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What They Said

If anyone can speak with authority about the best of American journalism and the newsrooms that produce it, surely it is Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. Baron’s journalism career spans nearly four decades, all of them in five of the nation’s most prestigious newsrooms: The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Under Baron’s leadership, the Herald, the Globe and Post collectively have won nine Pulitzer Prizes, including two for public service. Baron’s colleagues say he “may be the best newspaper editor working on this side of the Atlantic.” The late David Carr, in a glowing New York Times commentary about Baron and the Post, wrote in October 2014: “Sometimes a single person, arriving at the right time, can change the fortunes of an organization.”

Baron arrived at the Post the year before it was purchased by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and pioneer of a digital-first market mentality. Bezos has charged Baron—a sometimes curmudgeonly traditionalist when it comes to the core values of journalism in a democracy—with moving his news operation into the digital age without sacrificing its longstanding legacy of journalistic excellence and impact. Toward that end, Baron has turned to some of his startup competitors in search of new models, different approaches, and a more expansive definition of news.

“Our view is we don’t have to be other people, but we do have to learn from other people,” he says. “ … We don’t intend to be BuzzFeed, but how can we learn something that can enhance our brand and adapt it to our newsroom instead of replicating it? That’s what we are looking for.”

That merging of traditional and contemporary journalistic practice represents a sea change in the culture and tenets of mainstream American journalism. While still the generators of 98 percent1 of the industry’s revenue, legacy newsrooms (in print, television and radio) are eager to learn from their more nimble digital counterparts—not to become them, but to poach their digital-first strategies around everything from audience engagement to user-generated (free) content.

That starts with hiring, training and retaining reporters who can “write for the Web,” says Baron. What does that mean, exactly? Great Web content is imbued with authority, immediacy, interactivity, aggregation, and a conversational, accessible and entertaining narrative style. The Post’s new blog, PostEverything, is a case in point. Written by “outside contributors,” Baron says it’s drawing some of the heaviest traffic on the site. He described one of its early successes, a story called “This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps.” “It hit all the right sweet spots,” Baron says.

The Post has also transitioned away from journalism’s longstanding “first or nothing” scoop mentality. “It’s very different now,” Baron says. “It used to be that everything we did had to be unique; if somebody already had it, there was no point in our doing it. … Bezos has talked about using the gifts of the Internet. There are newsrooms all over the place doing good work; we don’t have to invent them here. Let’s find those, let’s do the reporting, let’s get additional context, let’s write it better.” The Post has a team of reporters on every shift whose job it is to scour the Web for great or breaking stories and to do the reporting and rewriting necessary to remake them into Post-quality content.

That strategy for creating new stories out of existing information doesn’t mean the Post is going to abandon its commitment to its own investigative reporting, Baron says. “It’s part of our mission, part of our identity and our brand, and people expect it of us. We invest a lot of money in it. I don’t expect investigative reporters, nor the long-form narrative writers that are part of our brand, to produce the same kind of site traffic that someone covering a beat should produce. So the expectations are different. But it’s all part of what we do.”

Journalism needs to be redefined for the 21st century.

Baron’s observations about the current and future state of American journalism—and the consequent shifts in the skill sets necessary to meet its requirements—reflect many of the recurring themes that emerged in my conversations with journalists, entrepreneurs, educators and students over a six-month period in 2014. While transcripts of the question-and-answer sessions are included in the Appendices of this report, this chapter excerpts and summarizes many of those perspectives.

Interviewees said:

  • Journalism’s core purpose hasn’t changed. What’s new is the way it is being produced, distributed and monetized (or not).
  • Journalists must be technologists, entrepreneurs and “intrapreneurs,” and community builders and mobilizers at least as much as they are writers or storytellers.2
  • There is today no consensus on a proven, sustainable business model for commercial journalism in a digital marketplace.
  • Journalistic content is no longer the purview or product of a single trade, craft or profession. Today, it is:
    • produced by working journalists (with all of the attendant privileges and access that position has inhered) for distribution to mass audiences;
    • produced by mass audiences for distribution through social media and other digital channels to mass audiences; and
    • produced by working journalists and mass audiences for submission to computer systems that will at some future point relay, configure and repurpose that content for instantaneous distribution to audiences of all sizes (including an audience of one).
  • Journalism education is not keeping pace with the news-and-information industry it is dedicated to serve. But it may have an opportunity to claim a more central role in the academy as the purveyor of “liberal arts +” for the 21st century.

Journalism’s core purpose hasn’t changed.

If there is anything about which the interview subjects agreed, it is that journalism remains essential to an informed, effective, and sustainable democracy. James Duff, former CEO of the Freedom Forum and the Newseum, in 2014 helped to create and launch the Civics Renewal Network, a national consortium of nonprofits dedicated to improving civics education in the nation’s schools. He speaks passionately about the need for improved civics education to protect the nation’s First Amendment freedoms and the role of a free press in a strong democratic society:

Without an engaged and informed citizenry, as Jefferson called it, we are at risk of losing the freedoms we have. … A free press is crucial as a watchdog in keeping [the balance between national security and civil liberties] in check, in keeping government in check and the public informed. It’s crucial that we have a free press and an informed public, so they understand the role journalists play in maintaining our freedoms.

Just across town from the Newseum, Jeffrey Rutenbeck, dean of the School of Communication at American University, is considering the same kinds of issues and questions. Rutenbeck is an historian who believes that academia has an important role to play in defining and protecting the role of journalism in a democracy: “We’ve got to have some friction here because if we just left the industry of journalism to find its own way, game over. We have to restore some of the conversation about why journalism and accountability matters, why we should think about journalism as an activity instead of an industry.”

Journalism—as an activity and a discipline—should be focused on “five pillars” of concern or priority, Rutenbeck says—none of them associated with technology for its own sake. They are engagement design (the art and science of why anyone should pay attention to journalism in the first place); the management of complex systems and processes in an environment that is increasingly networked; analytics and the measurement of impact; transformative storytelling; and leadership and accountability.

“Through all of this, what everyone still values most is a good story told, an important story told, a personal story told, told well and told with impact,” Rutenbeck says. “Journalism—as its sheds its ball and chain of objectivity and gets back to the realization that journalists are trying to influence the world like everyone else—is like the Oklahoma Land Rush. Everyone is lined up there at the starting line: Journalists are right there with high school kids and the housewife in Mumbai, and they all have stories to tell.”

What’s new is the way journalism is being produced, distributed and monetized (or not). Journalists must be technologists, analysts, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, community builders and mobilizers, and innovators as least as much as they are writers or storytellers.

While everybody agrees that journalists need to have technical skills and understandings, there is much less consensus about the depth or level of tech mastery necessary for success. On one end of the spectrum are educators like Howard Schneider at Stony Brook, Jeffrey Rutenbeck at AU, Bradley Hamm at Medill/Northwestern, and Robert Stewart at Scripps in Ohio (and many of our survey respondents, quoted in Part 3), as well as professionals like Jessica Lessin, founder of the digital-first startup The Information. They argue that journalists must have some understanding of various kinds of digital tools but the traditional fundamentals of journalism—reporting, writing, history, law, ethics, news literacy—will trump the tech tool kit every time.

“You need to be dynamically attentive to two things at the same time: the changing landscape and the constants. So you keep your eye on both things,” says Schneider. “What’s constant? Reporting, writing, critical thinking, serving your audience are all constants. None of that will change or be altered dramatically by technology or different jobs. The hard part is not losing your core values, your nerve, your courage, and not abandoning all of that on the basis of what’s trendy. “

After extended discussion and debate, the new curricula at the Scripps school at Ohio University retained a decidedly liberal-studies breadth. “When we went through the curriculum change, we voted on how many courses we would require in each area,” Stewart says. “That took a long time because of the detail involved. For example, faculty didn’t think we could have students take only one history course instead of two. We had a calculator to show what the total was to stay within the quota, but every decision was voted on and it worked. We ended up with a product that has a strong liberal arts orientation. I’m happy with it.”

Hamm suggests that the core has remained constant—and it’s a solid preparation for a wide variety of careers. “If I were the czar of curriculum,” he says, “I would put history back into every journalism curriculum. I don’t believe an educated person can leave a journalism program and not know about journalism history. … if I were to say that you brought in a Medill student and said they’ve had law, ethics, history … the ability to understand the skills of writing and visual communication. … You match that with professional experience, internships, student media, with study abroad and other leadership opportunities, and in an accredited world with a second major or minor or special emphasis, I think it’s as good a degree as you could possibly get, whether you choose to go into journalism or not.”

