Introduction
It is no secret that journalism and journalism education have been experiencing more than a decade of crisis. As Barbie Zelizer argues, journalism’s global crises have not just been about digital technologies upending media business models and revenue streams, but also about the values and visions of the future that can and should hold sway over the field.1 As technologists, executives, editors, futurists, and educators alike debate what the future of journalism should be, their sights are often sharply fixed on what kind of journalism education will serve their particular vision.
So then, it is perhaps useful to begin by understanding how journalism education works as a site of ideological debate within a larger field of discourse centered on the future of journalism, a future that is unmistakably digital, though there is often little clarity in what, precisely, digital means. Debates about the future of journalism education work as what educational theorist Ivana Milojevic understands as a set of “normative discourses … inclusive of the desired, the hoped for, as well as the feared.”2 This chapter traces various moments in these normative discourses, paying attention to how extant conditions around the journalism industry justify particular understandings of the market and the public, and the ways in which students should comport themselves in order to fit within a coherent vision of journalism’s future. Before turning to moments within the discourse, this chapter considers who claims the authority to speak about journalism’s future.
Two kinds of institutional actors have been laying out agendas for digital journalism education over the past decade: universities and journalism-focused foundations and think tanks. These entities are often in conversation with one another, and by tracing the exchange of ideas between these institutions, we can see how certain concepts, like innovation, start to operate as a kind of common sense.3 In fact, it is often by challenging universities as out of touch and slow to change that certain foundations begin to claim authority over what journalism’s educational future should be.
Famously, the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton posted an open letter in 2012 criticizing journalism education for being unresponsive to the needs of the industry. He laid bare a core conflict over who should have the authority to develop journalism education’s future.4 This was a telling moment, with major funders leveraging their financial resources to push for a certain vision of journalism. “Journalism funders agree that academia must be leading instead of resisting the reform effort,” the letter read, and over the following weeks, university presidents and deans scrambled to respond to Newton, often to agree.5
It was a moment that illustrated a key dynamic this chapter will explore. Foundations and industry-centric actors exert considerable influence over the direction of journalism education’s future, wielding their financial and discursive capital to make normative claims about what journalism programs should be doing. Much of their attention is leveraged at journalism schools, often pegged as too resistant to change and full of faculty who, in taking six years to get Ph.D.’s, have been out of the newsroom too long to know what is actually needed.
But, in focusing their comments on the supposed failings of journalism schools, commentators like Newton reveal the power universities continue to possess as the cornerstones of journalism’s professional culture. In thinking about what journalism education could be for in the digital age, it is important to first look at how both schools and the foundations and think tanks around journalism mobilize both their financial and discursive resources to bring their visions of journalism’s future into being.
Universities, foundations, and think tanks: Institutions as ideological actors
Both universities and journalism-adjacent foundations claim a certain kind of authority in the discourse surrounding journalism’s future, and they leverage their knowledge products and resources to sustain that authority.6 For instance, the Knight Foundation and other similar foundations have a vast library of research reports and policy papers, marshalling their knowledge resources to mobilize a form of “innovation advocacy” that places industry and market demands at the forefront of journalism education.7 Meanwhile, universities and journalism schools have been placed in a reactive position, often by not developing a coherent vision to articulate in the face of industry critique, instead operating within the discourse as a hidebound institution, too slow to respond to change.
Thinking of foundations and universities as discursive actors establishes a dichotomy that conveniently captures much of the dynamic that surrounds the journalism industry. Furthermore, it draws attention to the way knowledge production works to establish an understanding of reality that dictates how resources can and should be used to reorganize institutions in the face of an advancing future. Vivian Schmidt has called this kind of work “discursive institutionalism,” noting that many of the institutions that govern public life act through the circulation of knowledge claims about the way the world is and works.8 This holds true for many different sectors, not just the journalism industry. For instance, in education, philanthropists and funders have spent decades producing research that has been used to fundamentally reshape the nature of public education, opening up the field to private actors by providing evidence that public schools are failing.9 Over time, individual research findings begin to coalesce into a field of discourse, legitimating common sense assertions, such as Eric Newton’s claim that “Thinking digitally could save us. Yet two decades after the dawn of this new age, most journalists and journalism educators still resist it. Too many people, processes, policies and products are creatures of the past.”10
It is worth teasing out just a bit more how foundations operate as bearers of discursive capital. Nowhere is this captured better that in Eric Newton’s own words, worth quoting from extensively:
I work at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. We don’t just fund journalism and media innovation. We came from it. The foundation grew from the fortunes of Jack and Jim Knight, who built what was once the largest newspaper group in America, Knight-Ridder.
