Students flock to journalism school despite tanking news industry BY THE CAPITAL TIMES

When Abby Sears was accepted into the
journalism school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she had
hopes of one day working for a public relations firm.

Then she did some work at the Daily Cardinal news desk
and "fell in love with writing and reporting."

A Madison native, Sears covered last year's downtown homicide of UW
student Brittany Zimmermann. Her reporting led to several
appearances on Greta Van Susteren's "On the Record" and a summer
internship at Fox News in New York. And she is committed to the
craft.

"I definitely think journalists are an incredibly important
profession," she said. "It's our job to seek the truth and it's our
job to report the truth. There are so many people pushing so many
different agendas, and journalists are the people who are supposed
to sift through all of that and get down to the meat and potatoes
of it, and give that back to the people. I see it as my duty to
figure out what's going on out there and make people aware of that
-- and do it in an engaging and informative way."

Despite her passion and impressive resume, however, Sears likely
will graduate next month without a job. And she won't be the only
one.

While the economy in general is slumping, the newspaper industry in
particular is tanking. The American
Society of News Editors reports that daily newspapers across
the U.S. shed 5,900 newsroom jobs last year, slashing the number of
employed journalists by 11.3 percent. And in the first couple
months of 2009, the situation appears to be going from bad to worse
-- with newspapers in Denver, Seattle and Ann Arbor, Mich., either
folding altogether or significantly cutting staff and putting their
entire product online.

According to the layoff tracker "paper cuts," more than
8,400 newspaper jobs -- from editors and reporters to advertising
sales reps, pressmen and carriers -- have been lost so far in
2009.

"Some of my students are freaked out by all this," said Sue
Robinson, an assistant professor at UW-Madison's School of Journalism
and Mass Communication. "The fear in their eyes is startling.
And they should be nervous, because it's hard right now."

And yet, young adults continue to flood journalism schools across
the country, with many of these students still dreaming of writing
for a print publication one day. According to an annual enrollment
survey done by the University of Georgia, there were 199,711
undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass
communication schools in
2007 -- a jump of 41.6 percent from 1997. Meanwhile, a
recent article on Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at
Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford
University saw significant spikes in applications this past fall --
30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

"Honestly, and it could be because I'm young or naive or all of the
above, but problems with the newspaper industry don't worry me all
that much," said Emily Bisek, a UW-Madison junior who hopes to
write for a daily newspaper when she graduates. "I know the
industry is changing; it's in flux due to the Internet and new
technologies being used to tell stories. I guess I feel that, at
the very least, as a young graduate entering the workforce in about
a year, that I'm a little bit ahead of the curve as far as being
exposed to the new technologies and being part of a different age
of reporters."

Professor James Baughman, director of UW-Madison's School of
Journalism and Mass Communication, said the flow of applications to
his school has remained strong. Over the past three academic years,
nearly 1,400 people have applied to enter the school, with 55
percent being turned away due to space limitations.

And like their colleagues from across the nation, those within
UW-Madison's J-school are trying to tailor a successful curriculum
which meshes many of the new multimedia technologies with the
old-school fundamentals of reporting and writing.

"I am one of those people who firmly believes, who just knows, that
there will always be a place for journalism in a democratic
society," said Katy Culver, a J-school faculty member at
UW-Madison. "I don't know that it will be ink on newsprint arriving
at your door every day. I'm suspicious of that notion. Yet despite
all the crisis in the media industries -- talk of Newsweek maybe
not existing or of 5,000 job cuts in journalism -- I have not
really seen any relaxed interest in the major."

Culver pauses for a moment before adding: "But I imagine there are
a lot of nervous parents out there."

Not long ago, a newspaper reporter covering an
important school board meeting might have been asked to cobble
together a 700-word article for the next day's paper.

That same reporter today could be expected to produce a live blog
from the meeting, upload video or audio from a key exchange during
the event and then write an in-depth follow-up story.

This changing face of "print" reporting has forced J-schools across
the country to re-evaluate how they approach their teaching. In
this regard, those at UW-Madison feel they are ahead of the curve,
as the university revamped the J-school's curriculum prior to the
start of the 2000-01 school year.

"Platform agnostic" is the term those within the school like to use
when describing this new course of study.

"Journalism education used to be boxy," said Culver, who got her
bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in journalism at
UW-Madison, then joined the faculty in 1999 to design and teach the
J-school's foundation skills course, J202. "Students would follow
the print track or broadcasting track or advertising track or
public relations track, and it was very segmented and separate. It
was dominated by thinking about the platform in which you were
going to be telling the story as opposed to thinking about the
story. So our curriculum now prepares students in a broad-based way
so they can adapt either to a changing media landscape or changing
employer demands or even the changing mind of what one wants to do
in life."

While the J-school was criticized in the past for being heavy on
communication theory and short on faculty with professional
experience in the trade, Culver said the program realized in the
mid-1990s it needed to change its curriculum to meet the changing
times.

"We had researchers who were ahead of the curve in understanding
the web and the changes in what online communications would bring,"
said Culver. "It was, 'Wow, this medium is a game-changer, it's
going to rip apart the way that we do things.' We didn't exactly
know how, but we knew we needed a curriculum that could adapt to
those kinds of changes."

At any one time, there are about 400 undergraduate students in
UW-Madison's J-school, which also features more than 80 graduate
students and the equivalent of 15 full-time faculty. A little more
than half end up focusing on advertising and public relations, with
the rest following a reporting track. All students must take
Culver's six-credit journalism and communications boot camp, which
introduces them to everything from writing and print basics to
multimedia training in audio, video and online production. The idea
is to give students a strong, multifaceted foundation.