Jessica Lessin says building community can also be about building profit. Founder of The Information, a subscription site whose masthead asserts its role as “the most valuable source of news about the technology industry for the world’s professionals,” Lessin says the challenge is to build an experience that readers value and can’t get anywhere else. For The Information, that means writing great stories and building strong communities around them. “To me, that’s the critical ingredient to surviving in today’s media. The brands that people follow are the ones that they have a real relationship with, the ones that have a differentiated value are the ones that stand out.”

Lessin says tech skills are an organizational competency, but “what we’re looking for are great journalists… And J-schools have swung too far toward the tools, toward spending classroom time doing things like editing videos. You have to care about doing the legwork to make sure your stories are getting in front of the people who want to read them, but I think the organization has to do a lot of that work so the reporters can do what they do best….I worry because I see J-schools emphasizing that jack-of-all-trades model. But at the end of the day, the opportunities for original thinkers and writers have never been greater.”

On more middle ground are professionals like Baron of The Washington Post; Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief and co-CEO of ProPublica; Chris Persaud, former Palm Beach Post intern and staffer, now freelancing; Catherine Cloutier of BostonGlobe.com; Robert Rosenthal of the Center for Investigative Reporting; and Lindsey Cook at U.S. News & World Report, who say working journalists need to understand and use digital tools for data analysis and visualization, for example, but they don’t have to be experts or engineers. Collaboration, adaptability, a penchant for change, and the ability to value and recognize (if not tell) a story are just as important to a journalist’s success.

“I think we are becoming much more of a technology industry,” says Baron. “I think people will need to have much more of an understanding of computer engineering than I do, for example. It does not mean, however, that they have to produce an app. There will be someone to produce an app if that’s the future. It’s sort of like saying that to be a successful bus driver you have to be the mechanic. You don’t need to be the mechanic. Or that to be a successful pilot you have to be able to build the plane. You don’t need to know how to build the plane. On the other hand, you want to have familiarity with the technology to know how it works. As the driver, you want to understand what the steering wheel does, and if something goes wrong you have some sense of what it might be.”

Everyone who goes to journalism school doesn’t need to code, says Engelberg, but everybody does need to be able to talk to the coders. “Not everybody who can write the code can also be a reporter and a writer, but I think putting the two worlds together and creating more of both is a very viable goal for journalism.”

Increasingly, those two worlds come together because journalists new to the profession—digital natives—bring a different mindset to their work. For them, figuring out what you need to know—through online tutorials, experimentation and practice—is as much a part of their professional responsibility as interviewing and writing stories.

The Online News Association’s 2014 conference in Chicago was packed with journalists whose operating assumption is that you learn what you need to know. Chris Persaud, who at the time was a staff reporter for his hometown newspaper in Palm Beach, Florida, and Catherine Cloutier, a data journalist at BostonGlobe.com, have created their careers around that assumption. Persaud earned an undergraduate degree in urban planning from Florida Atlantic University; Cloutier studied English at Boston College. Both learned reporting and journalistic writing at their campus newspapers.

Cloutier decided to get more formal training at the University of Southern California graduate school journalism program: “USC-Annenberg gave me a fellowship to go there, so for me it was a good opportunity to learn a new skill set and not have to pay. And I got to move to LA from New England,” she said. “It was a complete life change. I loved LA. It was a great experience that way, in that it opened my worldview a lot, too. I reported a lot about South Central [Los Angeles], so it gave me a passion that I didn’t have prior, which is writing about poverty and the issues associated around it.”

Persaud took a job right out of college at Bankrate.com. After several months, he resigned to work as a freelancer and to create a commercial Web site, RichBlocksPoorBlocks.com, that presents census data on household occupancy and income at neighborhood scale. Users pay $50 annually to access the data.

Persaud knew very little about coding or data analysis when he decided to create the site. He spent three to four months tracking down tutorials online and learning Excel, Ruby, Python and PHP. “I think you can do fine teaching yourself if you have the time and you know where to go and where to look. I just Googled around ‘coding for journalists,’” he says. So Persaud’s pretty significant data and coding skills are all self-taught? “I don’t think you can say that,” he says. “I found a good tutorial, and I learned from it.”

Cloutier says she honed her reporting and writing skills in grad school: “I can write a basic news story… I can edit video in Avid and Final Cut. I can edit audio in Audacity and Audition. I can do audio slideshows, which I’ve never done. A misconception in journalism academia is that people do audio slideshows. I can do basic HTML and CSS. I can build a basic website using WordPress and adjusting templates to certain specifications. Infographics in Illustrator and Photoshop. It was a wide range of tech skills, but I was in the online journalism track. Had I not been, I probably would have had fewer online journalism skills coming out.”

After graduation, Cloutier worked for 10 weeks as a News21 intern and wrote her multimedia thesis, an investigation of Watts. From there, she took her first job at the daily newspaper in Erie, Pennsylvania—where she sat down with every one of the reporters to help them open a Twitter account. After a year, she applied for a job at Boston.com, doing hyperlocal coverage of Boston neighborhoods.

In February 2013, the Globe announced that it was splitting Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com and moving the journalistic elements of Boston.com to the Globe site. Cloutier’s job was eliminated, but her seniority level meant she would be reassigned; eventually, she was moved to the BostonGlobe.com site to become a data journalist, something for which she says she had little preparation or skill. “It has been challenging,” she says. “I didn’t even know much about Excel, to be honest. I have taught other people how to do pivot tables and in doing so, I’ve taught myself how to use them. It’s been a lot of Googling. It’s a lot of trial and error.”

Cloutier says she has mastered the basic tools she needs to do her daily work, and she works with more experienced and skilled designers and coders on the staff when she’s producing larger or more complicated stories. “I do some basic data visualization, we have some producer tools that are easier to use, basic charts and graphs. I use some other software, like Highcharts, for interactive charts that are easy and quick to do. I’m putting in the data and doing basic CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] work to make it look right, but I’m not coding. … When I do big projects I usually pair up with a news app developer to do the interactive coding for me.”

Persaud took an internship at the Palm Beach Post, became a data interactive reporter and now is a freelancer. While he can code, he says, most of the journalists in his newsroom don’t need that skill set—especially the more senior reporters who have the significant networks of sources and deep experience in reporting that he doesn’t have. “Let’s say someone who is a courts reporter should know a little bit to do the stuff they need, like going through a big spreadsheet of court records. I don’t think they need to know Ruby or Python. I guess the answer to your question is that first of all, reporters should be reporters. Everyone should know the basics of coding.”

Journalists now have more tools in their tool kits, says Persaud, and new ways to access complex information easily and quickly. “I guess back then, they taught you how to do the regular stuff, like how to talk to people, so today you could add in how to find specific information,” he says. “Say you are working in city reporting and you need the budgets. In the past you would have to go through someone to get the copy of the budget. Is that right? And nowadays, it’s on the Web. Even for the little towns. I go on their website, flip through it and determine what departments could be cut. Technology has made getting the information very easy, where in the past there was a roadblock to that.”

Persaud’s dream job? “I would work at the local newspaper, whether it’s the Palm Beach Post or somewhere else. … [New York is] a nice place to visit, but I don’t know why I would leave the beaches of Florida to move to New York. I don’t see the point of it when we have a great newspaper right here. I think if The New York Times tried to compete with us, they’d lose.”

Even the newsrooms that say they want tech-savvy journalists who know how to code don’t understand the difference between necessary skills and unnecessary mastery, says Lindsey Cook. Good enough, she says, is good enough.

The job descriptions that people write for entry-level data visualization jobs are “completely ridiculous,” and that’s why they can’t get applicants, she says.

If you look at some of these descriptions, they have more things listed on them than a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction would know. … I think possibly the hiring managers don’t know what skills you need, so they list everything. The lists I saw were listing an insane amount that no one coming out of school could be expected to know. You don’t need it. If you’re in data visualization and you know some JavaScript and D3, you know some programming fundamentals and you know the fundamentals of data, you can learn the other things as you need them. The word “expert” is used a lot. I applied to one job and they wanted you to know Flash for a data visualization job. Flash hasn’t been used in data visualization in almost a decade. They are making the barrier way too high. I think that’s the reason that a lot of people who know but didn’t study computer science are apprehensive about applying for these jobs.