Foundations are like watering holes. Everyone shows up, from the 20-something social entrepreneurs to the venerable media icons…
The younger visitors to Knight Foundation, the digital natives, travel light, no clunky machines or ideas weighing them down, fluently negotiating what Paul Simon called the days “of miracle and wonder.” The young live with few boundaries. They grew up with smart phones, with literally the whole world in their hands. But the older ones, the digital immigrants, often come to see us in a state of anxious astonishment. When they started in news, no one knew that the mechanical age of mass media, inspired by Gutenberg more than 500 years ago, was coming to an end.11
In a relatively short space, Newton captures a fairly accurate representation of what the foundations in and around journalism aspire to be: conveners, generation-bridgers, and most importantly, agenda setters. That the current technological and digital disruptions in journalism necessitate a spate of forward looking institutions often goes without saying, but Newton makes clear that these changing conditions, which threaten to upset everything Gutenberg set into motion, are precisely why organizations like the Knight Foundation are needed to intervene.
In the American context, technological change and market disruptions wrought by digital media companies form an a priori logic that justifies foundation interventions into the culture around journalism, often evident in statements and requirements accompanying funding commitments.12 Global journalism think tanks outside the United States respond to a different set of conditions, at times framing digital change as a means for navigating and reasserting journalism’s “core values” in a world increasingly dominated by new communications infrastructures.13 Foundations and journalism think tanks outside North America often demonstrate alternative ways of thinking about journalism’s digital future. For example, one report from the Center for Media Transition at the University of Technology-Sydney, Australia, notes that a reliance on technology industry practices has ceded journalistic authority to digital corporations, bringing implicit cultural tensions between journalism and technology industries to bear on the broader field of discourse.14
Applied research about journalism, especially research conducted outside the academy, acts ideologically, thus revealing latent values.15 In fields as various as international relations, public education, and economics, think tanks have increasingly wielded ideological influence by doing knowledge work, producing analysis and findings that lead to prescriptive outcomes.16 The research produced by these organizations offers a coherent vision of the world, compelling various institutions to make decisions informed by a latent set of ideological values, and the field of journalism is no exception. As Anthony Nadler shows, in the American context, much of the industry- and philanthropy-funded research in and around journalism has forwarded a market-centric ideology since at least the 1980s, when marketing and business consultants flooded print newsrooms as they sought ways to challenge television’s rising market share.17 The research produced during this time was often cited in speeches at the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Society of Professional Journalists, and used to justify strategies of corporate consolidation and efficiency, often at the expense of journalism’s more publicly oriented values.18
Paying attention to how foundations and think tanks justify their own visions for and about journalism’s future shows many of the strategies these organizations use to assert their own authority over the field. As Seth Lewis has shown, the Knight Foundation’s own discursive work takes various forms—through funding calls, public relations materials, research reports about winning grant applications—to establish the Knight Foundation as a primary arbiter over journalism’s future.19 Through this work, “the Knight Foundation has reframed the ‘problem’ of journalism in the digital age, away from the notion of saving newspapers (and, by extension, the profession itself) and towards the challenge of finding new ways to accomplish journalism’s core function of meeting the information needs of a community.”20 As Lewis’ research into Knight shows, this discursive work expands the foundation’s authority over changes in the field, and is a model of influence other foundations aspire to in their own work, adopting many of the tactics think tanks and applied research centers in other fields have deployed. Scanning the ever-growing discursive work conducted by foundations and think tanks reveals an increasingly expanding range of what Matt Carlson has called “symbolic contests in which different actors vie for definitional control” over normative visions for journalism’s future.21
Such debates, though, are not limited to recent crises, and are prevalent even in times of relative economic security. Stephen Reese, looking at the “Winds of Change” report on journalism education produced in the late 1990s by the Freedom Forum, a think tank connected to Gannett, the largest corporate newspaper chain at the time, argued that this kind of research often framed journalism education within a pro-corporate paradigm, while also developing empirical findings that showed how academic journalism often failed to meet the needs of corporate news organizations.22 As foundations wield philanthropic dollars as a form of influence, Stephen Reese makes explicit ho...
