Fraud & Delusion

What do newspaper editors really think of journalism schools and their graduates? To find out, Dwight Young, editor of the Dayton (Ohio) Journal Herald and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, recently polled 54 of his U.S. colleagues. By last week he had 45 replies, almost all critical of the way journalism is taught. Typical quotes:

"In all but a few journalism schools the faculty consists largely of unsuccessful newspapermen ... At the worst [the schools] are a fraud, providing snap courses for lazy students; at the best they are a delusion, giving graduates a mistaken notion that they have received valuable training."

Too many schools think "they are training their people to work for the New York Times and no one else." Journalism graduates "want to become city editors, yea, managing editors, right off the bat and are offended when they are told to write obits instead." Most of them "do not have the slightest notion how to go about digging up a story . . . The boys we get from journalism seem to be in a fog, lack initiative, have a lackadaisical attitude toward the job."

If the journalism-school graduates were not all they should be, Editor Young wanted to know, were the liberal-arts graduates better? Most editors said that they did not care what sort of a degree a young man had. The best training was "a broad basic education with plenty of accent on literature, economics and history."

The editors were agreed on one more point: if a young reporter "has the makings of a newspaperman, he will probably be a good one. If he hasn't, he will be hopeless regardless of the education he has had."

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