Across the country, in the San Francisco offices of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), Robert Rosenthal says today’s journalist doesn’t need to be a technologist as much as a team builder and collaborator—inside and beyond the newsroom. But he does believe that having the knowledge and perspective of the technologist in the organization is a necessity. “As a journalism school, you can’t assume the student can do everything well. They’re going to have a range of skills, including knowing how to produce radio, video, online,” he says. “One of the things that we’ve done [at CIR] is to honor and understand the value of the different skill sets. Not everyone is going to be a great reporter, or a data analyst, or a great storyteller. So how do you create an organization where there is collaboration around the creation of great content? And how do you create external collaboration with other media companies for distribution? And how do collaborate with the audience for distribution?

“Culturally, I think journalism schools have to think about collaboration and partnership as a huge value; the concept of exclusivity no longer exists,” he says. “If you really want to leverage your work for impact and reach, especially in an investigative nonprofit space, it’s all about distribution, traditional and nontraditional unique storytelling, and creating a culture where impact is thought about and valued.”

On the far end of the tech-essential spectrum are journalism nonprofits such as the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, and for-profits like Narrative Science, which define journalism in data-centric terms.

Gordon Witkin, executive editor of the Center for Public Integrity, says CPI needs interns and new employees who have a broader, deeper group of skills than he was asked for when he came out of journalism school in 1977. “It’s multimedia, being able to work on the Web … do video, shoot pictures, do podcasts, create interactive graphics, code maybe, data visualization is huge, things like interactive graphics, interactive games even, and … what we do with data is computer-assisted reporting. It’s taking big vats of data and being able to work with, massage, manipulate and analyze that data to come up with strong, unshakable, journalistic conclusions. If you think about all that, it’s a whole group of skills, but I guess, having come from a different generation, my big asterisk is that’s a lot, and you’re asking all of that. However, particularly for a place like this, or for any place, you’re still expecting for them to have the basic who, what, where, when, why reporting skills.”

At ProPublica, stories start and end with data: Journalists can now develop, test and prove hypotheses with statistical validity, says Paul Steiger, the founding CEO and executive chairman. “Then what you have to do is go back and get the anecdotes. It’s the anecdotes that help people grasp the story and make people care.” But even compelling anecdotes that humanize aggregated data aren’t as valuable to an audience as a story that is personalized and immediate. So many ProPublica investigations include a data set that, where possible, can be manipulated to provide every reader with information about his or her own experience. “Not only will we tell you about a lot of doctors, but we will tell you about your doctor,” says Engelberg. “That’s a very different way of doing journalism. … We need more great writers, we need more great number crunchers, and we need more people who can visually display it on the Web in a way that’s compelling.”

Journalists must be … analysts, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs …

At journalism schools around the country, students in entrepreneurship classes are engaging in the processes of a media startup—idea, iteration, testing, execution of a new product—often in collaboration with the campus business or engineering school. While most of those students will not pursue careers as app developers, the takeaway lessons from those experiences include teamwork, design processes, and an enhanced understanding of the business of media-product startups. That’s one kind of entrepreneurship, and faculty like Jan Schaffer at American University and Michelle Ferrier at Ohio University believe it’s a critically important aspect of a journalist’s tool kit.

But entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship can be as much a state of mind as it is a product-development process, a set of new operating assumptions that prompts journalists to assume ownership of the impact of their contributions on the growth and success of their news organizations. That means greater responsibility for what happens to a story after it’s written and published.

Marcia Parker, former assistant dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, has spent the past decade helping media companies develop better user engagement and audience-development strategies. She says journalists don’t understand the business side of their own industry, nor do they expect to be held accountable for it. “In the traditional organizations, journalists are still not exposed enough to that side on every level,” she says. “And then in the newer startup world, often they are, but they didn’t come in prepared, so they not only don’t know what a business plan is, they don’t understand road maps, they don’t understand product requirements, they don’t understand what partnership and strategy is all about, and how revenue is actually generated. … We don’t really train anybody in these things, but this is the language of our industry now.”

Most journalists understand the value proposition around using social media to drive traffic to their news sites (which is not to suggest that most know how to do that effectively). What they resist, says Parker, is being held accountable for audience metrics on their content. “Now you’re being judged on metrics like community engagement, time on site, time on section, time on story, how much are you seeding and engaged in conversation. … If your social media doesn’t sing and doesn’t get response, you’re going to be marked down for that.” In addition, she says, journalists have to concern themselves with the distribution of their content beyond their own news organizations, and with use of that content for marketing or commercial purposes.

While those are the skill sets most in demand in the marketplace, they’re not the skill sets being taught in journalism schools. “I feel like we should just reverse the whole thing [about journalism education] and start over,” Parker says. “We should figure out all the skill sets required to produce, manage and publish editorial content. It would be much broader than what programs are doing now. I’d hire content-strategies people, and then you could start breaking down the skill sets you need to be able to do that. You’d have to help students figure out what is the business strategy of the organization you’re going to work for—and that includes the LinkedIns of the world and the Salesforces and CIR and all of those different things.

“Just as schools are trying to figure out what’s going on and how to do this, there are all these players coming into the media space. They are doing it because they think they can take the skills that they have, and apply them and reimagine them, and they know that there is value in content,” she says. “I think that’s where that skill set needs to start: What’s the revenue model for the startup? And you need to know there are a whole bunch of those out there, and you need to be thinking about it from day one. This is our industry, this is how it’s changing, and it’s really like learning a different one. We don’t teach that in journalism schools … we barely even mention it.”

The Washington Post has long distributed its news analytics to managers and editors, and it has recently begun to share it with some individual reporters. But traffic metrics aren’t the only measure of success, says Marty Baron. All newsrooms are looking for journalists who actively generate new ideas and opportunities that can help move the organization forward, he says. “There is no future for people who think they are going to be merely cogs in the wheel, employees who aren’t coming forward with initiatives or proposing things we can do that will be successful.”

Kevin Davis, CEO and executive director of the nonprofit Investigative News Network, says journalists are poorly prepared for that future. Most of the students entering journalism schools today will never work in a traditional news organization, he predicts, and they’ll need entrepreneurial business skills to survive—skills they won’t have. “They’re at schools where things like self-promotion, activation and social media are considered to be, at best, a dilution of the purity of the journalism function,” Davis says. “… I know of no other medium … where so much work is put into producing a product or service without any understanding, guidance or money put toward the marketing, distribution or activation of that content. It’s just insane.”

Journalists must be … community builders and mobilizers.

Everything “still starts with core journalism,” says Marcia Parker, “because there’s no way you can do a good job without having the core commitments to what journalism is and does. But then on top of that, there’s everything else, there’s user engagement, communicating with your audience, using social media to expand and extend your audience. … It’s really about seeding conversation, engaging in conversation, keeping a conversation going—not just because you have to improve time on your site, but because users are now in the habit of really engaging with stories.”

There is no consensus today on a sustainable commercial business model for journalism in a digital marketplace.

While multiple models exist—from subscriptions and pay walls to display ads, native advertising, venture capital and philanthropic funding—the 2014 Pew Report suggests that the journalism marketplace is still struggling to identify revenue streams sufficient to sustain an industry reeling from the sharp declines in print advertising:

Advertising, at least for now, still accounts for the majority of known news revenue—a little over two-thirds, by this reckoning. But the advertising-supported business model is in a state of churn. Print advertising continues its sharp decline. Television advertising currently remains stable, but the steady audience migration to the web will inevitably impact that business model, too. Digital advertising is growing, though not nearly fast enough to keep pace with declines in legacy ad formats. And, while new forms of digital advertising gained momentum in 2013, the online advertising market seems to favor a scale achievable only by few.

The whole paradigm of advertising is disrupted online, where advertising space is available in infinite quantities. “There are a certain number of page views worldwide, it’s a very large number, which is the advertising inventory,” the Post’s Baron says. “What’s our answer to the need to make more money? Generate more page views. As we generate more page views, the supply of available inventory goes up and rates go down. The results are you aren’t making any more money, and you may make less. I liken this to being on a treadmill, and you’re going, but you’re not going anywhere. Then someone speeds it up and you’re going faster, but you’re still not going anywhere. Then someone speeds it up more and more until you collapse because you can’t sustain it anymore. In many ways, we are on that treadmill, and no one knows how to get off.

“The business model is unsettled. I don’t think anyone knows what the business model is yet. The business model right now it is try a lot of different things to see what works. We have very difficult economics right now in the industry.”

