J-School: How To Learn Nothing

Oh, what I wished I would have known when I needed to know it. A journalism education is acquired entirely outside of a classroom, yes. I should have majored in ANYTHING else, yes. A majority of universities with journalism programs are so out of touch with the working world it's hilarious? Yes.

Am I bitter? You betcha. I was duped. Slate, where were you when I needed you the most?

Highlights of Jack Shafer's 'Can J-School Be Saved?' below:
(PREACH!)

"I'm convinced that if all the programs in journalism—undergrad and graduate—disappeared tomorrow, America's newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters wouldn't miss a beat of the news cycle. Our culture produces news junkies, English majors, aspiring novelists, sports nuts, failed lawyers, and student journalists in such profusion that we'll never run out of the green material from which to build excellent reporters and editors.

In fact, a J-school degree means so little to me that I don't hold it against its holder.

Some wonderful people teach journalism, but let's acknowledge that most J-schools stock their faculties with aging journalists who bailed from the news business because they 1) got lazy or 2) wanted another gig after missing their paper's assistant-managing-editor track or 3) burned out and sought a place to relight or 4) fell in love with the academic life.

Non-journalists don't know that the greatest single impediment to becoming a reporter is overcoming the basic human aversion to getting in strangers' faces and asking nosey questions. With the exception of a few psychopaths, nobody in the business ever triumphs over this aversion.

All departments of journalism should divest themselves of advertising and public-relations tracks for the obvious reasons of cross-contamination. In general, PR people are journalists' enemies, except when they work for your publication, when they're enemies in specific.

Easterbrook remembers his one year at Medill as "one year of practice in writing simple declarative sentences."

I'd encourage J-school students to overload with courses outside their department, partly because those classes are more demanding, but mostly because it builds a journalist's character to skip classes and work on the school publication instead."