Thinking aloud here… As mentioned in the article below, free tuition at journalism schools would be a good thing, especially if journalism schools have a way to teach students how to make a living at journalism today, not just how we lucky folks born in the first half of the 20th century made a living at it.

I wrote the first draft of this posting on Facebook to share the New York Times op edit below, but also after speaking to a journalism class at the university where I quit teaching 11 years ago. I was talking about my quirky Jheroes.com media history research.

When the professor and I asked the students for questions, instead of anything about my research and presentation, I was faced with the inevitable: “How do I get a job in journalism today?” I was already annoyed that nobody in the room seemed to want to write about anything but sports, so I didn’t do a great job answering the question. 

In this longer essay, I’ve expanded that Facebook post of mine into the answer I tried to give the students, but now I have spent more time expressing my ignorance. Maybe someone who knows more than I do about successful paths into making money in today’s online publishing world will add comments here. But will it be journalism, and what is journalism anyway?

Back before the turn of the 21st century, I think the functional definition of journalism was, “Everything that newspapers have been doing for the past hundred years.”

That included sensational crime stories, light romance, celebrity scandals, “human interest” defined to include cute animals and funny looking vegetables, crossword puzzles, comic strips, advice to the lovelorn, recipes, obituaries, birth announcements, wedding announcements, fashion pages, and lots of political speeches. Today, with the internet, you should be able to get all of those things directly — from the web pages of creative artists, merchants, funeral directors, preachers, politicians, and public relations folks… without really needing a journalist in the middle.

I think that is the real reason most of the journalism industry from the 20th century is now in the hands of vulture capitalists selling off its presses, retiring its investigative reporters, scrapping its community memory libraries of local history, and removing the locally owned press as a respected institution.

Today, I’ll define journalism as what is left, and is worth paying for: “Informing people about things that affect their lives or hearts, especially things involving public affairs and civic life.”

To do that kind of journalism well, reporters should be able to write clearly and powerfully, and they should generally understand “how things work,” especially the functional, beneficial and corrupt parts of government, science and worldwide economics. There is room in there for emotion, human drama, tears and laughter. But reporters must know how to find the facts they need to tell strong stories, which are also the facts readers need to make decisions.

And these days they have to know how to make a living at it without a supportive Newsroom full of old pros, a newspaper morgue down the hall full of clippings and other local knowledge, and an institution that has the respect of the people of their town. Daily newspapers used to be big buildings on Main Street, sponsors of little league teams, summer camps for kids, including the newspaper carriers who had an exemption from child labor laws, and Christmas sing-alongs.. I’ve heard they even gave away free ice in the summertime back in the days before air conditioning.

Those times sure have changed. Now, the Future of Journalism may be in the hands of nonprofit newspapers that are good at finding grant-funding, and pay-per-view operations like Medium and Substack, personal subscription email newsletters, podcasts and blogs, or TikTok and YouTube “influencer” accounts with lots of product-seller sponsorships, which I find a risky way to support your freedom of speech.

To be a well-rounded journalist in any of those media, free journalism school might not be enough. I’d recommend a double major, adding economics, ecology, government, science, civil engineering, computer network and communication technologies, literature, philosophy, ethics, sociology, or history.

Come to think of it, while we are at it, it would probably be good to make medical schools free, especially if that would inspire doctors to see their profession as a public trust, not something they should surrender to the bottom line of stockholders, board members and executives in medical corporations.

And it would be great news for democracy to make civic-minded anti-greed, anti-corruption courses free.

There would also be wonderful irony in making courses on economic capitalism free. But, sure, let’s start with journalism school…

“One Way to Help a Journalism Industry in Crisis: Make J-School Free,” by Graciela Mochkofsky, dean at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.