Historically, journalists didn’t have to worry about the business side of their profession, Baron says. “We used to just do the journalism, and the business side will be taken care of. … That was false security for us because we thought people were coming to us for certain reasons, but they were in fact coming because they didn’t have other choices. Now they have other options, and we are getting a better sense of the real world. That may lead to a situation in which journalists only do the things that make money, and then what happens to the stuff that doesn’t make money?”

Baron says he doesn’t have the answer to that question, even as he sees growing gaps in the coverage of local, state and federal governments, in journalism’s role in holding the powerful accountable. But he’s optimistic one will emerge: “At some point, I’m confident, there will develop a model that will provide the information people need,” he says, “but it hasn’t happened yet.”

Journalistic content is no longer the purview or product of a single trade, craft or profession. Today, it is:

  • produced by working journalists (with all of the attendant privileges and access that position has inhered) for distribution to mass audiences;
  • produced by mass audiences for distribution through social media and other digital channels to mass audiences; and
  • produced by working journalists and mass audiences for submission to computer systems that will at some future point relay, configure and repurpose that content for instantaneous distribution to audiences of all sizes (including an audience of one).

It’s clear that journalism is in a state of rapid evolution, from a traditional system of trained, professional gatekeepers identifying and distributing news and information through a very limited number of media outlets, to the current network of reporters (trained and not) sharing information across a multimedia web of distribution channels. One of those channels—sometimes derisively referred to as “robo journalism”—is produced by an artificial intelligence system that translates data input into explanatory narrative.

In journalism circles, Narrative Science is probably best known for the stories it generates for news sites like Forbes—evidence, it is argued, that it is trying to replace or eradicate journalism as we know it. Kris Hammond, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, acknowledges that there’s some overlap between traditional journalism and the content that its platform, Quill, produces and distributes, but says the mission of Narrative Science is only tangentially related to journalism as a practice or an industry.

In fact, he says, his company’s vision is far grander and more inclusive: Rather than aspiring to provide news to consumers, Quill’s mission is to create narratives that draw upon the world’s data to meet the information needs of every citizen. Its goal is to educate the world, one person at a time.

“We do narrative generation,” Hammond says. “That means I first need to understand what’s happening in the world, and what’s important about what’s happening in the world. Then I need to know what’s interesting about what’s happening in the world, and then I need to know what you—you as an individual, as a person—need out of all of that. And I will use that insight to craft the narrative. Not just a sentence or whatever. I will use that to explain these things to you in a way you understand, in a way that’s meaningful and impactful specifically to you.”

That’s very different from journalism as we know it, he says. Stories produced by even the most experienced and talented journalist reflect only what that individual reporter knows or can know—which pales, he says, in comparison to the capacity of an artificial intelligence system to collect, process, filter and present deeply informed narrative.

“We’re creating a system that does the one thing that differentiates us from beasts,” Hammond says. “Communication. We have a system that actually models communication. … We will make people smarter through the application of technology to generate stories about the world based on data.” Storytellers of the future will need to understand how to capture, collect, aggregate, and submit (or channel) relevant data to systems like Quill, which will store and relay that data in multiple forms, for multiple purposes, over time.

Journalism education is not keeping pace with the news-and-information industry it is dedicated to serve.

The Poynter Institute’s 2013 study on the future of journalism education is a touchstone for the question of journalism education’s currency; even those closest to the academic enterprise acknowledge that it is not keeping pace with the changes in the profession. Anecdotally, journalists and educators alike wonder aloud whether there’s a realistic way to bring together two cultures so out of sync with each other in terms of process and pacing.

“When people think of J-schools, they think of institutions that are churning out people who are being taught by people who aren’t reflecting the reality of the market today,” says the Investigative News Network’s Kevin Davis. “It involves community organizing, activation, reflection, engagement, social, business acumen, technology skills. … As we shape the information systems for the next hundred years, in my opinion, it’s unlikely that we will see anything or anybody that is supposed to be a publicly traded conglomerate media organization. It’s more likely that we will have news coming as a tangent out of something that is intended to do something totally different, like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. … We need a lot more content and information entrepreneurs.”

Journalism schools may have an opportunity to claim a more central role in the academy as the purveyor of “liberal arts +” for the 21st century.

Howard Schneider, founding dean of the Stony Brook University School of Journalism, may be the most visible spokesperson for the role of journalism schools in educating media consumers to recognize journalism as a source of reliable information in an increasingly crowded mediated world. Stony Brook offers every student on campus the opportunity to take a News Literacy course in fulfillment of one of their general education requirements—an option that more than 10,000 undergraduates have selected over the past seven years. Schneider describes the course as “critical thinking as applied to news. But it’s also civic education at the same time.”

Journalism schools have an obligation to educate the audience as well as the producers of news and information, he says, “if we are going to have a robust, successful press and a successful democracy. Charlotte Grimes at Syracuse says all the time that journalism is an act of citizenship. It is. If you embrace that, then you need to embrace both sides of the equation. I think that’s absolutely the role of a journalism school.”

Like several of his colleagues, Schneider believes that journalism schools have a compelling opportunity to claim a more central place in the academic mission of their colleges and universities.

Journalism schools “are no longer professional schools residing on the fringes of great research universities,” he says. “If you look at the revolution we are living through, it is the job of the journalism school to prepare all of the students on the campus for this tsunami of information and disinformation that is descending upon us. It is a core competency in the 21st century, a civic competency, and it is the role of the journalism school to fulfill that. … This is an opportunity to grow and be expansive and to think differently about ourselves and to become central to the mission of a major research university in the 21st century.”

And that’s the golden opportunity today’s journalism educators—who are still struggling to claim a place at the academic table on their campuses and in the eyes of their academic administration—are missing, according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab at American University. Schaffer is convinced that journalism education should be seizing the day—and the central power position of the liberal arts—in the higher education landscape of the digital age.

I think we have a bigger role to play, in higher education and society at large. The opportunity is right here, but we can’t see it: Journalism schools, in my view, should be recasting themselves as a gateway to just about any career a student wants to have. If it happens to be in journalism, that’s fine. But, we need digital and reporting skills in the nonprofit sector; we need them in the diplomatic sector; we need them in the for-profit sector; we need them, at large, in government. Journalism skills are a great baseline for medical, law or business degrees.

Journalism schools have a moment in time when they could create the new liberal arts degree, but with a more pronounced value proposition. They should be trumpeting how the overlay of digital, writing, and research skills makes the right journalism degree much more valuable than a classic liberal arts degree. It’s a degree that really will prepare students for a menu of jobs. Some of them will be journalism jobs, but even now journalism school graduates are migrating far beyond the field of journalism. We just don’t always want to crow about that reality.

Schaffer, who speaks eloquently about journalism education reshaping its mission to focus on making “the media we need for the world we want,” is insistent that journalism education should expand its value proposition to become a gateway to professional work—of all kinds.

“I think journalism/communication schools should be totally rebranding themselves as giving students incredibly useful gateways to the world,” she says. “It’s a much more meaningful and marketable construct. Liberal arts programs can’t really say that students will come out with a set of skills that can be used in almost any job they encounter. A genuine Gateway Degree will allay parent concerns. It will give students jobs. It will bring you better, more grounded alumni who can actually feed back into your programs. I think it’s a missed opportunity.”

What They Said: Summing Up

The purpose and promise of this project was to collect the best thinking and innovative ideas of as many people as possible about the future and shape of American journalism and journalism education. The goal was not to filter or critique, but to present and share within a framework in which those disparate and wide-ranging commentaries could be situated in some reasonable context.

Given that charge, it’s no surprise that the comments and proposed solutions are as far-ranging as the nature of journalism itself: from resituating journalism education as the 21st-century liberal arts to reconceptualizing journalism as a system of data channels through which technology produces individualized content. One of the key takeaways from every conversation, however, is the degree to which the professionals, students and academics involved in the conversation care passionately about the value and purpose of journalism in a world ever more in need of the kind of accurate, substantive and insightful information upon which a democracy—and a culture—depend. While there are no easy answers about how to shape an academic system to educate those who will create that information, and a market system that will pay for it, there is no question or debate about the fact that it must be done.

