During the past couple of years, the field of journalism has faced many hurdles. Newsrooms are shrinking, technology is advancing faster than we can and budgets are being cut across the board. To compound this problem, universities have begun to completely shut down their journalism programs. This means, even less people are going to be able to go into the profession to help improve our plight.
Journalists around the world have banded together to spread the word about our shrinking industry for Tuesday’s World Press Freedom Day.
Yes, as practicing journalists we have a vested interest when it comes to the future of journalism and how we can recover from this financial slump, but it is our hope that we can express our dedication and love for this industry to our readers.
As stated above, one of the greatest hurdles we are facing is the shrinking newsroom and lack of funding for proper journalism. With fewer journalists in the newsroom, it would be impossible for us to cover every aspect of a topic. The news — which we feel is so important — for our citizens to stay informed about what is going on in their governments would not be as extensive and our representatives could take advantage of this gap.
President Barack Obama said Saturday night at the White House press Correspondence Dinner, “I may not agree with everything you write or report … but I do so with the knowledge that when you are at your best, you help me be at my best by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and following into easy political games that people are desperately weary of. That kind of reporting is worth preserving. Not just for [journalism’s] sakes but for the public’s.”
We would like to applaud Obama for his glowing remarks about our profession, and hope our readers share his sentiments. We have been able to produce good content providing students information from how student fees are divvied out to unwarranted raises for certain OU employees. We hope to continue to provide such quality journalism to our readers, but with problems like what the University of Colorado are facing, the future looks bleak.
In April, Colorado’s Board of Regents decided to shut down their school of journalism. It had been open for 49 years when the 5-4 decision was made to shut it down.
Instead of getting a strictly journalism degree, Colorado students wanting to practice journalism are forced to double major with mass communications. This is unfair to their students; they are forced to take additional classes that would take away from the time they could spend studying journalism.
We are already a struggling industry, and muddling up our classes with having to double major doesn’t help improve the situation. We are not ready to give up on our profession, and we would hope universities across the nation wouldn’t either.
“I know that each newspaper and media outlet are wrestling with how to respond to these changes, and some are struggling simply to stay open,” Obama said. “And it won’t be easy, not every ending will be a happy one. But it is also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy. Its what makes this thing work.”
Citizens have become used to getting all of their news for free on the Internet, but even when they choose to go this low-cost route the information is gathered from what we would hope is a legitimate news sources.
It is sad when more people probably tuned in for the NFL draft and royal wedding this weekend than picked up a newspaper. We have become a society so obsessed with famous people and what they are doing that we have forgotten about what is going on in our government.
We believe Obama summed up the media’s importance best: “A government without newspapers, is a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts is not an option for the United States of America.”
For more information on World Press Day click here
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jrichardstevens 1 year ago
It seems the further from Boulder the story gets, the less accurate the details become.
My name is Rick Stevens, and I am a faculty member in the (soon to be former) School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Though our faculty are mixed about the "Journalism-Plus" plan, the idea does have some merit. Despite what is reported above, our students will be required to double major in Journalism and a specialty subject area. That area might be business, physics, theater, studio art, art history ... or just about any other major within the university's offerings. The idea is that reporters need not only the skills to communicate effectively, but also need to have a subject of expertise to inform their reporting.
In the recently released Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa performed a comprehensive review of higher education. Painting a disappointing picture of the learning experiences on higher ed campuses, the authors point out that business students demonstrate the least amount of growth in critical thinking during their college experience, followed closely by communication students.
The implications are distressing: journalism students were found to be (on average) less critical than general liberal arts majors. That has to change. Such findings are one of the reasons the CU administration is enforcing the double-major requirement: we need our great writers and media producers to think more critically in the years to come.
Finally, I want to address the lone comment posted above mine. I'm not sure where the rumor started that CU's journalism program is behind the times in terms of technology. I happen to use iPad texts in my own classroom, and we've been teaching multimedia production for some time.
I suspect this misinformation comes from the fact that the administration closed our school in part to merge it with other groups on campus interested in studying technology, communication and information science. But our forced participation in this new school or college (to be formed over the next few years) was not an indication that our program was not technologically savvy. In fact, quite the contrary.
Our school was the smallest on campus, and it was an awkward size that created some funding problems. In addition, we had some cultural problems within the school that the administration thought a reorganization would help.
I just wanted to assure you, writers and readers alike, that the "Colorado problems" are not that anyone at CU doesn't think news or journalism is important. The difficult and confusing year our faculty and students just experienced was intended as an opportunity to leverage our current successes into a new and innovative structure. And in the meantime, journalism will continue to be taught at the University of Colorado without interruption.
Rick Stevens rick.stevens@colorado.edu
colinwkirk 1 year ago
I can see Colorado's point; print is dying. Not just in journalism, either. Some schools have started to use iPads for students' books rather than actual printed texts. More people get their news from the television or internet than from newspapers or magazines. That said, pure journalism is important; there are journalists like Howard Fineman, formerly of Newsweek, now head political writer for the Huffington Post, who have show than traditional journalists do hold an important place in the changing media climate.