly gathered background information to bring the news consumer the best of the old and the new—and a more complete story along with it.  Perhaps this is the best answer…it’s certainly an answer I can grow comfortable with.  Better than just swallowing social media news wholesale, Open Journalism allows news to be filtered through the trained eye of the professional journalist who can use his or her lens to verify and help the reader or viewer make sense of everything.

In the interim, I am looking forward to my next eye exam.  Perhaps one day, Bart and I can frolic at the Cayce-West Columbia Riverwalk, feeding the ducks and reciting the First Amendment in a beautiful montage set against “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash...

What Is News?

What better way to start off a blog than with a nice dose of hypocrisy?

My friend Noel down in Florida posted this on Facebook just this past week: 

How clever and timely of Noel down in Florida to have posted this—he must have sensed I would need a topic for this blog.

Now, I have a confession to make: I absolutely hate it when people “share” things like this on Facebook, so much so that I’ve actually begun to hate the word share.  I want to see friends’ photos and hear about what’s going on in their lives—that’s why I go on Facebook—not to see the latest “share” of a recipe they’ll never make or household project they’ll never complete, Photoshopped kitten or puppy doing something cute, vintage drawing with sarcastic comment, command to “share if you agree the President is (or is not) doing a good job,” or sappy photo of someone holding a hand-scrawled sign saying he was allegedly left on the hospital steps thirty years ago and is now looking for his parents.

Sure, some of those things are cute or inspiring (but most are annoying).  And one can’t help reading them as one wades through the Facebook news feed searching for a morsel of personal news someone has posted.  I make it a rule to never comment on these incessant “shares,” and I certainly have never posted one, nor will I ever.

But I did save this one to—dare I say it—share with you, the students of John Bowen’s Social Role of the Mass Media class.

“What is News?” asked Discussion Board Question 1 in relation to the Duck Dynasty controversy.  I think Duck Dynasty definitely belongs in the right column.  Are these items newsworthy?  Some of them certainly are.  Some of them certainly are not.  Entertainment news, perhaps…some might even say gossip or frivolity.  And everyone occasionally indulges in a little escapism, a little junk food, a little fluff, and a small dose of it is probably needed to maintain one’s sanity in the face of all the items in the left column.  But it’s when the items in the right column outweigh those in the left column that we have a problem, when the audience becomes consumed with the immaterial at the expense of the germane. 

Is the media to blame for producing such content, or is the media merely giving the audience what it wants?  Is coverage of the topics in the left column socially responsible journalism?  Conversely, is coverage of the topics in the right column socially irresponsible journalism?  I suppose we will tackle these and other weighty questions over the next sixteen weeks.

In the meantime, please don’t share anything with me.  Unless it’s chocolate.