  1. Holcomb, Jesse and Mitchell, Amy. “Revenue Sources: A Heavy Dependence on Advertising,” State of the Media, Pew Research Center, March 26, 2014, https://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/, accessed online January 31, 2015. ↩

  2. “Intrapreneur” is defined by Merriam Webster as “a corporate executive who develops new enterprises within the corporation.” BusinessDictionary.com defines “intrapreneurship” as the “practice of entrepreneurship in an established firm.” ↩

Interviews from the Field • Knight Foundation

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What They Said

If anyone can speak with authority about the best of American journalism and the newsrooms that produce it, surely it is Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. Baron’s journalism career spans nearly four decades, all of them in five of the nation’s most prestigious newsrooms: The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Under Baron’s leadership, the Herald, the Globe and Post collectively have won nine Pulitzer Prizes, including two for public service. Baron’s colleagues say he “may be the best newspaper editor working on this side of the Atlantic.” The late David Carr, in a glowing New York Times commentary about Baron and the Post, wrote in October 2014: “Sometimes a single person, arriving at the right time, can change the fortunes of an organization.”

Baron arrived at the Post the year before it was purchased by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and pioneer of a digital-first market mentality. Bezos has charged Baron—a sometimes curmudgeonly traditionalist when it comes to the core values of journalism in a democracy—with moving his news operation into the digital age without sacrificing its longstanding legacy of journalistic excellence and impact. Toward that end, Baron has turned to some of his startup competitors in search of new models, different approaches, and a more expansive definition of news.

“Our view is we don’t have to be other people, but we do have to learn from other people,” he says. “ … We don’t intend to be BuzzFeed, but how can we learn something that can enhance our brand and adapt it to our newsroom instead of replicating it? That’s what we are looking for.”

That merging of traditional and contemporary journalistic practice represents a sea change in the culture and tenets of mainstream American journalism. While still the generators of 98 percent1 of the industry’s revenue, legacy newsrooms (in print, television and radio) are eager to learn from their more nimble digital counterparts—not to become them, but to poach their digital-first strategies around everything from audience engagement to user-generated (free) content.

That starts with hiring, training and retaining reporters who can “write for the Web,” says Baron. What does that mean, exactly? Great Web content is imbued with authority, immediacy, interactivity, aggregation, and a conversational, accessible and entertaining narrative style. The Post’s new blog, PostEverything, is a case in point. Written by “outside contributors,” Baron says it’s drawing some of the heaviest traffic on the site. He described one of its early successes, a story called “This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps.” “It hit all the right sweet spots,” Baron says.

The Post has also transitioned away from journalism’s longstanding “first or nothing” scoop mentality. “It’s very different now,” Baron says. “It used to be that everything we did had to be unique; if somebody already had it, there was no point in our doing it. … Bezos has talked about using the gifts of the Internet. There are newsrooms all over the place doing good work; we don’t have to invent them here. Let’s find those, let’s do the reporting, let’s get additional context, let’s write it better.” The Post has a team of reporters on every shift whose job it is to scour the Web for great or breaking stories and to do the reporting and rewriting necessary to remake them into Post-quality content.

That strategy for creating new stories out of existing information doesn’t mean the Post is going to abandon its commitment to its own investigative reporting, Baron says. “It’s part of our mission, part of our identity and our brand, and people expect it of us. We invest a lot of money in it. I don’t expect investigative reporters, nor the long-form narrative writers that are part of our brand, to produce the same kind of site traffic that someone covering a beat should produce. So the expectations are different. But it’s all part of what we do.”

Journalism needs to be redefined for the 21st century.

Baron’s observations about the current and future state of American journalism—and the consequent shifts in the skill sets necessary to meet its requirements—reflect many of the recurring themes that emerged in my conversations with journalists, entrepreneurs, educators and students over a six-month period in 2014. While transcripts of the question-and-answer sessions are included in the Appendices of this report, this chapter excerpts and summarizes many of those perspectives.

Interviewees said:

  • Journalism’s core purpose hasn’t changed. What’s new is the way it is being produced, distributed and monetized (or not).
  • Journalists must be technologists, entrepreneurs and “intrapreneurs,” and community builders and mobilizers at least as much as they are writers or storytellers.2
  • There is today no consensus on a proven, sustainable business model for commercial journalism in a digital marketplace.
  • Journalistic content is no longer the purview or product of a single trade, craft or profession. Today, it is:
    • produced by working journalists (with all of the attendant privileges and access that position has inhered) for distribution to mass audiences;
    • produced by mass audiences for distribution through social media and other digital channels to mass audiences; and
    • produced by working journalists and mass audiences for submission to computer systems that will at some future point relay, configure and repurpose that content for instantaneous distribution to audiences of all sizes (including an audience of one).
  • Journalism education is not keeping pace with the news-and-information industry it is dedicated to serve. But it may have an opportunity to claim a more central role in the academy as the purveyor of “liberal arts +” for the 21st century.

Journalism’s core purpose hasn’t changed.

If there is anything about which the interview subjects agreed, it is that journalism remains essential to an informed, effective, and sustainable democracy. James Duff, former CEO of the Freedom Forum and the Newseum, in 2014 helped to create and launch the Civics Renewal Network, a national consortium of nonprofits dedicated to improving civics education in the nation’s schools. He speaks passionately about the need for improved civics education to protect the nation’s First Amendment freedoms and the role of a free press in a strong democratic society:

Without an engaged and informed citizenry, as Jefferson called it, we are at risk of losing the freedoms we have. … A free press is crucial as a watchdog in keeping [the balance between national security and civil liberties] in check, in keeping government in check and the public informed. It’s crucial that we have a free press and an informed public, so they understand the role journalists play in maintaining our freedoms.

Just across town from the Newseum, Jeffrey Rutenbeck, dean of the School of Communication at American University, is considering the same kinds of issues and questions. Rutenbeck is an historian who believes that academia has an important role to play in defining and protecting the role of journalism in a democracy: “We’ve got to have some friction here because if we just left the industry of journalism to find its own way, game over. We have to restore some of the conversation about why journalism and accountability matters, why we should think about journalism as an activity instead of an industry.”

Journalism—as an activity and a discipline—should be focused on “five pillars” of concern or priority, Rutenbeck says—none of them associated with technology for its own sake. They are engagement design (the art and science of why anyone should pay attention to journalism in the first place); the management of complex systems and processes in an environment that is increasingly networked; analytics and the measurement of impact; transformative storytelling; and leadership and accountability.

“Through all of this, what everyone still values most is a good story told, an important story told, a personal story told, told well and told with impact,” Rutenbeck says. “Journalism—as its sheds its ball and chain of objectivity and gets back to the realization that journalists are trying to influence the world like everyone else—is like the Oklahoma Land Rush. Everyone is lined up there at the starting line: Journalists are right there with high school kids and the housewife in Mumbai, and they all have stories to tell.”

What’s new is the way journalism is being produced, distributed and monetized (or not). Journalists must be technologists, analysts, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, community builders and mobilizers, and innovators as least as much as they are writers or storytellers.

While everybody agrees that journalists need to have technical skills and understandings, there is much less consensus about the depth or level of tech mastery necessary for success. On one end of the spectrum are educators like Howard Schneider at Stony Brook, Jeffrey Rutenbeck at AU, Bradley Hamm at Medill/Northwestern, and Robert Stewart at Scripps in Ohio (and many of our survey respondents, quoted in Part 3), as well as professionals like Jessica Lessin, founder of the digital-first startup The Information. They argue that journalists must have some understanding of various kinds of digital tools but the traditional fundamentals of journalism—reporting, writing, history, law, ethics, news literacy—will trump the tech tool kit every time.

“You need to be dynamically attentive to two things at the same time: the changing landscape and the constants. So you keep your eye on both things,” says Schneider. “What’s constant? Reporting, writing, critical thinking, serving your audience are all constants. None of that will change or be altered dramatically by technology or different jobs. The hard part is not losing your core values, your nerve, your courage, and not abandoning all of that on the basis of what’s trendy. “

After extended discussion and debate, the new curricula at the Scripps school at Ohio University retained a decidedly liberal-studies breadth. “When we went through the curriculum change, we voted on how many courses we would require in each area,” Stewart says. “That took a long time because of the detail involved. For example, faculty didn’t think we could have students take only one history course instead of two. We had a calculator to show what the total was to stay within the quota, but every decision was voted on and it worked. We ended up with a product that has a strong liberal arts orientation. I’m happy with it.”

Hamm suggests that the core has remained constant—and it’s a solid preparation for a wide variety of careers. “If I were the czar of curriculum,” he says, “I would put history back into every journalism curriculum. I don’t believe an educated person can leave a journalism program and not know about journalism history. … if I were to say that you brought in a Medill student and said they’ve had law, ethics, history … the ability to understand the skills of writing and visual communication. … You match that with professional experience, internships, student media, with study abroad and other leadership opportunities, and in an accredited world with a second major or minor or special emphasis, I think it’s as good a degree as you could possibly get, whether you choose to go into journalism or not.”

