We were glad to see the release last week of the Carnegie/Knight foundations' executive summary of their study, “Improving The Education Of Tomorrow's Journalists.”  It’s often a good sign when financial heavyweights like these organizations recognize there is a problem and change needs to be forthcoming. 

And we are grateful the study’s conclusion reports that journalists need to be trained to have greater analytic abilities.  This study, for example, goes so far as to say, “Developing news judgment and analytical skills, including the ability to separate fact from opinion and use statistics   But the report, at least the summary, fails to break any new ground (the Carnegie Foundation has tried this before, at least with the J-school at Columbia Univ.) in articulating just which statistics some or all journalists should be using."  (This is no surprise: the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, the accrediting body for journalism education, says students should be able to “apply basic numerical and statistical concepts,” but then fails to describe criteria an accrediting team could use to measure that objective.)

But and but….

First, we are struck by the U.S.-centric perspective of the study.  Yes, yes, "five leading U.S. research universities with journalism schools."  And, after all, Carnegie and the Knight family made their fortunes in the U.S.  But the Digital Revolution is global, and so should be many aspects of journalism education and practice.  Japanese police, for example, use the same numerals in their GIS systems as do the Brits or Brazilians.  Ergo, journalists in all nations need to know things like how GIS is being applied in their jurisdictions to “monitor the centers of power” or understand and illustrate a variety of phenomena.

Second, as much as we would like to take comfort in this research effort, we can only conclude that it’s the same old Classic Journalists talking to each other.  Consider this:  The summary lists 40 individuals interviewed for the report.  Any American journalist or journalism educator will recognize most of the names because they are all high-profile individuals of a certain age, individuals deeply invested in, it would seem, practicing and perpetuating classic journalism, i.e. pre-Digital Age journalism.  (There is a handful of major exceptions, people who have either been deeply involved in practicing journalism in the new infosphere or learning to leverage the new environment:  Michael Bloomberg, James Fallows, Richard Kaplan, Donald E. Newhouse, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.)

But by talking to 40 mostly high-profile types, along with these five deans, what specific directions for change in journalism are likely to result?  If the study’s efforts were thorough, interviewees would have included people entrenched in managing information and data in the digital infosphere.  People like Dave Winer, one of the early inventors of blogging software, or Craig Newmark of “Craig’s List” or Andy Lehren at NBC Dateline or Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Mercury-News, or Rich Meislin at The New York Times or just about anyone at Google.  All of these people are changing the way journalism is practiced and delivered.

Third, we are taken aback by the rationale for the “Summer Institute at ABC News” internships.  We can’t follow the logic here.  We are told that all forms of journalism are in trouble in terms of quality and readership/viewership.  Yet this initiative is sending 10 carefully selected students into one of the very places that is in trouble, ostensibly to learn something.  Huh? 

These students, and the future of journalism, would be far better served if the ten were given financial support to spend a summer working as an administrative assistant to a city manager in a medium-sized city; spend a summer working with a crime analyst in a major city police department; spend a summer working as an aide in the congressional IT division office; spend a summer working in the field with Oxfam or Catholic Charities or similar organizations; spend a summer working at Community Viz to learn how simulation modeling can generate insights and tell stories; spend a summer working at WHO or the CDC to learn how data is collected and analyzed.  Then, at the end of the summer, have those students submit a how-to-implement-the-process paper describing what they learned that can be applied to journalism and how those lessons and skills could be taught in J-school.

Finally, we are concerned that the study seems to look at journalism education as a unique species without appropriate attention to the information environment, the rapidly changing environment, in which the species lives.  On one hand, Hodding Carter III, president of the Knight Foundation, seems to recognize the change:  “Virtually everything in journalism is, at the moment, insufficient and in a state of flux," he said. "Basic principles do not change, but the environment in which they must be applied is changing radically. So should the education of those who must work within that environment."  Yet the report of the study so far doesn’t address these changing-environment issues in any specific manner.

We hope that in the next phase, the foundations and deans consider investigating issues like these:

·  What proportion of a J-faculty has participated in a research project in the past 24 months involving colleagues in other disciplines on the same campus?  Or colleagues in other disciplines from any other campus?  And how did those interdisciplinary participants organize and manage the project in the digital environment?

·  What proportion of the J-faculty subscribes to listservs other than those for their department, school or university?  If the number is between one and six, how many of those are related to academic disciplines other than journalism? 

·  What proportion of the J-faculty has attended a scholarly conference in the past 24 months related to a discipline other than journalism?

·   What proportion of the J-faulty has used a spreadsheet or database to analyze data pertaining to a story the faculty member worked on or used a spreadsheet or database to build a mini data base for personal or department use?  What proportion of the J-faculty teaching writing or editing courses have taught students to use a spreadsheet or database to analyze data related to a story?

·  What proportion of the J-faculty has downloaded or installed a computer utility in the past three months, just to see how it works and to explore how it might be helpful to journalists?

          ·  What proportion of the J-faculty have posted their course syllabi and calendars to a website, one designed to facilitate communication between and among faculty and students?  What proportion of the J-faculty typically expects their students to always submit written and imagery assignments in digital form and via e-mail or similar tools?