Posted on 03/12/2015 12:05:42 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Traditional media has been on a downward slide for some time now, with cutbacks taking place in newsrooms at papers, magazines and cable television outlets. This makes for a tighter job market for those following the traditional J-school path and that new reality seems to be setting in at Columbia. One of the oldest journalism schools in the nation is downsizing.
Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism will reduce its class size and cut about six positions from its staff as the news industry retrenches.
The school will gradually reduce enrollment over several years and has already stopped filling some vacant faculty positions, Steve Coll, dean of the school since 2013, said in an e-mail to students, faculty and staff today.
News organizations around the world are cutting staff and budgets as advertisers and readers have fled traditional media for free online sources and social media sites, such as Twitter. While graduate student applications rose sharply after the recession that began in 2008, the school’s class size is headed back to a lower “historical norm,” Coll said.
“This adjustment will preserve our capacity for hands-on and intensive teaching that is a trademark of the school,” he said in the e-mail.
Keep in mind that this isn’t just any old J-school. This is the 900 pound gorilla of the league, founded by Joseph Pulitzer more than a century ago. And as the name suggests, they’re the ones who hand out the Pulitzer Prizes each year. Assuming one can either cough up the tuition or cobble together some combination of grants and scholarships, the best and brightest hopefuls in the nation should generally be beating each other up with spiked clubs for a chance to get inside the door there. How much has the media landscape changed for these guys to feel the pinch?
I suppose there is a debate over what is sinking the traditional media business faster. On the one hand, new media and instant access to free news on your phone, tablet or laptop the instant something happens has been a slow poison for the old guard. There’s really no arguing that point, though we might debate how “good” that has been for the accurate coverage of current events. But at the same time, social media and citizen journalists have exposed a lot of shortcomings in the old method of doing business which we never would have known about if the traditional gatekeepers were still controlling the entire flow of information. Much of what is killing traditional journalism can honestly be pinned on their bringing it on themselves. The true beginning of the end may have been Dan Rather’s fake but accurate debacle, but the apple cart was already beginning to tip well before then.
In summary, Columbia isn’t going away… at least not for the foreseeable future. But cutting their staff and services is no doubt a sign of the times.
Buggy whip alert!
Columbia University and all of journalism can blame their failures on the inherent contradictions and self refutation of postmodernism.
Maybe if journalists did their hob and stopped putting politics into their reporting then their jobs could be a bit safer. I know we hardly watch the news now and never buy a paper due to the bias these idiots put into their writing and reporting.
To some extent I wonder whether icons of progressivism like Francis Piven, Saul Alinsky or anyone else have failed to see this coming because they just aren’t sharp enough, or because their thinking is outdone by their arrogance.
I wonder about what good J school does anyway.
I see news reports filled with factual errors and grammatical errors all the time. So I wonder what skills they teach in J school.
Or do they just teach how to push liberalism in any news story. So that facts and context and grammar don’t matter.
Journalism students are nonsensical ideas like “truth is relative” and “perception is reality.”
Their consequent failure to understand and describe truth and reality is a major cause of journalism’s decline.
I don’t think news has never been objective. At the time of our founders news was always skewed politically the difference is that publications wore their politics on their sleeve, and publishing was much less consolidated. I feel like that is what we are returning too. A thousand biased voices reporting the worlds events with those biases clearly known.
Also, If I can get two conflicting reports of the same event I can usually get the truth of things more clearly than a single report from what J-School grads would call an authoritative source.
It’s more than that—many would-be journalists would rather go to Northwestern University near Chicago or the University of Missouri instead.
A two year Journalism Masters Degree in New York City could easily set you back $125,000.
Good luck paying that back if you are trying to support a family with a $65,000 pay check.
There is also a political dimension to journalism that is not mentioned here.
Almost all of the graduate students in journalism are dedicated Left Wingers who plan to leverage their advanced degree into a super-sized influence on the American political system.
When speaking fees are included, I'll guess that many Left Wing bloggers, who have no advanced degrees, earn more money, and have greater political influence, than most of the reporters or editors at CNN or the New York Times.
Burn the M-fer down!
There hasn’t been a journalism school at Columbia University in thirty years!!!
Ivy Plague School
Far too many out there as it is
Wow, the factory that produces the Liars who support the Big Lie is wobbling. The Elites better consolidate their position over us fast...
They have been - have made themselves a fundamental threat to the (sic)
democracy and in my opinion made themselves the enemy of the American
people, and it is a threat to the very future of this country...
Pat Caddell
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