Jessica Lessin says building community can also be about building profit. Founder of The Information, a subscription site whose masthead asserts its role as “the most valuable source of news about the technology industry for the world’s professionals,” Lessin says the challenge is to build an experience that readers value and can’t get anywhere else. For The Information, that means writing great stories and building strong communities around them. “To me, that’s the critical ingredient to surviving in today’s media. The brands that people follow are the ones that they have a real relationship with, the ones that have a differentiated value are the ones that stand out.”

Lessin says tech skills are an organizational competency, but “what we’re looking for are great journalists… And J-schools have swung too far toward the tools, toward spending classroom time doing things like editing videos. You have to care about doing the legwork to make sure your stories are getting in front of the people who want to read them, but I think the organization has to do a lot of that work so the reporters can do what they do best….I worry because I see J-schools emphasizing that jack-of-all-trades model. But at the end of the day, the opportunities for original thinkers and writers have never been greater.”

On more middle ground are professionals like Baron of The Washington Post; Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief and co-CEO of ProPublica; Chris Persaud, former Palm Beach Post intern and staffer, now freelancing; Catherine Cloutier of BostonGlobe.com; Robert Rosenthal of the Center for Investigative Reporting; and Lindsey Cook at U.S. News & World Report, who say working journalists need to understand and use digital tools for data analysis and visualization, for example, but they don’t have to be experts or engineers. Collaboration, adaptability, a penchant for change, and the ability to value and recognize (if not tell) a story are just as important to a journalist’s success.

“I think we are becoming much more of a technology industry,” says Baron. “I think people will need to have much more of an understanding of computer engineering than I do, for example. It does not mean, however, that they have to produce an app. There will be someone to produce an app if that’s the future. It’s sort of like saying that to be a successful bus driver you have to be the mechanic. You don’t need to be the mechanic. Or that to be a successful pilot you have to be able to build the plane. You don’t need to know how to build the plane. On the other hand, you want to have familiarity with the technology to know how it works. As the driver, you want to understand what the steering wheel does, and if something goes wrong you have some sense of what it might be.”

Everyone who goes to journalism school doesn’t need to code, says Engelberg, but everybody does need to be able to talk to the coders. “Not everybody who can write the code can also be a reporter and a writer, but I think putting the two worlds together and creating more of both is a very viable goal for journalism.”

Increasingly, those two worlds come together because journalists new to the profession—digital natives—bring a different mindset to their work. For them, figuring out what you need to know—through online tutorials, experimentation and practice—is as much a part of their professional responsibility as interviewing and writing stories.

The Online News Association’s 2014 conference in Chicago was packed with journalists whose operating assumption is that you learn what you need to know. Chris Persaud, who at the time was a staff reporter for his hometown newspaper in Palm Beach, Florida, and Catherine Cloutier, a data journalist at BostonGlobe.com, have created their careers around that assumption. Persaud earned an undergraduate degree in urban planning from Florida Atlantic University; Cloutier studied English at Boston College. Both learned reporting and journalistic writing at their campus newspapers.

Cloutier decided to get more formal training at the University of Southern California graduate school journalism program: “USC-Annenberg gave me a fellowship to go there, so for me it was a good opportunity to learn a new skill set and not have to pay. And I got to move to LA from New England,” she said. “It was a complete life change. I loved LA. It was a great experience that way, in that it opened my worldview a lot, too. I reported a lot about South Central [Los Angeles], so it gave me a passion that I didn’t have prior, which is writing about poverty and the issues associated around it.”

Persaud took a job right out of college at Bankrate.com. After several months, he resigned to work as a freelancer and to create a commercial Web site, RichBlocksPoorBlocks.com, that presents census data on household occupancy and income at neighborhood scale. Users pay $50 annually to access the data.

Persaud knew very little about coding or data analysis when he decided to create the site. He spent three to four months tracking down tutorials online and learning Excel, Ruby, Python and PHP. “I think you can do fine teaching yourself if you have the time and you know where to go and where to look. I just Googled around ‘coding for journalists,’” he says. So Persaud’s pretty significant data and coding skills are all self-taught? “I don’t think you can say that,” he says. “I found a good tutorial, and I learned from it.”

Cloutier says she honed her reporting and writing skills in grad school: “I can write a basic news story… I can edit video in Avid and Final Cut. I can edit audio in Audacity and Audition. I can do audio slideshows, which I’ve never done. A misconception in journalism academia is that people do audio slideshows. I can do basic HTML and CSS. I can build a basic website using WordPress and adjusting templates to certain specifications. Infographics in Illustrator and Photoshop. It was a wide range of tech skills, but I was in the online journalism track. Had I not been, I probably would have had fewer online journalism skills coming out.”

After graduation, Cloutier worked for 10 weeks as a News21 intern and wrote her multimedia thesis, an investigation of Watts. From there, she took her first job at the daily newspaper in Erie, Pennsylvania—where she sat down with every one of the reporters to help them open a Twitter account. After a year, she applied for a job at Boston.com, doing hyperlocal coverage of Boston neighborhoods.

In February 2013, the Globe announced that it was splitting Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com and moving the journalistic elements of Boston.com to the Globe site. Cloutier’s job was eliminated, but her seniority level meant she would be reassigned; eventually, she was moved to the BostonGlobe.com site to become a data journalist, something for which she says she had little preparation or skill. “It has been challenging,” she says. “I didn’t even know much about Excel, to be honest. I have taught other people how to do pivot tables and in doing so, I’ve taught myself how to use them. It’s been a lot of Googling. It’s a lot of trial and error.”

Cloutier says she has mastered the basic tools she needs to do her daily work, and she works with more experienced and skilled designers and coders on the staff when she’s producing larger or more complicated stories. “I do some basic data visualization, we have some producer tools that are easier to use, basic charts and graphs. I use some other software, like Highcharts, for interactive charts that are easy and quick to do. I’m putting in the data and doing basic CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] work to make it look right, but I’m not coding. … When I do big projects I usually pair up with a news app developer to do the interactive coding for me.”

Persaud took an internship at the Palm Beach Post, became a data interactive reporter and now is a freelancer. While he can code, he says, most of the journalists in his newsroom don’t need that skill set—especially the more senior reporters who have the significant networks of sources and deep experience in reporting that he doesn’t have. “Let’s say someone who is a courts reporter should know a little bit to do the stuff they need, like going through a big spreadsheet of court records. I don’t think they need to know Ruby or Python. I guess the answer to your question is that first of all, reporters should be reporters. Everyone should know the basics of coding.”

Journalists now have more tools in their tool kits, says Persaud, and new ways to access complex information easily and quickly. “I guess back then, they taught you how to do the regular stuff, like how to talk to people, so today you could add in how to find specific information,” he says. “Say you are working in city reporting and you need the budgets. In the past you would have to go through someone to get the copy of the budget. Is that right? And nowadays, it’s on the Web. Even for the little towns. I go on their website, flip through it and determine what departments could be cut. Technology has made getting the information very easy, where in the past there was a roadblock to that.”

Persaud’s dream job? “I would work at the local newspaper, whether it’s the Palm Beach Post or somewhere else. … [New York is] a nice place to visit, but I don’t know why I would leave the beaches of Florida to move to New York. I don’t see the point of it when we have a great newspaper right here. I think if The New York Times tried to compete with us, they’d lose.”

Even the newsrooms that say they want tech-savvy journalists who know how to code don’t understand the difference between necessary skills and unnecessary mastery, says Lindsey Cook. Good enough, she says, is good enough.

The job descriptions that people write for entry-level data visualization jobs are “completely ridiculous,” and that’s why they can’t get applicants, she says.

If you look at some of these descriptions, they have more things listed on them than a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction would know. … I think possibly the hiring managers don’t know what skills you need, so they list everything. The lists I saw were listing an insane amount that no one coming out of school could be expected to know. You don’t need it. If you’re in data visualization and you know some JavaScript and D3, you know some programming fundamentals and you know the fundamentals of data, you can learn the other things as you need them. The word “expert” is used a lot. I applied to one job and they wanted you to know Flash for a data visualization job. Flash hasn’t been used in data visualization in almost a decade. They are making the barrier way too high. I think that’s the reason that a lot of people who know but didn’t study computer science are apprehensive about applying for these jobs.

