Last year I was named one of America’s “Top 50 Journalism Professors” of the year, and I’ve finally decided to share that link with my students as an end-of-semester exercise in critical thinking, while we talk about the differences between journalism in print, on the air and on the Web.
After class — or after next week’s final exams, or after I clean out my office the week after that — I may come back to this page and add a few paragraphs to explain why I’m taking at least a semester or two off from teaching.
(I am also making jokes about going to a tractor-trailer driving school so that I can declare myself “semi-retired.” If I come up with better jokes, I may add them to this page, too — or at least delete that one.)
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After-class update.
I was very pleased that a good number of students in my intro news writing class came up with appropriate “critical thinking” questions about that site — in particular, two questions they should ask any news source:
- Who are you? (In this case, who runs the website, who pays the bills, and what is the site’s real purpose?)
- How do you know that? (In this case, what are the criteria for the top-50 list and how was it assembled?)
In addition to “interrogating” the Web pages themselves, reading the “Home” and “About” pages, I suggested students try the zip-code search to find interesting journalism schools. Surprise! Almost all the results were for for-profit schools or online-only programs. Nowhere was there any link to the major accrediting or research associations in journalism education (ACEJMC and AEJMC), and the search never turned up schools at which the “Top 50″ professors teach.