During this course, Culver also tries to stress to her students the
importance of thinking about which medium can best be used to
deliver a message. It's a message that appeals to Bisek.

"I really enjoy being able to tell a story that is more of a
package deal -- where you have the print and a video or some sound
slides and a little bit of Twitter," she said. "I think you can
represent certain stories and people better in those ways than you
would be able to with just a printed story in the paper."

Still, the most important journalism skills are critical thinking
and writing, said Culver.

"What we really try to instill in people is that if you are
thinking about questions correctly, that's the hallmark of great
journalism," she said. "Having an HD camera is not the hallmark of
great journalism."

Although UW-Madison's J-school is committed to
changing with the times, the pace at which the newspaper industry
and multimedia technologies are evolving pose significant
challenges. Not only do some of the tenured professors have limited
or no real-world experience with audio, video or photo editing
software, but finding the time, energy and patience to get up to
speed with some of these new technologies can seem daunting.

Robinson requires undergraduate students in her 400-level in-depth
reporting class to supplement a printed piece with interactive web
elements. (For examples, visit journalism.wisc.edu/content/j-school-student-showcase.)
But Baughman, who doesn't even have a cell phone, admits his
400-level course on column and editorial writing is much more
focused on print.

"It's not that I'm indifferent to change," said Baughman. "I could
make that class more current in some ways or I could play
with it a bit more, but I think some classes offer more multimedia
opportunities than others."

The changing media landscape also has placed a new financial burden
on the J-school in the form of video cameras, plus audio, photo and
video editing software. All of the online tools needed to produce a
website can be quite costly.

For a few years, Culver stopped giving video assignments in her
class because the cameras that were purchased broke down after a
couple years, and no funds were immediately available to replace
them. Currently, the J-school's labs are in need of newer computers
which have the right processors to run some of the state-of-the-art
software.

"I think my only major complaint about the J-school is the lack of
resources," said Lara Sokolowski, a UW-Madison senior majoring in
journalism and English literature. "We could certainly use some
more computer labs."

And more time.

"There are so many multimedia tools out there today that it's hard
to learn how to use them all," Sokolowski added. "I feel like
sometimes we're just given a brief overview of something, and then
we have to move on."

Some students also wish the J-school offered more in the way of
real-world internships and career advising. Students at Arizona
State's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass
Communication, for instance, must intern before they can graduate.
There is no such requirement at the UW-Madison J-school.

"I feel like the journalism school as a whole taught me how to be a
great writer and a great thinker, and taught me good analytical
skills," said Ashley Spencer, a senior. "But the journalism school
did very little to help graduates find a job. I know other
journalism schools, like at Northwestern, have job fairs. And I'm
like, 'Why don't we have that? We're a great school, too.' "

When Tom Lea was growing up in tiny Colfax, Wis.,
he used to tell his mom that he planned to replace Brett Favre as
quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.

"Once I figured out I wouldn't be able to play sports at that
level, or not even close to that level, I figured, 'Oh well, I can
always cover sports,' " said Lea, a senior in UW's J-school who has
a job covering UW sports for BadgerBlitz.com. "Sports has always
been a joy for me, and it's just something I really, really enjoy.
So even though the newspaper industry is in turmoil, I really feel
like I picked the right major."

Spencer, a native of suburban Chicago, had a different
experience.

Although she came to Madison with hopes of majoring in journalism
and becoming a print reporter, a stint at the Daily Cardinal as an
editor and political reporter turned her off to the "stressful
lifestyle" of being a newspaper reporter.

"Why would I want to be low-paid and really struggle to find a
job?" posed Spencer, who still writes feature columns for the Daily
Cardinal, one of two independent campus newspapers. "I feel like
journalists are completely undervalued and work very hard for very
little pay. And with the added stress of the profession and the
economic situation, I just decided that this isn't where I wanted
to go with my life."

Spencer, who double-tracked in journalism/reporting and strategic
communications, now is hoping to land a job in public relations,
advertising or magazine writing. She is still looking for a job, as
is Amanda Hoffstrom, a UW-Madison senior who will graduate in about
a month. Hoffstrom is seeking a reporting position.

"In a way, this is a very exciting time because we can be the ones
who can reinvent this industry," said Hoffstrom. A former staffer
at the Daily Cardinal who now is an editor for UWire, a student journalist site,
Hoffstrom recently started blogging about her job search at
UWireHelpWanted.com.

"Even though newspapers are on the decline doesn't mean journalism
is dead," added Sokolowski. "We just have to figure out what way
this new technology is taking the field, and we'll be fine."

Robinson agreed that it's not all gloom and doom. "We're seeing
layoffs and some newspapers dying off, but we're also seeing other
exciting things that people aren't talking about -- like all of
these nonprofit investigative journalism centers that are starting,
and all these professional-amateur collaborations with citizen
journalists and professional organizations," she said. "And even a
lot of the newspapers that are 'dying' are really still alive;
they're just online. It's just a matter of appreciating where the
industry is right now and figuring out what the needs are, and
we're trying to direct students in those ways."

Culver noted that Willard Bleyer -- who is credited with starting
journalism education at UW-Madison in 1905 -- once said that the
"future of our democracy depends on the character of our
newspapers." She said the statement holds true today with one
tweak.

"I would say that the future of our democracy depends on the
character of our journalism. It's not tied to a medium. It's tied
to the practice of going out and seeking information, skeptically
challenging institutions and maintaining accountability. That's the
nature of journalism."

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