Across the country, in the San Francisco offices of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), Robert Rosenthal says today’s journalist doesn’t need to be a technologist as much as a team builder and collaborator—inside and beyond the newsroom. But he does believe that having the knowledge and perspective of the technologist in the organization is a necessity. “As a journalism school, you can’t assume the student can do everything well. They’re going to have a range of skills, including knowing how to produce radio, video, online,” he says. “One of the things that we’ve done [at CIR] is to honor and understand the value of the different skill sets. Not everyone is going to be a great reporter, or a data analyst, or a great storyteller. So how do you create an organization where there is collaboration around the creation of great content? And how do you create external collaboration with other media companies for distribution? And how do collaborate with the audience for distribution?

“Culturally, I think journalism schools have to think about collaboration and partnership as a huge value; the concept of exclusivity no longer exists,” he says. “If you really want to leverage your work for impact and reach, especially in an investigative nonprofit space, it’s all about distribution, traditional and nontraditional unique storytelling, and creating a culture where impact is thought about and valued.”

On the far end of the tech-essential spectrum are journalism nonprofits such as the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, and for-profits like Narrative Science, which define journalism in data-centric terms.

Gordon Witkin, executive editor of the Center for Public Integrity, says CPI needs interns and new employees who have a broader, deeper group of skills than he was asked for when he came out of journalism school in 1977. “It’s multimedia, being able to work on the Web … do video, shoot pictures, do podcasts, create interactive graphics, code maybe, data visualization is huge, things like interactive graphics, interactive games even, and … what we do with data is computer-assisted reporting. It’s taking big vats of data and being able to work with, massage, manipulate and analyze that data to come up with strong, unshakable, journalistic conclusions. If you think about all that, it’s a whole group of skills, but I guess, having come from a different generation, my big asterisk is that’s a lot, and you’re asking all of that. However, particularly for a place like this, or for any place, you’re still expecting for them to have the basic who, what, where, when, why reporting skills.”

At ProPublica, stories start and end with data: Journalists can now develop, test and prove hypotheses with statistical validity, says Paul Steiger, the founding CEO and executive chairman. “Then what you have to do is go back and get the anecdotes. It’s the anecdotes that help people grasp the story and make people care.” But even compelling anecdotes that humanize aggregated data aren’t as valuable to an audience as a story that is personalized and immediate. So many ProPublica investigations include a data set that, where possible, can be manipulated to provide every reader with information about his or her own experience. “Not only will we tell you about a lot of doctors, but we will tell you about your doctor,” says Engelberg. “That’s a very different way of doing journalism. … We need more great writers, we need more great number crunchers, and we need more people who can visually display it on the Web in a way that’s compelling.”

Journalists must be … analysts, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs …

At journalism schools around the country, students in entrepreneurship classes are engaging in the processes of a media startup—idea, iteration, testing, execution of a new product—often in collaboration with the campus business or engineering school. While most of those students will not pursue careers as app developers, the takeaway lessons from those experiences include teamwork, design processes, and an enhanced understanding of the business of media-product startups. That’s one kind of entrepreneurship, and faculty like Jan Schaffer at American University and Michelle Ferrier at Ohio University believe it’s a critically important aspect of a journalist’s tool kit.

But entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship can be as much a state of mind as it is a product-development process, a set of new operating assumptions that prompts journalists to assume ownership of the impact of their contributions on the growth and success of their news organizations. That means greater responsibility for what happens to a story after it’s written and published.

Marcia Parker, former assistant dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, has spent the past decade helping media companies develop better user engagement and audience-development strategies. She says journalists don’t understand the business side of their own industry, nor do they expect to be held accountable for it. “In the traditional organizations, journalists are still not exposed enough to that side on every level,” she says. “And then in the newer startup world, often they are, but they didn’t come in prepared, so they not only don’t know what a business plan is, they don’t understand road maps, they don’t understand product requirements, they don’t understand what partnership and strategy is all about, and how revenue is actually generated. … We don’t really train anybody in these things, but this is the language of our industry now.”

Most journalists understand the value proposition around using social media to drive traffic to their news sites (which is not to suggest that most know how to do that effectively). What they resist, says Parker, is being held accountable for audience metrics on their content. “Now you’re being judged on metrics like community engagement, time on site, time on section, time on story, how much are you seeding and engaged in conversation. … If your social media doesn’t sing and doesn’t get response, you’re going to be marked down for that.” In addition, she says, journalists have to concern themselves with the distribution of their content beyond their own news organizations, and with use of that content for marketing or commercial purposes.

While those are the skill sets most in demand in the marketplace, they’re not the skill sets being taught in journalism schools. “I feel like we should just reverse the whole thing [about journalism education] and start over,” Parker says. “We should figure out all the skill sets required to produce, manage and publish editorial content. It would be much broader than what programs are doing now. I’d hire content-strategies people, and then you could start breaking down the skill sets you need to be able to do that. You’d have to help students figure out what is the business strategy of the organization you’re going to work for—and that includes the LinkedIns of the world and the Salesforces and CIR and all of those different things.

“Just as schools are trying to figure out what’s going on and how to do this, there are all these players coming into the media space. They are doing it because they think they can take the skills that they have, and apply them and reimagine them, and they know that there is value in content,” she says. “I think that’s where that skill set needs to start: What’s the revenue model for the startup? And you need to know there are a whole bunch of those out there, and you need to be thinking about it from day one. This is our industry, this is how it’s changing, and it’s really like learning a different one. We don’t teach that in journalism schools … we barely even mention it.”

The Washington Post has long distributed its news analytics to managers and editors, and it has recently begun to share it with some individual reporters. But traffic metrics aren’t the only measure of success, says Marty Baron. All newsrooms are looking for journalists who actively generate new ideas and opportunities that can help move the organization forward, he says. “There is no future for people who think they are going to be merely cogs in the wheel, employees who aren’t coming forward with initiatives or proposing things we can do that will be successful.”

Kevin Davis, CEO and executive director of the nonprofit Investigative News Network, says journalists are poorly prepared for that future. Most of the students entering journalism schools today will never work in a traditional news organization, he predicts, and they’ll need entrepreneurial business skills to survive—skills they won’t have. “They’re at schools where things like self-promotion, activation and social media are considered to be, at best, a dilution of the purity of the journalism function,” Davis says. “… I know of no other medium … where so much work is put into producing a product or service without any understanding, guidance or money put toward the marketing, distribution or activation of that content. It’s just insane.”

Journalists must be … community builders and mobilizers.

Everything “still starts with core journalism,” says Marcia Parker, “because there’s no way you can do a good job without having the core commitments to what journalism is and does. But then on top of that, there’s everything else, there’s user engagement, communicating with your audience, using social media to expand and extend your audience. … It’s really about seeding conversation, engaging in conversation, keeping a conversation going—not just because you have to improve time on your site, but because users are now in the habit of really engaging with stories.”

There is no consensus today on a sustainable commercial business model for journalism in a digital marketplace.

While multiple models exist—from subscriptions and pay walls to display ads, native advertising, venture capital and philanthropic funding—the 2014 Pew Report suggests that the journalism marketplace is still struggling to identify revenue streams sufficient to sustain an industry reeling from the sharp declines in print advertising:

Advertising, at least for now, still accounts for the majority of known news revenue—a little over two-thirds, by this reckoning. But the advertising-supported business model is in a state of churn. Print advertising continues its sharp decline. Television advertising currently remains stable, but the steady audience migration to the web will inevitably impact that business model, too. Digital advertising is growing, though not nearly fast enough to keep pace with declines in legacy ad formats. And, while new forms of digital advertising gained momentum in 2013, the online advertising market seems to favor a scale achievable only by few.

The whole paradigm of advertising is disrupted online, where advertising space is available in infinite quantities. “There are a certain number of page views worldwide, it’s a very large number, which is the advertising inventory,” the Post’s Baron says. “What’s our answer to the need to make more money? Generate more page views. As we generate more page views, the supply of available inventory goes up and rates go down. The results are you aren’t making any more money, and you may make less. I liken this to being on a treadmill, and you’re going, but you’re not going anywhere. Then someone speeds it up and you’re going faster, but you’re still not going anywhere. Then someone speeds it up more and more until you collapse because you can’t sustain it anymore. In many ways, we are on that treadmill, and no one knows how to get off.

“The business model is unsettled. I don’t think anyone knows what the business model is yet. The business model right now it is try a lot of different things to see what works. We have very difficult economics right now in the industry.”

Historically, journalists didn’t have to worry about the business side of their profession, Baron says. “We used to just do the journalism, and the business side will be taken care of. … That was false security for us because we thought people were coming to us for certain reasons, but they were in fact coming because they didn’t have other choices. Now they have other options, and we are getting a better sense of the real world. That may lead to a situation in which journalists only do the things that make money, and then what happens to the stuff that doesn’t make money?”

Baron says he doesn’t have the answer to that question, even as he sees growing gaps in the coverage of local, state and federal governments, in journalism’s role in holding the powerful accountable. But he’s optimistic one will emerge: “At some point, I’m confident, there will develop a model that will provide the information people need,” he says, “but it hasn’t happened yet.”

Journalistic content is no longer the purview or product of a single trade, craft or profession. Today, it is:

  • produced by working journalists (with all of the attendant privileges and access that position has inhered) for distribution to mass audiences;
  • produced by mass audiences for distribution through social media and other digital channels to mass audiences; and
  • produced by working journalists and mass audiences for submission to computer systems that will at some future point relay, configure and repurpose that content for instantaneous distribution to audiences of all sizes (including an audience of one).

It’s clear that journalism is in a state of rapid evolution, from a traditional system of trained, professional gatekeepers identifying and distributing news and information through a very limited number of media outlets, to the current network of reporters (trained and not) sharing information across a multimedia web of distribution channels. One of those channels—sometimes derisively referred to as “robo journalism”—is produced by an artificial intelligence system that translates data input into explanatory narrative.

In journalism circles, Narrative Science is probably best known for the stories it generates for news sites like Forbes—evidence, it is argued, that it is trying to replace or eradicate journalism as we know it. Kris Hammond, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, acknowledges that there’s some overlap between traditional journalism and the content that its platform, Quill, produces and distributes, but says the mission of Narrative Science is only tangentially related to journalism as a practice or an industry.

In fact, he says, his company’s vision is far grander and more inclusive: Rather than aspiring to provide news to consumers, Quill’s mission is to create narratives that draw upon the world’s data to meet the information needs of every citizen. Its goal is to educate the world, one person at a time.

“We do narrative generation,” Hammond says. “That means I first need to understand what’s happening in the world, and what’s important about what’s happening in the world. Then I need to know what’s interesting about what’s happening in the world, and then I need to know what you—you as an individual, as a person—need out of all of that. And I will use that insight to craft the narrative. Not just a sentence or whatever. I will use that to explain these things to you in a way you understand, in a way that’s meaningful and impactful specifically to you.”

That’s very different from journalism as we know it, he says. Stories produced by even the most experienced and talented journalist reflect only what that individual reporter knows or can know—which pales, he says, in comparison to the capacity of an artificial intelligence system to collect, process, filter and present deeply informed narrative.

“We’re creating a system that does the one thing that differentiates us from beasts,” Hammond says. “Communication. We have a system that actually models communication. … We will make people smarter through the application of technology to generate stories about the world based on data.” Storytellers of the future will need to understand how to capture, collect, aggregate, and submit (or channel) relevant data to systems like Quill, which will store and relay that data in multiple forms, for multiple purposes, over time.

Journalism education is not keeping pace with the news-and-information industry it is dedicated to serve.

The Poynter Institute’s 2013 study on the future of journalism education is a touchstone for the question of journalism education’s currency; even those closest to the academic enterprise acknowledge that it is not keeping pace with the changes in the profession. Anecdotally, journalists and educators alike wonder aloud whether there’s a realistic way to bring together two cultures so out of sync with each other in terms of process and pacing.

“When people think of J-schools, they think of institutions that are churning out people who are being taught by people who aren’t reflecting the reality of the market today,” says the Investigative News Network’s Kevin Davis. “It involves community organizing, activation, reflection, engagement, social, business acumen, technology skills. … As we shape the information systems for the next hundred years, in my opinion, it’s unlikely that we will see anything or anybody that is supposed to be a publicly traded conglomerate media organization. It’s more likely that we will have news coming as a tangent out of something that is intended to do something totally different, like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. … We need a lot more content and information entrepreneurs.”

Journalism schools may have an opportunity to claim a more central role in the academy as the purveyor of “liberal arts +” for the 21st century.

Howard Schneider, founding dean of the Stony Brook University School of Journalism, may be the most visible spokesperson for the role of journalism schools in educating media consumers to recognize journalism as a source of reliable information in an increasingly crowded mediated world. Stony Brook offers every student on campus the opportunity to take a News Literacy course in fulfillment of one of their general education requirements—an option that more than 10,000 undergraduates have selected over the past seven years. Schneider describes the course as “critical thinking as applied to news. But it’s also civic education at the same time.”

Journalism schools have an obligation to educate the audience as well as the producers of news and information, he says, “if we are going to have a robust, successful press and a successful democracy. Charlotte Grimes at Syracuse says all the time that journalism is an act of citizenship. It is. If you embrace that, then you need to embrace both sides of the equation. I think that’s absolutely the role of a journalism school.”

Like several of his colleagues, Schneider believes that journalism schools have a compelling opportunity to claim a more central place in the academic mission of their colleges and universities.

Journalism schools “are no longer professional schools residing on the fringes of great research universities,” he says. “If you look at the revolution we are living through, it is the job of the journalism school to prepare all of the students on the campus for this tsunami of information and disinformation that is descending upon us. It is a core competency in the 21st century, a civic competency, and it is the role of the journalism school to fulfill that. … This is an opportunity to grow and be expansive and to think differently about ourselves and to become central to the mission of a major research university in the 21st century.”

And that’s the golden opportunity today’s journalism educators—who are still struggling to claim a place at the academic table on their campuses and in the eyes of their academic administration—are missing, according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab at American University. Schaffer is convinced that journalism education should be seizing the day—and the central power position of the liberal arts—in the higher education landscape of the digital age.

I think we have a bigger role to play, in higher education and society at large. The opportunity is right here, but we can’t see it: Journalism schools, in my view, should be recasting themselves as a gateway to just about any career a student wants to have. If it happens to be in journalism, that’s fine. But, we need digital and reporting skills in the nonprofit sector; we need them in the diplomatic sector; we need them in the for-profit sector; we need them, at large, in government. Journalism skills are a great baseline for medical, law or business degrees.

Journalism schools have a moment in time when they could create the new liberal arts degree, but with a more pronounced value proposition. They should be trumpeting how the overlay of digital, writing, and research skills makes the right journalism degree much more valuable than a classic liberal arts degree. It’s a degree that really will prepare students for a menu of jobs. Some of them will be journalism jobs, but even now journalism school graduates are migrating far beyond the field of journalism. We just don’t always want to crow about that reality.

Schaffer, who speaks eloquently about journalism education reshaping its mission to focus on making “the media we need for the world we want,” is insistent that journalism education should expand its value proposition to become a gateway to professional work—of all kinds.

“I think journalism/communication schools should be totally rebranding themselves as giving students incredibly useful gateways to the world,” she says. “It’s a much more meaningful and marketable construct. Liberal arts programs can’t really say that students will come out with a set of skills that can be used in almost any job they encounter. A genuine Gateway Degree will allay parent concerns. It will give students jobs. It will bring you better, more grounded alumni who can actually feed back into your programs. I think it’s a missed opportunity.”

What They Said: Summing Up

The purpose and promise of this project was to collect the best thinking and innovative ideas of as many people as possible about the future and shape of American journalism and journalism education. The goal was not to filter or critique, but to present and share within a framework in which those disparate and wide-ranging commentaries could be situated in some reasonable context.

Given that charge, it’s no surprise that the comments and proposed solutions are as far-ranging as the nature of journalism itself: from resituating journalism education as the 21st-century liberal arts to reconceptualizing journalism as a system of data channels through which technology produces individualized content. One of the key takeaways from every conversation, however, is the degree to which the professionals, students and academics involved in the conversation care passionately about the value and purpose of journalism in a world ever more in need of the kind of accurate, substantive and insightful information upon which a democracy—and a culture—depend. While there are no easy answers about how to shape an academic system to educate those who will create that information, and a market system that will pay for it, there is no question or debate about the fact that it must be done.

  1. Holcomb, Jesse and Mitchell, Amy. “Revenue Sources: A Heavy Dependence on Advertising,” State of the Media, Pew Research Center, March 26, 2014, http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/, accessed online January 31, 2015. ↩

  2. “Intrapreneur” is defined by Merriam Webster as “a corporate executive who develops new enterprises within the corporation.” BusinessDictionary.com defines “intrapreneurship” as the “practice of entrepreneurship in an established firm.” ↩